By Neal F. Litherland

For the past 17 years the Liars’ Club has been meeting for breakfast throughout Valparaiso and Chesterton. This breakfast club, which boasts such an unusual name, meets at a variety of different restaurants every Tuesday, and members attend when they can. Just how the Liars’ Club came to be what it is today is something of a story in and of itself.

“It all started back in 1993,” Ted Krebs, one of the founding members of the Liars’ Club, said. “My friend Don Wetzel and I had met up for breakfast one day, and then we’d part ways afterwards. It was later when one of us mentioned that we’d ‘just had breakfast’ to a friend Betty Conley. She teased us and said it had sounded like a lie. That was really where the name the Liars’ Club first came from, and the point where the club got started.”

From that day, Krebs and Wetzel began to have regular breakfast meeting times between them. As the months and years went on they invited other men they knew casually to join them. As the years progressed those casual friends became a regular part of the club and then they would invite their friends, and so on and so forth. Over time the meetings grew more frequent. Currently the club meets every, single Tuesday. Additionally the group’s numbers expanded to the current member roll of the Liars’ Club; 21 regulars, with others that show up less regularly.

Taken at Phil-B’s restaurant in Valparaiso on January 12, members of The Liars’ Club, a long-standing breakfast club, enjoy the camaraderie of their weekly meeting.  The Liars’ Club was formed by two members back in 1993 and has met nearly every Tuesday morning since then at 8 a.m., at one of ten different restaurants in Valpo and one in Chesterton.  And all of this is TRUE!

“At first we’d only get together once a month or so,” Krebs said. “None of us were strangers, but we didn’t see each other too regularly. You know how that goes, you have people that you see around every so often and that you know casually, but you don’t work together so you just don’t see them very often. The Liars’ Club changed that and gave us all a reason to get together more often.”

In fact, due to the slowly growing numbers of new members in the Liar’s Club the group’s had to get more organized about how they set their agenda. There are no phone calls between members, no e-mails, or any other form of checking and cross checking. The Liars’ Club simply prints out a monthly sheet that shows where each meeting will be held, and every member receives a schedule each month.

“There are a lot of local places that we go to on Tuesdays,” Krebs said. “The Campbell Street Cafe, Suzie’s Cafe, Cosmo’s, the Viking Chili Bowl, the Broadway Cafe, Round the Clock, and Schoops, just to name a few. We try to mix it up so that we’re not always going to the same place, and to make sure that the place we’re going is big enough for everyone who’s likely to show up. We have between seventeen and twenty members who come on average, so we need to plan for that. We also make sure that we leave a day open in the calendar as a free day in case a new restaurant opens that we’d like to try out.”

The Liars’ Club isn’t anything more than a social get-together for its members. According to Krebs there’s no real purpose for the meetings, no agenda or action list that needs to be attended to. While there may be discussions of politics or local happenings that is not the purpose of the Liars’ Club.

“It really grew out of the local academic community, even though the group really began with a couple of guys who used to work in the steel mills,” Krebs said. “It was a lot of retired guys, some of them professors, who didn’t have anything pressing to do and wanted to get out. We’d spend some time out, and have a morning away from the wives. Just a good time and a lot of different restaurants.”

As one might guess, the Liars’ Club is currently made up entirely of men. In an interesting twist several of the members’ wives have begun going out to a different restaurant to form their own breakfast club.

“We don’t have any by-laws against women or anything like that,” Krebs said. “In fact, we don’t have anything like regulations for the group at all. But since most of our members invite only other male friends to come with them, it’s just how things have turned out over the years that we’ve been meeting.”