It’s Old Home Day season in New Hampshire, and in Hancock the highlight is the fire department’s chicken barbecue. For $15 you get half a chicken, potato salad and coleslaw, a roll, a slice of watermelon, and a can of lemonade.
Volunteer firefighters set up the tent and grill on Friday. They then start cooking late Saturday morning so that they can start serving at 4 p.m. They then clean up so that, apart from the tent, which will still be standing the next morning, everything is spotless. As if nothing ever happened.
Four hundred and fifty dinners were handed out while children and dogs ran around and a band played in the background.
As if the fire department doesn’t do enough already, shouldn’t we cook for them too? Where did volunteer fire department barbecue come from? When we were kids, we always looked forward to the Labor Day weekend chicken barbecue hosted by the volunteer fire department in my grandparents’ town in upstate New York.
Later, when I lived in Western New York, our community south of Buffalo also held a similar festival around Labor Day, but in this case it was hosted by Chiavetta’s, a family-run business that has been grilling chicken in backyards and parking lots for 70 years, relying on its secret, incredible barbecue marinade. (It’s available online. It’s a good idea to always have a batch on hand.)
I’m not sure if anyone realizes when fire departments got into the chicken grilling business. They’ve been doing it for years to raise money, but at $15 a plate, the only people really making money are probably the chicken farmers or, more likely, the food wholesalers. They sell a lot of chicken this time of year.
But nothing says community or Old Home Day more than a volunteer fire department and a chicken barbecue. You can separate them, of course. You can have the fire department and a chicken barbecue. Together, though, they bring everyone to the table and generally celebrate the last days of summer — the harvest season — which is why many of them are held around Labor Day weekend.
Except that at some point, Labor Day weekend was eliminated as the official end of summer in New England. Now students don’t have to go back to school until the last week of August, instead of the first week of September. In our district, that’s the 28th, so three school days followed by the long weekend. Frankly, it doesn’t feel like a process improvement that will yield major educational benefits down the road.
I tell this rant every year around this time. Think of what many of us remember from Labor Day, which included parades, street races, and miles of traffic on the freeways, the clearest sign that it was time for everyone to get back to work. Labor Day weekend gave us closure—the last nights of less and less daylight when we could be outside after dinner instead of in our rooms doing homework.
Full of anticipation and a little regret, we headed off to the volunteer fire department’s chicken barbecue. But there we met our neighbors, told each other their summer stories, played a few games, ate watermelon and went home in a good mood.
The wait was worth it. And all of this was accomplished by our local volunteer firefighters. And by a whole bunch of chickens.
Thank you very much.
Jarvis Coffin writes fiction and essays about country life. He is a retired media and advertising salesman and former chef and owner of New Hampshire’s oldest inn, the Hancock Inn. You can reach him at [email protected] and stay up to date with all his Musings at jarviscoffin.com.
