The crew on a festival weekend. June is off-frame, watching the thermometer.
June
June Calloway learned fire management at eleven, on a drum smoker welded from a burn barrel behind her granddad's garage in Kansas City, Kansas. He ran a two-item menu on Sundays after church: ribs, and whatever he felt like. She kept the second habit.
Twenty years of line work, two competition circuits, and one stubborn food truck later, she signed a lease on a brick rail-supply warehouse in the West Bottoms the same week the roof leaked through. She signed anyway. The draft through the loading door, she says, is the best draw a chimney ever had.
“People ask for the recipe. The recipe is: stay awake while everyone else sleeps, and don't lie to the fire.”
— June Calloway, pitmaster + owner
Big Alma, door open, week forty-something of the year.
Big Alma
The pit is a thousand-gallon offset welded by a retired boilermaker in Tonganoxie, Kansas, out of a decommissioned propane tank and what he described as “spare parts of significance.” She holds 250 degrees through a Missouri January without complaint, which is more than anyone on the crew can say.
Big Alma burns Missouri white oak, split and cured ten months, lit at 9 p.m. for the overnight cook. Brisket goes on at ten. Somebody sits with her until open. That somebody is usually June.
Why “Emberline”
Old pit hands had a name for the row of banked coals raked down the length of a masonry pit: the ember line. You read it like a gauge. Bright at the firebox end, dim at the stack, and everything you needed to know about the next six hours written in orange along the way. The West Bottoms used to be all lines: rail lines, stock lines, men reading fires under brick smokehouses. We kept the habit and took the name.
The neighborhood has watched a century of freight roll through. We just add smoke.