By Norman Cain, February 11, 2021 — At the Northwest mouth of Olive St., the narrow alley led to a dead end where I lived for the first sixteen years of my life. There was a huge well-kept lot. One day, Mr. Wilson, the premier entrepreneur in the neighborhood, who happened to be a devout friend of my family, decided that he would build a barbecue grill upon the lot.
My best friend Bobby and I, who were approximately ten years old at the time, watched in amazement as Mr. Wilson built this pit with plastic cinder blocks, leaving an opening at the top for the head of the grill to contain the meat. Mrs. Wilson, the cook, always commissioned me and Bobby to assist her when she cooked the pork. She would place slabs of hickory wood at the bottom of the pit and we would be sent to the corner store to get loaves of bread, salt, lemons, ketchup, sugar, tomato paste (not sauce,) for her secret barbecue sauce. Mrs. Wilson would begin her culinary process by setting the wood on fire, carefully placing the slabs of ribs on the grill while she occasionally turned the meat. When the meat was done, Mrs. Wilson would present Bobby and me a healthy sandwich and a bottle of soda.
After receiving our reward, we would run across the lot to the alley that bordered it, make a right turn, run past several back yards, and stop at a backyard that led to an abandoned building. There, we would devour our sandwiches with gusto and silently think “good luck” for not being detected by our friends. We selfishly and without guilt did not want to share. A bag of chips was one thing, but a healthy barbecue sandwich and a bottle of soda was something else.