Seven years after the final Hays breakfast was hosted during the 2019 Stampede, a new iteration of Calgary’s most prestigious, invite-only pancake breakfast is returning this summer. The inaugural Legacy Stampede Breakfast will carry forward many of the beloved traditions of the Hays breakfast, which was started by former mayor and senator Harry Hays in 1950 and ran for nearly seven decades before the Hays family decided to call it quits.
A Beloved Tradition Returns
Ruth Peters, whose family co-hosted the Hays breakfast for many years, said that while everyone understood the Hays family’s decision to hang up their hats, there was “a lot of sadness” around it. Her son, then 19, had even planned to bring it back in some way. “I think there was a passion still from our family to try to find ways, and I know he had some conversations — and then COVID hit,” Peters said.
But the breakfast was greatly missed by many who had attended over the years, said event volunteer and president of CBI Business Solutions, Catherine Brownlee. “It was, for 69 years, the Stampede event that everybody wanted to be at. If you had an invitation to be able to attend, you felt blessed to be able to be there,” she said.
Community and Leadership Gathering
The breakfast brought together politicians, executives, and community and business leaders from across all sectors, but Brownlee said it was never a “stand on the podium and make it about me” type of event. “Many of us community leaders are always talking about it, and wishing that it would come back…we started bringing together a team to get it done.”
Peters said she was “surprised and delighted” that the breakfast is being brought back, and amazed at what the committee had been able to pull together over a short period of time. “It’s not a small breakfast. It’s an amazing feat to put together, so we were very, very impressed, and thrilled.”
Honoring Founding Families
The Hays family, too, have been supportive of the idea, and will be honoured at the breakfast along with the other ‘founding families,’ Brownlee said, but they no longer wanted their name attached. Peters said her family will be supporting in any way they can, and will definitely be attending. “We were very pleased that the committee has gone out of the way to honour all the founding families, not just ours — everyone who’s participated in the 69 years,” she said.
She added that she can’t quite explain why the breakfast was so special to so many. “It was such a phenomenon. Everyone looked forward to it for the whole year. It was a very unique event — the location, the number of people, the reasons for having it, the community that came around it, and the volunteers.”
