The Batesville Exchange Club will hold its fall pancake breakfast Saturday in the Batesville Intermediate School cafeteria.

Exchangites will serve pancakes — the usual fare: sausage, bacon, juice, milk, coffee and pancakes with optional peanut butter — from 7 to 10 a.m. October’s busy first Saturday.

Of course, the annual Showoff on the Square will be under way both Friday and Saturday with hundreds of classic, vintage and often unusual vehicles on display.

Saturday evening, the Sardis Chamber of Commerce hosts a benefit gala at the Heflin House Museum. Funds raised will go the Sardis Fire Department.

A hearty Exchange Club breakfast will serve well to start a day that might later find you on the Batesville Square, at the Heflin House in Sardis or in Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford or Davis Wade Stadium at Starkville.

Money raised from the breakfast will help fund the Exchange Club’s child abuse prevention education program, among other local projects. Portraying that effort to the public in news stories and photos is difficult.

The Exchange Club Child Abuse Prevention Center in Oxford needs a certain cloak of privacy to operate successfully. Among its services are parenting classes aimed at child abuse prevention and coping with stress. Some who attend have been ordered there by a judge, and some parents come of their own volition but they probably would not if somebody from the newspaper was going to show up, take a photo, put it in the newspaper, “Attending parenting classes to learn about child abuse prevention this week are … .”

Exchange Club members ask you to take their word that money raised will be well spent, even though much of child prevention abuse education goes on behind the scenes.

The Boys and Girls Clubs of North Mississippi in Batesville also benefits from your donations made to the Exchange Club through its pancake breakfast benefit. The Boys and Girls Club is something like the flip-side of child abuse