Page 25 - January 2022 Barbecue News Magazine

T. Michael Garrison
KCBS Master Judge mgarrison8@sbcglobal.net
This month’s BBQ Profile is a long time and very dear friend of mine from the Kansas City area. He was born and raised in Kansas City. He was first exposed to cooking BBQ over an open fire when he was about 10 years old. His Aunt and her daughter had a very successful restaurant in KC called Blenders BBQ. He has memo- ries of snitching a rib bone or two as a kid and occasionally a slice of brisket. More than once, he was caught and repri- manded for taking food from their kitchen, but it was so good that he contin- ued to do this throughout his childhood.
This was my dear friend, Jerry Bressel, who today is a very successful attorney in Overland Park, a suburb of KC on the Kansas side of the state line. He has many stories of his source of top quality BBQ. Early in his legal career Jerry approached me to take flying lessons and to get his pilot’s license. I taught Jerry to fly, and he was a natural stick. He was an active pilot and maintained his skills.
One Saturday afternoon, after we finished flying, I invited Jerry to join me at the Kill Creek Farms BBQ in DeSoto, Kansas. I was judging and Jerry volunteered to work the contest. One event and he was hooked with competition BBQ. At the time he had two daughters at the University of Kansas in Lawrence so he took them some sam- ples from the grazing
table, when you could still do that, and his daughters were immediately hooked on competition BBQ as well. They wanted dad to do more judging. Jerry im- mediately completed his required training in 2006 and became a KCBS Certi- fied Judge. We started judging local contests and Jerry began his serious
judging with the Great Lenexa BBQ Battle in Lenexa, the same contest where I began my judging career. I judged every event in Lenexa until I moved to Florida in 2014 and I believe Jerry has also judged every one of these events in Lenexa.
We’ve saw a lot of things change over these 34 years. We made a lot of friends in the BBQ Family, and just kept finding more and more experiences in the BBQ World. During these years I’ve trained a lot of new pilots and also introduced sev- eral of them to competition BBQ. Another long-time friend who completed his pilot’s license training is Bryan Beier. Bryan at that time was a high-tech elec- tronics wizard with Sprint. Another excel- lent pilot was Mike Dyer, a Real Estate Executive in Kansas City, who also com- pleted his pilot’s license. I believe it was Mike’s original idea to form a group to fly to various contests around the country and to judge competition BBQ. We met over the Christmas break and formed what is known today as the Flying BBQ Judges. Mike was coming up with an annual list of contests where we could fly to the contest as a group. At this point Jerry had pur- chased a Beechcraft Bonanza so we had one aircraft among our group and the oth- ers were renting planes. A few years later Bryan purchased a V-Tail Bonanza in Navy Flying colors. Jerry moved up to earning
his instrument rating so he could fly in in- clement weather while Bryan was working on his instrument rating certification too. By this time, I had earned my airline pilot certificate in both single and multiengine certificates and this allowed us to fly in al- most any weather. At this point there were numerous events around the country that wanted us to judge their event and would usually have press coverage of our group when we arrived at their local contest.
During a visit to the KCBS main office I met Kelly Cains who was then the editor of the Bull Sheet. She asked me if I would be interested in writing a monthly article covering the adventures of the Flying BBQ Judges. I agreed to do that and that was the birth of the “Adventures of the Flying BBQ Judges” article that has appeared in the Bull Sheet continuously until today. Jerry would read my article and make sug-
gestions so it was a joint effort of Jerry and myself.
In 2006 we first judged both the Open and the In- vitational contests at the American Royal BBQ. In 2008 we were judging Blues and BBQ in Ham- mond, Louisiana, and there was a photographer taking a lot of pictures at the contest. I approached
JANUARY 2022
BarbecueNews.com - 25
BBQ Profile
Jerry Bressel