Goodbye, elephant ears. Altrusa will no longer serve the fried treat at local fests

It’s a rough year for fans of elephant ears, those big, irregularly shaped hunks of fried dough covered in cinnamon and sugar.

With every fair and festival canceled or virtual, South Sound gourmands had no chance to have the popular pachyderm pastries this summer.

And now, Altrusa International of Olympia has announced that it will no longer sell ears at Lakefair, Oysterfest in Shelton and the Lacey Rotary’s Duck Dash.

The story is a familiar one: Altrusa’s membership has gotten smaller and grown older, making it increasingly difficult to find enough volunteer power to make and sell the fritters to the crowds that line up on both sides of its truck.

“I really hope that people understand why we are giving it up,” said Shirley Pearsall, the last charter member who’s still involved in the local chapter, which was founded in 1966 and started serving elephant ears in 1981. “It was too much for a group our age.”

Declining membership is affecting many service clubs, and it’s been a factor in many of the departures from Lakefair’s food row, which last featured the Tumwater Rotary’s corn dogs and the Olympia Kiwanis Club’s roast beef in 2016, the Saint Martin’s Alumni Association’s burgers and curly fries in 2017, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 318’s strawberry shortcake and mud pie in 2018.

Though they are not the first traditional food to disappear from Lakefair, elephant ears might be the most beloved.

“It just isn’t Lakefair without an elephant ear,” food-row organizer Joyce Rommel told the Olympian in 2019.

“They’re fair food,” she said Thursday. “There aren’t a lot of other places that have them. When you go the Puyallup fair, you have scones, and when you go to Lakefair, you have elephant ears.

It’s no surprise, then, that she’s lamenting the loss of her fried favorite and of the folks — mostly women, because Altrusa was founded as a women’s club — who served it.

“I was very sad to know that the ladies felt that they had to sell their trailer,” she said. “We’ll just really miss them.”

So will the treat’s many, many fans.

In 2005 — the year the club’s sales were highest — hungry hordes bought 10,852 elephant ears at Lakefair, Pearsall said. And in 2008, the club grossed $31,312 on the fried dough, before expenses.

“It made us so happy that so many people liked our product,” she said.

Altrusa started its Lakefair concession stand in 1979 with sloppy joes, but members quickly realized that wasn’t the best choice, since the sandwiches were messy and not too appealing on a hot day.

Enter the elephant ears. “They took off right away,” she said.

Altrusa has already sold the familiar truck — the third from which it served the pastries over the decades — which will now serve both ears and Salvadoran pocket bread in Kent.

But both Pearsall and Rommel hope that another nonprofit will step up to the fryer in the future.

And Pearsall and her fellow Altrusans are exploring new fundraising ideas in hopes of continuing to fund scholarships, awards for outstanding high school students, literacy programs and more.

“It’s a really big challenging year for nonprofits trying to figure out how to reinvent themselves,” said Tore Johnson, who’s on the board of Altrusa. “Elephant ears have been our biggest fundraiser for 40 years.”

This story was originally published October 4, 2020 at 5:45 AM.