Neighbors share more than just cake.

Byline: Bob Welch The Register-Guard

They arrived for the 50th anniversary Monday at Marie Callender's Restaurant, a dozen women with one thing in common.

More specifically, one place in common.

There was Darlene Toycen, 63, who'd come down from Monroe, Wash. And Shirley Athey, 73, who'd started it all by baking that first cake back in 1957. And, of course, Phyllis Rhodes, 80, who had back surgery less than a week ago.

"But I wouldn't have missed this for the world," she says.

It was 50 years ago this month that Athey decided to take a birthday cake over to Rhodes, a neighbor of hers on Avalon Street in west Eugene.

The group has been doing it ever since. Every month. Six hundred times they've gathered, each month to celebrate the birthday of someone in the Avalon neighborhood.

They shifted from a cake for each person to a cake each month, in honor of anyone who has a birthday that month.

But the Avalon Street Birthday Group has survived five decades, the deaths of eight spouses, a divorce, a robbery and more.

"I don't believe we've missed a single month," says Vi May, now 79.

Most have moved. A few women have dropped out, a few women have joined, but the group's monthly gatherings continue.

Athey was only 23 when the group began. "We've watched our children grow up, watched them have children, watched ourselves become grandparents and great-grandparents," Athey says. "It's almost like we're family. Phyllis and I call each other sisters."

Decades ago, the group of neighbors would baby-sit for each other. Some camped with each other. But, mainly, they gathered each month to keep tabs on each other's lives.

"We're not about the past," May says. "We're about the present. What's going on in our lives now."

Somewhere out there in suburbia, I suppose groups like this exist, women who routinely gather - and will, in 2057, to celebrate their 50th.

But with more two-income families, higher mobility rates and busier schedules, our times don't encourage such get-togethers.

The Avalon women credit time and place. Time - because the '50s and '60s were more conducive to neighborhood togetherness. Vi May was one of the few women who worked outside the home - in part, to pay the mortgage on her family's new $10,000 house.

And place - because there was something special about Avalon Street, near what's now Malabon School.

"Someone would no sooner move into the neighborhood than they'd be invited to join," says Lucille Kinnaman, at 91 the oldest member of the group. "That's one of the reasons we moved there. It just seemed like a friendly place."

The Avalon Street Birthday Group has laughed together. Once, two people were presenting a cake when each thought the other was going to take the full load. "That was a true upside-down cake," Helen Riddell says.

And cried together. Once, two hooded robbers stuffed Adaline Root in a room while ransacking her house. May lost a daughter to cancer in the mid-1990s. And husbands have died.

"I remember being consoled after my husband died, then, two weeks later, consoling someone else for the same reason," Athey says.

The Avalon pull is so strong that Riddell left the group in 1959 and rejoined only three years ago - after being gone for more than 40 years.

Over the decades, the conversations have changed: from diapers to raising teenagers to retirement.

"Now, we talk about, say, trips we've been on or ask how someone's surgery went," Athey says.

"Yeah," May says. "A lot of body-parts discussions."

Only two of the 12 - Athey and Root - still live on Avalon Street.

But, in some ways, none of them ever left.

Bob Welch can be reached at 338-2354 or at [e-mail].