Fun Is on the Menu : * The Los Angeles Breakfast Club has been a friendly institution since 1925. The group is grappling with demographic change.

It’s not yet 6 a.m., still dark outside--but these seniors arrive sunny-side up.

They happily sit down to ham (or bacon and sausage) and eggs every Wednesday, most of them impeccably groomed as if attending church or a dress-up party, to form a group called the Los Angeles Breakfast Club.

“It’s a real waker-upper,” says E.T. Lundgren of Glendale, a retiree and great-grandparent who wins prizes in senior skiing competitions when he’s not still tinkering with the stick-shift Thunderbird he ordered brand new in 1960.

“I’m in gear--I get more done on Wednesday than any other day of the week,” says Virginia Nielsen of North Hollywood, a retiree who recently toured Hong Kong and Thailand.

“All we offer is love, kindness and friendship,” says Mabelle (Miss Angel) Crowley of Los Angeles, editor of Ham and Egg News, the club’s newsletter, and whose arrival at club meetings is heralded by her red 1991 Camaro Z-28 and its throaty Corvette engine.

The Breakfast Club--born in 1925 with a membership including film producers Darryl F. Zanuck and Jack Warner, as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan--calls itself “not a church, not a lodge, not a service club, but the Shrine of Friendship,” awarding $6,000 annually to a dozen charities.

The club is a community fixture where the fun also rises, herding members into buses and trains for day trips locally and weekend forays to Las Vegas.

It’s as homespun as a coffee klatch, as predictable as its piano sing-alongs (“Grand Old Flag” and “Happy Days Are Here Again”) and every bit as lighthearted as, say, George Burns, who recently wisecracked about why, at 98, he smokes a dozen cigars a day: “At my age, you’ve gotta hold on to something .”

Almost every Wednesday for 69 years, Breakfast Clubbers have banged spoons, knives and forks rhythmically against coffee cups and water glasses as they sing the club’s anthem, “Ham ‘n’ Eggs”:

I like mine fried good and brown.

I like mine fried upside down .

Ham ‘n’ eggs.

Flip ‘em, flop ‘em, flap ‘em .

Ham ‘n’ eggs.

And inside headquarters near Griffith Park, at 3201 Riverside Drive--in a gleaming, one-story building called Friendship Auditorium, which the club sold to, and now leases once a week from, the city--about 170 Breakfast Clubbers shout, in unison, a shibboleth created in 1925 by club member Ralph Springer, an artist at the old Los Angeles Evening Herald.

Reading block letters printed on a huge board onstage, they recite:

FVNEM?

SVFM.

FVNEX?

SVFX.

OICVFMNX!

Translation: “Have we any ham? Yes, we have ham. Have we any eggs? Yes, we have eggs. Oh, I see. We have ham and eggs.”

Especially ham.

A few men nicknamed the Roosters sit at a table and repeatedly interrupt the meeting with heckling chants.

When a Baptist preacher and the club’s chaplain and resident jokester--the Rev. James Whitcomb Brougher Jr. of Glendale, who is 92 and going on eternity--was introduced not long ago, the Roosters crowed:

“Ohhh, Jim! Tell us about the heavenly shrine!”

On this winter morning, Brougher tells of neither heaven nor shrines but two old men who converse in rocking chairs and reminisce about their long friendship, whereupon one says:

“I can’t remember your name.”

“How soon,” the other asks, “do you have to know?”

For all its renown as a citadel of un -change, the Breakfast Club has bent, if not snapped, with the times.

Originally an all-male preserve founded by the city’s film, business, professional and social elite, who rode horseback together in Griffith Park before sitting down to breakfast, the club admitted women as members in 1981.

Until then, women could only accompany their husbands to club activities. “At the annual meetings,” says Joan Weeks, the club’s office manager, “they had to sit in the back of the room and be quiet.”

Today, the Breakfast Club grapples with demographic change, its membership of 226 (including 124 women and 102 men) ranging in age from 55 to 95.

Membership is down from the more than 1,000 who belonged when members were collectively younger and, even as they reared families, seemed to have more leisure time.

“There’s a lack of interest today among the younger generation. Why? I cannot tell you,” says Aurelio (Sal) Salazar, 68, who with his wife Rose, 69, drives to club meetings from their house in Bell Canyon, a 70-mile round trip.

“The young people can’t afford it (dues are $18.50 a month or $200 a year, if paid all at once), and the retired people are dying off,” Mabelle Crowley says. “It used to be that the companies where our members worked paid the club’s dues. Not anymore.”

Inez Smith, a retired Los Angeles schoolteacher and now the club’s second woman president, concedes that its long-range future appears “a little dismal. We’ve lost 11 members this past year. The younger people are too busy. They have to support their families--and now more women than ever are working.”

Not long ago, a male member suggested that the club should boost membership by inviting Griffith Park’s early morning joggers and bicyclists to breakfast.

“No way!” some club women protested.

As Joan Weeks remembers, “That was the only time the women had a big voice in this club. They said, ‘We don’t want to look at those sweaty bodies and hairy legs. . . . If they can’t come dressed and clean, don’t bring them here!’ ”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: Los Angeles Breakfast Club.

Location: Friendship Auditorium, 3201 Riverside Drive, Los Angeles.

Hours: 6 to 9 a.m. every Wednesday.

Price: Admission to complete buffet breakfast and program ($3 members, $6 non-members); monthly dues ($18.50, or $200 annually if paid all at once).

Call: (213) 662-1191.