A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
A city in Iowa has gobbled up a new Guinness World Record. The town broke the mark for the most pancakes served at a single time.
NOEL KING, HOST:
More than 14,000 of them. This is a tradition in the town of Centerville called, appropriately enough, Pancake Day. After missing it last year, organizers decided to show the people from Guinness what they could do.
VERONICA STOBER: All of the pancakes had to be at least five inches in diameter. And actually, the person from Guinness would come around and measure. So you very quickly learned to make sure that your pancakes met the five inches.
MARTÍNEZ: That's Veronica Stober, a Pancake Day - what else would they call it? - Volunteer and a lifelong resident of Centerville. She worked with dozens of volunteers to mix, pour and flip 14,280 pancakes and beat the world record.
KING: Pancake Day started as an appreciation day for workers at a local Pillsbury factory. Delaney Evers is Centerville's tourism director.
DELANEY EVERS: They would gather all of the employees on the square each year and, basically, provide free pancakes for 12 hours. And as those factories started to leave or shrink in size, the community took over the day to still celebrate. And now there's free pancakes in the morning, a parade, a ton of free activities for families and then a pageant in the evening.
STOBER: Confetti got thrown out. And everybody was excited. And the crowd was cheering.
MARTÍNEZ: As for hanging on to the record against some other town that might try to stack even more flapjacks, volunteer Veronica Stober says, they will be ready to defend their title.
STOBER: Oh, I'm sure we will. They better bring it because we'll be back.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTÍNEZ: They'll be flapback (ph).
(SOUNDBITE OF LANTERNA'S "VENTURE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
