Young Life cake auction is not about cakes, but about kids

Last year’s Young Life Cake Auction started with a cake-eating contest with some of the Young Life youth. Competing were, from left to right, Lilly Hunst, J.T. Henriksen, Jonny Wall and Candace Goodsell, with Lindsay Thompson, the area director of Young Life, doing the play-by-play. Jonny Wall was the eventual winner. (People’s Press le photo)

By JEFFREY JACKSON jjackson@owatonna.com

OWATONNA — Make no mistake about, there was a lot of cake in the Owatonna High School gymnasium that Saturday.

How much? There were 90 cakes on the block for the 41st annual Young Life cake auction held last April, each cake with a prize associated with it, and an additional 100 cakes that were up for sale.

When all was said and done, the auction had raised more than $81,000 in that one day, prompting Lindsay Thompson, the area director of Young Life in Owatonna, to call it a “big day” for the organization.

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That $81,000 raised on a single day represented a third of the organization’s annual budget. Still, despite how vital that day was to the organization, the annual cake auction — in its 42nd incarnation this year — isn’t about the money, Thompson said. And it isn’t about the cakes or even the prizes that accompany the cakes.

“We’re not about the cakes,” Thompson said last year in the aftermath of the auction. “We’re about the kids.”

Take, for example, the one-phrase description of the Wyld Life program on the local Young Life website. Wyld Life is a program that is “walking with middle school kids as they ache for acceptance.” Anyone who has passed through adolescence and knows the struggle associated with growing up and maturing during those formative years certainly has had that experience of aching for acceptance. The Wyld Life program seeks to ease that ache.

But Thompson says that Young Life, in its many iterations, is not “program heavy.” It’s about “relationships,” she says.

When Thompson talks about the work of the local chapter of Young Life, she, of course, can tell you about the different programs that the organization offers. There’s the Young Life program proper — a program geared toward high school students. And there’s Wyld Life, focused on middle school-aged youth. Real Life aims to reach out to kids in non-traditional or alternative school settings, providing “a safe place where all kids are welcome.” And for youth who prefer not be involved in a “club-like” setting there is Walk With Me, a program designed to offer a oneto-one relationship between a youth and an adult. “It’s not having kids come to us,” she says. “We go to the kids.”

And that, she says, is part of the mission — to put “positive adults in the life of kids.”

But there’s another integral part of that mission, a faith-based element — to “introduce adolescents to Jesus Christ and keep them growing in faith.”

Because the organization is not, as Thompson says, “program heavy,” Young Life doesn’t keep track of exact numbers of youth that it reaches.

Of course, the programs are not simply divided by age. There is a focus to each division. “We go where the kids are,” she says.

Still, they estimate that they reach about 500 kids a year, all of whom they try to know by name, all of whom they try to establish relationships with.

Planning for the annual cake auction begins in all earnestness in January, Thompson said, as the committee starts to line up donors for the live auction items — the cakes, of course, as well as the “specials” that accompany them. And that, she said, will continue “up until the last minute,” which this year will until 8:59 a.m. Saturday, April 18. The doors to the Owatonna High School gymnasium, where the auction will be held, open at 9 a.m. with

Cakes took on unique and unusual shapes and forms for the Young Life Cake Auction in this April 2018 le photo. The event surpassed both the organization’s $70,000 goal and the event’s $74,000 record. (People’s Press le photo)

Young Life Owatonna Area Director Lindsay Thompson said that 2018’s Cake Auction had more youth than ever before helping out in a variety of ways, from organizing the cakes to selling T-shirts to assisting in the Kids Club. (People’s Press le photo)

the live auction starting at 10 a.m. Online bidding, however, will begin on Friday, April 17, Thompson said.

“It’s a lot of work for one day,” she said.

Thompson expects there to be at least as many cakes up for auction this year as there was last year, perhaps closer to 100, with an additional 100 cakes up for immediate sale.

And they expect the auction to bring in as much as it has in years past — $80,000 or more.

