AOPA Pilot Magazine - January 2013 - 72

adorns a jacket (far right); Walt Reddel (foreground) with his T–6 (bottom right); Steve Russell talks to club members (below right); Gregg Erikson, Juliet Oeffinger, Butch Bejna, and Jim Oeffinger stroll the Lake Lawn grounds (right); Steve and Carol MacCabe greet friends (center).

THE CLUB’S LOGO

It’s

With roots going back decades, the members of this friendly pilots’ group genuinely like hanging out and eating together.
And that’s pretty much it. There are no dues, fees, or elected officers. Nobody except MacCabe has a title, and his is perfunctory. Everyone likes it that way. “There’s no politics—and because of that, it’s great,” says Steve Russell, who flew his 1962 Piper Cherokee 160 from Greater Kankakee Airport (IKK). “No dues—I love that!” adds Rosario LoPiccolo. Like most others in the SMBC, he is wearing a fluorescent orange button that displays his name, his aircraft N number/make/model (Cessna 182), and his home base (Lansing Municipal Airport, Chicago). The buttons make it easy for the pilots to find each other at fly-ins. “I don’t want to be a member—I just want to be part of this group,” he says. THE ‘GET AWAY FLYING CLUB.’ The Sunday Morning Breakfast Club traces its very early heritage to 1959, when a group of pilots formed the “Get Away Flying Club” at now-closed Tinley Park. That club disbanded when the airport closed, but some of its members, flying out of other area airports, would tune in 123.45 MHz on Sunday mornings and ask, “Where are we going today?” The tradition continued with pilots using 122.75 and asking, “Where we going?” The slogan “Wherewegoin’ 122.75” is displayed on the backs of jackets worn by longtime members, and the group still talks to each other via that frequency. With the advent of email, longtime member Mark Weincek created a mailing list and began setting destinations in advance. Weincek has since moved to the Spruce Creek Fly-in community in Florida, but he is still considered very much a part

a perfect pancake breakfast morning, and luckily, EAA Chapter 15 has obliged. Volunteers are dishing out plates of steaming food to hungry visitors at Lewis University Airport (LOT) in Romeoville, Illinois. Locals love an EAA breakfast, so the parking lot is full—but, more important, so is the ramp. The Sunday Morning Breakfast Club has come calling. “It’s amazing how much avgas this group burns on a Sunday morning,” observes Steve MacCabe, the official—or unofficial—“talleymeister” of the group. He moves through the crowd, shaking hands as pilots catch sight of him. Later, he will count 55 SMBC members flying 28 aircraft, and faithfully note it on the group’s website. Active participation is a point of pride. Bob Barcelona, who’s been a part of the Sunday Morning Breakfast club since the 1980s, keeps his RV–6A at the airport—but he took his wife for a ride around the pattern so that he could say he’d flown in. With roots going back decades, the members of this friendly pilots’ group genuinely like hanging out and eating together—two favorite pilot pastimes. What sets them apart is that they’ve managed to keep it going at a time when many other groups struggle to retain members or even fly regularly. Based at LOT but drawing pilots from neighboring Indiana and Wisconsin, SMBC’s credo is simple: to fly out for breakfast every Sunday. If a VFR destination can’t be found, they will drive to an airport with a restaurant.
72 | AOPA PILOT January 2013

AOPA Pilot Magazine - January 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - January 2013