Dennis Polson is a pleasant, genial man in a cowboy hat, tasselled boots and a turquoise neckerchief, who doesn’t mind smiling on occasion but who is dead serious about his barbecue. He’s the sort of kindly stickler given to the phrase “the rules are the rules.”
The 73-year-old Lebo native — whose duties as a Kansas City Barbeque Society representative have taken him to 11 states already this year — was in Iola over the weekend to oversee Iola Rotary’s annual KCBS-sanctioned barbecue competition at the Allen County Fair.
The 34 judges gathered at four tables in the New Community Building in Riverside Park. A “Do Not Enter” sign was plastered across the building’s front door. It’s a serious undertaking, judging barbecue. A reverent, hushed mood pervaded the room where the judges considered their particular meats. At one point, a young man — a fair worker, in fact — tried to gain entry into the building.
“You can’t come in here,” said Polson. “I’m sorry.”
“I just need to get to the office back there,” said the young man.
“We’re in a judging right now, son,” said Polson, closing the door on the man’s befuddled face.
That was during the chicken portion of the competition. During pork butt, an elderly man opened the front door and let a big gush of wind blow through the entryway. Another KCBS volunteer rushed to the scene. “You can’t come in here, sir,” the volunteer said.
“I’m looking for Frances,” the man said.
“No one is named Frances,” the volunteer said.
The man seemed not to hear. “Is Frances in there?” he asked, looking over the volunteer’s head.
“No,” the volunteer said, “no Frances.” The volunteer shut the door and the congregation returned to its solemn assignment of evaluating smoked meats — a tableau of highly-trained eaters turning rib bones over in their hands with the lavish attention of jewelry appraisers.
THE KANSAS CITY Barbeque Society is in its 32nd year and is the largest national cookout organization of its kind. According to Polson, the group hosts more than 500 contests per year and has a presence in nearly every state and is even gaining a reputation overseas.
Whether a particular KCBS contest is held in Lubbock or whether it’s held in Liverpool, the rules remain the same. Every barbecue team is required to cook four meats: chicken, ribs, pork and beef brisket.
Australia, for instance, explained Polson, wanted to smoke lamb. Not happening. Norway wanted to cook fish. Nope. “If you want to play our game, you use our rules.”
“Now, if you want to cook lamb as an ancillary or extra contest,” said Polson, “that’s fine. But you must first cook our four.”
Each team is allowed their choice of marinades, rubs and spices, however, and can choose the type of wood used for smoking. “You go farther south, you’re getting more into pecan trees. Up here, we use more of the other fruit trees. In Texas, they like mesquite.”
On the day of the competition, during a designated 10-minute window, each team hands their meat product — transported in standard-issue polystyrene clamshells — to a KCBS volunteer, who sees that the clamshell is labelled via an intricate double-blind numbering system that ensures the temporary anonymity of the teams. From there, the clamshells are dispatched to the judges’ tables, where their contents are set upon by thousands of qualified tastebuds.
The meats are evaluated on three KCBS-specified criteria, which also happen to be decent criteria for selecting a romantic partner: pleasing appearance, good taste and sufficient tenderness. “Looks, taste and tenderness,” said Polson, “that’s the name of the game.”
“With around 25 teams, this contest is considered a small contest,” explained Linda Polson, Dennis’s wife and — as the one in charge of inputting the scores — a crucial partner in administering the KCBS contests. “Still, though, there are 10 of the best teams in the country right here in Iola.”
Dennis agreed. “It’s going to be a tough ‘who wins this darn thing?’ contest, I’ll tell you that.”
BARBECUE has always been a big deal. Writing from the International Barbecue Cooking Competition in Memphis in 1985 — the birth year of KCBS, as it happens — the New Yorker correspondent and Kansas City native Calvin Trillin clapped eyes for the first time on that species of human for whom barbecue is life: “There are so many barbecue-cooking contests that in the summertime a competitive barbecuer can haul his rig from fairgrounds to fairgrounds, like a man with a string of quarter horses.”
And that was about the cut of it on Saturday in Riverside Park, too. Expensive-looking smokers and trailer rigs dotted the greens. Typically, the team name is stenciled somewhere on the rig: Spicy Spitfire, Smokin’ Dan, Smooth Smoke, Pork Pullers, Pig Newton, Fire & Spice, Caveman Cuisine, 4 Legs Up, and an Olathe-based team called Hunka Hunka Burnin’ Rub. Plus 19 others.
Who are these people who’ve transformed a happy backyard pursuit into a form of obsession? I asked Polson.
