Some stories arrive on a breeze of cinnamon and bacon, carrying the soft clink of plates and the hush before first light. By the time the sun lifts over a quiet block in south St. Louis, a stream of teenagers has already filed through one small doorway, dropping backpacks, trading hugs, and calling out for “Grandma Peggy.” They gather not because everything is easy, but because grief—when met with kindness—can become a table wide enough for everyone.
The ritual began simply. In 2021, a handful of Bishop DuBourg High School students met for breakfast on Wednesdays, the day their school started late. At first, they tried a diner, until freshman Sam Crowe made a case for his grandmother’s kitchen.
“You know, my grandma could cook better than this,” he told his friends—an invitation that turned a booth into a home and a few plates into a tradition. The next week they showed up at Peggy Winckowski’s door, hungry for waffles and welcome, and kept coming, week after week.
A Sudden Loss That Changed Everything
In July 2022, everything changed. Sam, just fifteen, was killed in a hit-and-run crash—a loss that rippled through family and classmates alike. The teens who had filled Peggy’s kitchen found themselves returning to the same place, now with shock and silence in their hands.
She answered the hardest question—Would Wednesday continue?—with a promise so gentle it felt like a light left on: “I will feed you if you come.” They came back the very next Wednesday, and most Wednesdays since.
Over time, the Wednesday Breakfast Club grew, spreading beyond the original circle. Some mornings, more than thirty teenagers crowd into Peggy’s tiny kitchen, leaning against counters, bumping shoulders in the doorway, laughing, crying, eating, remembering. “They call me ‘Grandma Peggy,’” she said. “Wednesday is my most favorite day of the week.”
A Kitchen That Became a Sanctuary
The menu is as faithful as the teens: pancakes and bacon, French toast (on homemade bread), cinnamon rolls, eggs in every style, waffles, casseroles—the sort of food that warms a cold morning and gives conversation something to grow around.
But ask the kids why they keep showing up, and they rarely mention the food first. “It’s really not about the food, it’s just about being together,” said Sam’s cousin Brendan. Another regular, Mya Dozier, explained the exchange simply: “We benefit from her, she benefits from us… we feed off each other.”
Peggy’s table is part family kitchen, part support group, part open door. On some Wednesdays Sam’s parents stop in; on others, new underclassmen find their way to the counter, unsure but welcomed.
The house, as Peggy likes to say, “is tiny,” but there’s “a lot of love in the walls.” She keeps her promise week after week: a safe place to stand with one another in the tender, ordinary work of mourning. “They can always come here; it will be a safe house,” she told St. Louis Public Radio.
How the Community Joined the Table
What began with one teenager’s brag about his grandma’s cooking has become a living memorial—less a shrine than a practice. It asks only that you show up. On the hardest days—anniversaries, difficult weeks at school, a sudden memory that stings—the club holds steady. “He would want us to continue,” one friend told a reporter, “so we’re going to continue it.” Peggy, who describes herself as a grandmother to many, frames it this way: “We’ll never get over Sam’s passing, but we can get through it together.”
There is another quiet truth beneath the waffles: community maintenance costs something. For a long stretch, Peggy paid for the groceries herself, rising before 5 a.m. to chop fruit and heat skillets. Eventually, after local coverage and word-of-mouth, parents, grandparents, and businesses began to chip in—bags of bacon dropped on the porch, a case of eggs, extra loaves of bread. The help matters, not as charity but as a circle widened, a sign that grief’s work belongs to all of us.
The Choreography of Care
Still, the heart of the story is the room itself. Watch a Wednesday unfold and you see the choreography of care: one teen flips waffles; another rinses dishes without being asked; someone else slides an extra chair into a gap and gestures a sophomore into the space.
Peggy moves among them with the efficient warmth of a lifetime host, nudging a plate toward the shy kid at the edge, kissing a forehead, reminding them to take leftovers “so nothing goes to waste.”
The details accumulate—smudges of syrup on the table, a photograph of Sam tucked into a frame, laughter that trips and steadies—and you begin to understand why these mornings could hold a whole community together.
The Gentle Power of Togetherness
Journalists sometimes try to pin a single moral to stories like this: resilience, compassion, the village it takes to raise a child. There is truth in all of that, but the teenagers and Grandma Peggy describe something even more elemental. “Grandma Peggy brings everyone together,” said one student—an observation that, in its plainness, is hard to improve on.
In her kitchen, loss is neither minimized nor made monstrous. It’s given coffee and a chair. It’s met by the ongoing, ordinary action of caring for one another.
The Legacy That Keeps Growing
If the Wednesday Breakfast Club reads like a parable, it is a practical one. There is nothing to sign up for, no grand design to endorse, no fundraising goal to meet. The instruction is simple: show up with your hunger—literal or otherwise—and make space for the person beside you.
In time, memory softens from a sharp edge into a shared story, the kind told with a smile: Remember when Sam said Grandma’s cooking could beat the diner? Remember how right he was?
For those far from St. Louis, the lesson travels. Across the united states, and far beyond, communities are stitching themselves back together after losses both private and public. Not every neighborhood has a Peggy or a kitchen big enough for thirty.
But every block has a room—a porch, a corner of a cafeteria, a small office—that could be this kind of gathering if we let it. We underestimate the power of simple rituals because they look so ordinary. Then a Wednesday morning shows us otherwise.
Hope Served Warm
As for Peggy, she keeps the griddle hot, the hugs ready, the door open. Teenagers will graduate and scatter, new kids will arrive, and the club will continue to breathe. She hopes the young people carry the practice forward: make a table, invite others, feed and be fed.
In return, she receives what she once feared she’d lost forever—a house full of life, and the abiding sense that love, like breakfast, is best when shared. “Sam would be so proud,” she says. And many of us, reading from a distance, are proud too.