The auction begins

It was back in the late 1970s that the Young Life cake auction began in Owatonna, a time in which the Young Life organization was still fairly new to Owatonna.

“They were running short in their budget by about $1,000,” said Thompson, recalling the history that has been passed down to her.

Todd Hale takes up the story.

“I can remember how this event originally began,” Hale wrote in his Around Town column.

A cake auction in town was the brain child, he said, of his radio partner “Pink” Allen. Allen had heard of another community raising money through a cake auction to benet another charity and thought Owatonna would be receptive to a similar event here. Hale doesn’t recall the exact date, even the exact year, saying only it was back in the late 1960s or early `70s, and that the auction, sponsored by KRFO radio, was originally done here to benet the March of Dimes.

“We held the event at our studios, which were then located at Cedar and Pearl,” Hale recalls. “We asked listeners to donate homebaked cakes, and we displayed them in the windows of the station. The auction took place in the rear studio of KRFO, using only the station telephone to take bids.”

The original series of cake auctions that supported the March of Dimes lasted only a few years before it was discontinued, Hale said. But then, a few years later, Kathy Muellerleile approached the radio station about reviving the auction. Muerllerleile was, Hale said, very active in Young Life and wanted the auction to benet the organization, still very new to Owatonna.

“We were more than receptive to the idea,” Hale said. “A committee was formed and planning began.”

Larger crowds were anticipated, crowds that would be too big for the small studios of the radio station, so a new locale had to be found. Ken Wilcox, president of what was then Norwest Bank, now Wells Fargo, in downtown Owatonna, “was quick to answer the call and volunteered the lobby of the bank for the event,” Hale said.

Roy Koenig acts as auctioneer with Julie Rethemeier as the color commentator at last year’s Young Life Cake Auction in the Owatonna High School gymnasium. (People’s Press le photo)

For many years — until the auction grew too big for even that spacious building — the cake auction was held in the bank lobby.

With a goal of raising $1,000 to meet the budget shortfall, that rst cake auction did better than the organizers hoped for and anticipating, raising $1,500. Pretty good for an auction that had, according to the tradition passed down to Thompson, just 10 cakes for sale.

Of course, it’s more than just cake that is being auctioned off. Those cakes on the auction block now include “specials,” as they are called — items that accompany each cake.

Todd Hale again takes up the story.

“That tradition [of offering specials] was started by Bill Kottke, owner of Kottke Jewelers,” Hales said. “Bill decided to offer three cupcakes with one of them hiding a diamond bracelet. Bidders anxiously awaited until the bidding on the cupcakes began.”

Over the years that tradition of having specials with the cakes has continued, with the prizes becoming bigger and bringing in even greater bids. In 2012, for example, tickets to a Madonna concert and a hotel room in St. Paul went for $1,100. That same year, a wine event for eight people was sold for $1,050. Both winning bids were more than was the goal for that very rst auction.

This year, Thompson said, there are already a few interesting specials lined up to go with cakes — tickets to the Tony Award-winning musical “Hamilton,” tickets to a Guns and Roses concert, and even a year’s supply of Cindy’s Nachos from Grace’s restaurant here in Owatonna, to name just a few.

Amazing fellowship

Another tradition of the cake auction — one that marks the start of the auction each year for the past several years and one that shows that the Young Life organization is more about kids than about cake — is the annual cake-eating contest. In the contest, four Young Life participants are brought up on stage and, with their hands behind their back, they plunge face-rst into their individualsized cakes to see who could east the most in the time allotted.

Last year’s winner was Jonny Wall, who managed to eke out a close win over the others, though all four of the competitors were covered in cake and frosting by the time the clock had run out. to be the 2019 Cake Eating Champion — Wall wanted to talk about his participation in Young Life.

“I’ve been involved the past three years,” he said, noting especially his attendance at summer camps.

He called the experience — both the summer camp and Young Life as a whole — “amazing,” especially the fellowship — think “relationships” — he had with other youth and with the adults.

“It was heaven on earth,” he said.