#PancakesForRoger marks fifth year supporting MU Law School veterans clinic
Roughly five years ago Maj. Gen. Roger E. Combs set the kitchen table for breakfast and made a request for pancakes for his daughter, Susan L. Combs.
He had agent-orange-related throat cancer and by this point in his treatment regimen, was now fed via a tube. It was a simple, but heartbreaking request for his daughter.
"His desire for pancakes became a rallying point for me and #PancakesForRoger became my way to honor his greatness," she wrote on the Pancakes for Roger website. Each February for the last five years, the #PancakesForRoger campaign has raised money for the University of Missouri School of Law Veterans Clinic.
"The premise behind #PancackesForRoger is to stop and appreciate the little things in your life," Combs said in an interview with the Tribune late last week, adding the pancake request came about three weeks before her father's death.
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The clinic will hold a free pancake and coffee breakfast 9-11 a.m. February 22, which is Roger E. Combs' birthday, at Reynolds Alumni Center in the Bistro. He died on Aug. 22, 2018, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
"I love telling my students about Maj. Gen. Roger Combs' military career as well as his service as a judge," wrote Angela Drake, veterans clinic director. "The lives of our Vietnam veterans, like Combs, are important to share. ... Not all of my students get to help Vietnam-era veterans because they are helping veterans from other eras, so this opportunity allows me to focus on that very important piece of our nation's military history.
"It also allows us to honor veterans who were not always welcomed home in the manner they should have been because of the nation's conflicted feelings about the war."
People can post photos to social media with the #PancakesForRoger hashtag and Combs and Co. Insurance will make donations to the clinic. The campaign reached all 50 states in 2022 and even portions of Central America, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
"The first year we only had a couple hundred pictures. ... Last year there was thousands of dollars donated to the clinic," Combs said, adding she has friends with children where the children are excited about having pancakes in February. "They talk about the military. They talk about service. It is just kind of a nice topic to bring up as a family."
Both Combs and her father are University of Missouri graduates, where her father also graduated from MU's law school in 1975.
He spent a nearly 40-year career in the U.S. military branches of the Marines, Army and Air Force before returning to civilian life practicing law in St. Joseph, serving as Gentry County prosecuting attorney for a decade and then as a judge in the state's fourth judicial circuit of Gentry, Atchison, Holt, Nodaway and Worth counties.
Combs has her own insurance company located in New York City, but it is her longstanding connections to MU and its national alumni board that led to her learning of the law school's veterans clinic.
"You don't have to be from Missouri, a MU student or a graduate to be helped by the clinic," Combs said. "I always tell people, if you know a veteran having problems with the VA system, to have them contact me and then I get the information and send it along to the clinic, and if they can help, they absolutely are going to help."
Who Roger Combs was
Roger Combs was a man who was good when no one was watching, said Susan L. Combs.
"He mentored a lot of people," she said. "After he passed, I had a lot who reached out to me and talked to me. My father was a two-star general in the U.S. Air Force, but also a civilian judge.
"I had just as many civilians and military people reach out to me."
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She received a thank-you message from a person her father helped while on the bench, for one.
"(This person said,) 'I was going down a bad path and your dad gave me a shot,'" Combs said in recollection, adding that person said they made something of their life and owe that to Roger Combs. "He was just a kind man. ... He made everyone feel important and what they said mattered.
"Hey stayed true to his Missouri roots."
A guide for slaying dragons
Life lessons Combs learned from her father and other influential people in her life have made it into her book, "Pancakes for Roger: A Mentorship Guide for Slaying Dragons," published on her father's birthday last year.
"When you lose a parent, there usually is one (sibling) who steps up and handles a lot of the roles that parent handled," Combs said.
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So, Combs handled her father's estate after his passing, including the management of two farms and her mother's finances. In a way, Combs did not have an opportunity to grieve.
"I went into work mode. My father was a civilian judge and a general, so he had two pensions. There were properties, the VA, Defense Department, Arlington, changing passwords and accounts over. Because I went into that work mode, I didn't get that cathartic grieving. The book was a present to myself, in a way, to kind of heal and deal with the loss of my dad," Combs said.
The lessons and advice essays written by Combs are broken into four sections: Self, Love, Family and Career.
"It's written in vignettes and gives practical advice," Combs said, adding a portion of sales also goes to support the veteran's clinic. "It was well received."
Charles Dunlap covers local government, community stories and other general subjects for the Tribune. You can reach him at cdunlap@columbiatribune.com or @CD_CDT on Twitter. Subscribe to support vital local journalism.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: #PancakesForRoger supports MU Law School veterans clinic for fifth year
