David_Weatherly's Blog

You may remember “The Breakfast Club,” a movie from the mid 1980’s. In it, a group of teenage, social misfits get to know each other while thrust together in early morning detention.  The movie offers quite a contrast to another “Breakfast Club,” Roy Ackland and I visited recently. It too is a product of the 80’s and it also brings a group of people from various social and ethnic backgrounds together. But that’s about as far as the similarities go.

In 1988, George Miller (seen below) and a handful of friends, all retirement age, started gathering on Tuesday mornings, to eat and play Bingo at the McDonalds on North Fayetteville Street in Asheboro. Twenty years later, members of the “McDonalds’s Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club,” still come for the food, fellowship and fun. Of course, the dollar menu and senior citizen discount may have some appeal.

Around 8:30AM on any given Tuesday, you’ll find sixty to seventy well seasoned citizens, sipping coffee and intently watching their cards as Ed Smith calls the Bingo numbers. Ed first attended in 1989 and has seen many club members come and go. By “go” I don’t mean take out… Over a hundred have passed on, but new ones are always joining the gathering. Somehow there always seems to be just the right number of seats available for the crowd. Although, I suspect the Mickie D’s in heaven is starting to get a bit crowded.

For many of these folks, especially the widows and widowers, the “Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club,” is the most fun they’ll have all week. And that’s what it’s all about. McDonalds has built an empire by combining food and fun. Every Tuesday, in Asheboro, you might say, the “Golden Arches” provides these golden agers with a whole new kind of “Happy Meal.”

Click here to watch the "Roy's Folks" segment.