Cowboy Breakfast set for Friday
File photo Dallie Cobb rounds a barrel on her trusty stick horse during 'barrel racing' at last year's Cowboy Breakfast. This year's breakfast is Friday.
MOSES LAKE — Keeping with the Old West tradition, the Grant County Fair and Moses Lake Roundup kick off with a good breakfast. The annual Cowboy Breakfast will be served from 7 to 10 a.m. Friday at Sinkiuse Square, next to the Moses Lake Post Office.
The fair opens Aug. 15; the first rodeo performance is Aug. 17.
Breakfast is sponsored, cooked and served by the Kiwanis Club of Moses Lake. All proceeds go to Kiwanis charitable activities and scholarships.
Breakfast is $10 per person for adults and teens 13 years of age and older, $6 per person for children 4 to 12 years of age, and free for children age 3 and younger.
Breakfast also includes the crowning of a new queen of the rodeo and the best buckaroo during the Pee Wee Rodeo, for children age 9 and younger. Buckaroos, steer ropers, barrel racers and queen contestants line up for the grand entry at 9 a.m.
Local deejay Dale Roth provides the music.
As befits a cowboy breakfast – everybody who's ever punched cattle or watched a Western movie knows how this works – the menu includes flapjacks and coffee, along with sausage, scrambled eggs and juice. Kiwanis volunteers flip the flapjacks and scramble the eggs, pour the coffee and run the chow line. Michael's on the Lake provides the pancake batter, eggs and sausage. Other sponsors include the Moses Lake Business Association and the Moses Lake Roundup Association.
The Pee Wee Rodeo includes two events for boys, roping a stationary steer head and riding stick horse bucking broncos. Girls ride their stick horses around a barrel race course, and compete for the title of Little Miss Moses Lake. (Although in 2016, boys competed in the barrel racing and girls were in the steer roping contest.)
The horses are stick horses, but Little Miss Moses Lake gets a real crown and sash.
The 2016 Cowboy Breakfast drew a big crowd, one of the biggest in the almost-30 years the Kiwanis have sponsored it. It's a longtime tradition.
The Kiwanis have sponsored the breakfast since at least 1988, said longtime Kiwanis member Louis Logan, but Kiwanis took it over from a different civic organization.
The Kiwanis use the money for high school scholarships, and to support Kiwanis civics clubs in Moses Lake schools. The parent club sponsors the Key Club at Moses Lake High School, the Builders Club at Frontier Middle School and two K-Kids clubs, at Lakeview and Longview elementary schools.
Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at education@columbiabasinherald.com.