The Military Vehicle Preservation Society of South Australia was given the opportunity to host the Sausage Sizzle at Parafield Bunning on Saturday, and while it was fairly short notice, Russell took the lead and organised the event brilliantly, and a number of members volunteered to help out on the day.
The day started early with Russell and Trevor starting at around 07:30 for the setup with the rest of the morning shift arriving soon after, with a Jeep and Saracen to put on display about 20 meters from the BBQ area.
John C arrived wearing a replica of his grandfather’s Light Horse uniform and was armed with a donations bucket and a stack of flyers for the museum, and spent the most of the day at the entrance to Bunnings chatting to customers and handing out the flyers.
The rest of us got down to work preparing, cooking and serving the sausages, and despite it being cold and windy to start with, the weather improved considerably and by about 10:00 it had become constantly busy, with the team working well together in order to keep the customers fed and the line moving.
The change over to the afternoon shift was done with military precision and the customers kept coming, although it became apparent that we were starting to run low on supplies, which is probably a good problem to have, but meant that some emergency shopping had to be arranged with Russell’s wife Tracy coming to the rescue, making 3 trips throughout the course of the day.
The vehicles attracted a lot of attention and there was usually one of our members nearby, talking to the public about them. It was unfortunate that we could not park them closer to the BBQ, but the nearby spaces were reserved for disabled parking.
Despite the fact that he never asked for a donation, John proved very popular in his uniform and managed to give away all of the flyers, and raise over $550, which is an amazing result!
While we still had plenty of stock, the customers began thinning out and we stopped cooking at about 17:30 and sold off the remaining inventory before packing up at about 18:00. The modular BBQ that was provided by Bunnings was quite amazing and packed up into a fairly small package with surprising ease, after a good clean, with the only thing left to do was to pack the remaining stock into Russell’s car and drive the Saracen back to the museum.
So after all this, how did we go?
BBQ gross takings – $2909.50
Donations – $572.50
Expenses – $957
Total Earned – $2525.50
As you can see, a fantastic result, that will go towards our building fund!
Sincere thanks to those that made the day possible and successful, in alphabetical order:
Bob (Baldy), Darryl, Don, Graham, John C, John F, Russell, Terry, Tracy, Trevor and Ray.
We also need to offer thanks to Bunnings Parafield for inviting us to run the BBQ, to their hungry customers and special thanks to everyone that dropped a donation in John’s bucket; it was an amazing and humbling result.
