How one brick mason quietly built Kansas City’s barbecue tradition

Bill Chaney can fire up a pit, but he draws the line at cooking barbecue.

“I’m only the builder,” says the 95-year-old brick mason. “I couldn’t tell you anything about the cooking or the recipes.”

In 1956, Chaney built a pit for Russ Fiorella, the founder of Jack Stack Barbecue, igniting a decades-long career working with some of Kansas City’s best-loved barbecue restaurants.

Chaney constructed more than 20 custom wood-burning brick pits over the years. Jack Stack, LC’s Bar-B-Q and Smokehouse Barbecue continue to operate pits built by Chaney, smoking their meats over a combination of oak and hickory.

“The people my age, they’re used to wood-flavor barbecue,” Chaney says. “They didn’t use all these seasonings to give it flavor.” 

Chaney built his reputation by refusing to cut corners. It took two to three bricklayers a month to construct a pit. If he had a question about fire science, engineering, or health or environmental codes, Chaney wasn’t shy about asking for help.

His craftsmanship, an eagerness to collaborate and willingness to take care of his customers’ business by working after the restaurant closed for the day cemented lifelong friendships. I recently went with Chaney to celebrate his birthday at the Smokehouse Barbecue in Gladstone, where the general manager, Julie Domann, greeted Chaney like a long-lost relative.

Chaney, who grew up in the 18th & Vine neighborhood, was surrounded by barbecue legends from the start. As a teenager, Chaney recalls playing basketball on a then-vacant lot at the corner of East 19th Street and Highland Avenue, where decades earlier Henry Perry, the self-proclaimed “Barbecue King” and widely credited founding father of Kansas City barbecue, opened his longest running restaurant in the 1920s. The business continued strong until Perry’s death in 1940.

Charlie Bryant, one of Perry’s apprentices, picked up the torch, moving the business to 18th Street and Euclid Avenue, where as a kid Chaney washed dishes. Charlie renamed the restaurant Charles Bryant Barbeque. In the ’50s, his younger brother, Arthur, replaced his late brother’s name with his own and moved the restaurant to its current location (1727 Brooklyn Ave., KCMO).

Although Chaney did not build the pit at Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque, he provided modifications and maintenance until only a few years ago, long after the legendary pitmaster died in 1982.

“Every year, Mr. Chaney would come in January when they shut the place down and make sure the construction was sound,” says Willis Simpson, a former long-time general manager at Arthur Bryant’s. “Talk about a wealth of knowledge. I talk to Mr. Chaney every chance I get.”

In recent years, rising demand for barbecue has increasingly replaced brick pits with gas-fired smokers that offer safer, more consistent results with less labor.

“Gone are the days when the owner like Arthur Bryant would be there day and night to watch the fire didn’t flare up,” says 84-year-old Ardie Davis, a founding member of the Kansas City Barbeque Society and member of the Barbecue Hall of Fame. “Today with the shiny metal ovens, it’s set-it-and-forget-it barbecue.”

Only a lone chimney of a brick barbecue pit Chaney built for the former Winslow’s Barbecue in the City Market, now Pigwich, survives. Evidence of barbecue evolution.  “The pit he built wasn’t there anymore,” Davis says of Chaney’s handiwork. A discovery the two made after a visit. “It’s sad, but life and barbecue go on.”

But Chaney is sanguine when it comes to Kansas City’s ever-changing barbecue landscape. 

“It was a surprise that they didn’t use it anymore, but it didn’t make me sad,” he says. “Different generations have different ideas, and I believe in that.” 

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