Barbecue is an entirely democratic endeavor, said the barbecue rep. “Take Dave Qualls, for example, who is part owner of a casino down in Oklahoma. He just loves to cook. We have doctors and lawyers but we also have the redneck from right up the road. When it comes to barbecue, they’re all putting their pants on the same way. And it’s the same with judges.”
HUSBAND AND WIFE Robert and Thelma Hill have judged more than a hundred contests in their 10 years with KCBS. (They were acting volunteers at Saturday’s Iola event.) As it happens, Robert and Thelma both grew up in Kansas City’s Roundtop neighborhood, the undisputed Valhalla of Midwest barbecue.
“When we were kids,” remembered Robert, “we would go to Arthur Bryant’s and get a sandwich. This guy behind the counter had hands big enough to swallow up a basketball. He’d pull the meat down and he’d slam it on the bread. We’d say thank you, and then run right up to Gates and get Gates’s sauce because we liked it better.”
Thelma’s home joint was Rosedale’s, a longstanding barbecue restaurant on Southwest Boulevard, where every Friday evening Thelma’s dad would pile Thelma and her 11 siblings into the back of his pickup truck and drive crosstown for a mountain of burnt ends and a stack of hot pulled pork sandwiches.
The Hills met when Thelma was 14 and Robert 16. After 50 years of marriage the pair has a teasing, sometimes sardonic, relationship. For instance, Thelma remembers her first, teenaged encounters with Robert like this: “With six brothers, Bob had to fight to get on my block. My brothers wouldn’t let him come over.”
“What!” said Robert, throwing his head back in mock exasperation. “This story changes every day. In fact, let me tell you something.”
Thelma grabbed Robert’s arm. “Don’t you tell him that. Bob, don’t you start that lie.”
Robert continued. “They had 12 kids in that family, you understand? Her daddy was giving them away like kittens. I’m serious. ‘Here, son, take two or three.’ ‘No, sir, one’s fine for me.’”
“Oh, you lie,” said Thelma, “and you know you lie.”
DESPITE their vast barbecue pedigree, the Hills insist that the value they derive from competitive barbecue is the warmth and camaraderie that permeates every event. Jo Lasher, a widow from Liberty, Mo. — who, on Saturday, gave a thumbs up to her chicken and a thumbs down to her ribs — said much the same: “Eighty percent of the people here I’ve judged with before, and it’s always so nice to see their faces.” George Gustafson, an 80-year-old master gardener from Tulsa, who in his prime sold bearings and seals across a section of West Texas that stretched from Odessa to El Paso, had a similar recommendation: “You come for the people. The food is a plus.”
Nearly every judge echoed the sentiment. Organizers, too. And cooks. There seems to be a conspiracy of goodness in the ranks of the KCBS. To talk to anyone associated with Saturday’s barbecue, you’d forget that the point of these events is the seasoned meat.
“Look, we enjoy the food,” explained Polson, “but really the passion with barbecue societies is for the people you meet, the friendships you make. It’s cutthroat, yes, but it’s community.”
BRUCE BUBACZ is the head of the philosophy department at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. He is also a KCBS-certified master judge. He was in Iola on Saturday. “The New York Post rates Joe’s Kansas City the best barbecue joint in the country. Now, what does the New York Post know about barbecue? Hell, I don’t know. But, for me, in Kansas City, there are three: Joe’s, Q39 and Jack Stack BBQ. Now, if you want a funky place, the Woodyard is just bizarre. Go there.”
Originally from Chicago, Bubacz has been at UMKC for nearly 45 years. He teaches the history of philosophy, but his specialty is medieval philosophy. He’s written a book on St. Augustine’s theory of knowledge.
A garish question, but an irresistible one: After seven years as a KCBS judge, has he developed a philosophy of barbecue?
Bubacz pauses. He’s taking the question seriously. “I’ve thought about it a bit,” he says. He speaks for a few minutes on the link between barbecue and jazz. Both are distinctly American phenomena brought to Kansas City by way of the African-American migration from the South, and both depend on a standard blueprint — the recipe, the song. But each jazz number, each barbecue dish, says Bubacz, takes its individual flavor from the “freewheeling, ad lib” stamp that a particular musician or cook applies to his product. They’re both, essentially, riffs on a style.
“But the best part of all this stuff,” said Bubacz, re-joining the chorus of other KCBS members, “is the people you meet. It’s all a kind of fellowship.”
BY 3 P.M. on Saturday, most of the judges had vacated the Community Building and the cooks had flooded in. It was awards ceremony time. Everyone awaited the results. In the end, Smooth Smoke was named grand champion. The room cheered and three guys from Springfield, Mo., moved toward the front to collect their trophy.
