DeLong's

Sun, 11/10/2024 - 4:04pm

When: 2024

Director Kameron Donald takes us through the story of DeLong's Bar-B-Q Pit, one of Ann Arbor's most famed bygone eateries.  In a history told by Diana McKnight-Morton, one of DeLong's founders, we learn about the idea for the restaurant being born out of the many heads that popped over the backyard fence during family barbecues and hear about the many people, Ann Arborites and those much more far-flung, who numbered it among their favorites.

Transcript

• [00:00:30] Diana McKnight-Morton: I'm Diana McKnight-Morton, the daughter of the founders of DeLong's Barbecue. Go this way?
• [00:00:47] Angela Davis: Let's just go here.
• [00:00:54] Diana McKnight-Morton: This is the apartment building that's being built, where my parents had their restaurant here for close to 38 years. It was a business that was very vibrant in this community, and it was a business that people from all over the country would come and buy the food and order the food or have it mailed to them out of state. Now has been replaced, torn down, and replaced with a a multi-million dollar apartment complex. I'm very sorry to see it go, and a lot of customers and community people are sorry to see it go. But time moves on, and my parents, they're both deceased now, and I'm just happy that they enjoyed it, and they had a good time being in the business and enjoyed their life had from the business. My father came to Ann Arbor, I would say, in the late 30s. With his mother, they had migrated from the South to one of his relatives house in Saginaw, and then the mother moved to Ann Arbor. My mother came to Ann Arbor from her sister who had been coming to dances at the at old armory. She told my mother, Hey, there's a lot of men up there in Ann Arbor, come with me, so my mother finally went with her. My dad and my mother met, and they dated for a while. Then they got married. We couldn't go out to eat because because of the segregation at that time. Everybody came. My mother always cooked. They always my parents were very social people. They have people at the house all the time. She would cook dinners and people would come over and or they do pot luck. This went on for a long time. My father started cooking in the back yard just by happenstance. He decided that Hey, I'm going to fix some ribs. This is the holiday. If I remember right, it was in Memorial Weekend. As he's cooking, the wind carried the smell in the surrounding neighborhoods, and people started coming in the back, and said, "Hey, how about we had some cooking ribs, it smells good. Can I have a bone or something?". Well, my mother would cook, fix up other sides, potato salad, coleslaw, and such. But it was just for the family. That's how he got started doing the cooking the ribs. Then he was doing so well and cooking them because he wasn't selling it at that time. It was decided that he would go ahead and open up a restaurant, and he started he saw a gas station, he used to go in there all the time to get his gas, and this lady and him became friends who owned the gas station. He said, well, one day he said to her that he would like to open up a restaurant, and she says, well, he asked her how much would she sell the gas station for because he wanted to open a restaurant. She said she wasn't ready. But that was, about I would say two years later, he said, "In the meantime, can I use one of your back room? Do you use that storage?" It was a storage room. She said, "Yeah, you can use the storage room." He started cooking out of that storage room. Because of that, him cooking and the smell going everywhere, when people got came out of the bars, the bars closed at two o'clock, they would line up around the corner and buying the ribs in the dinners. Eventually, the lady saw that well, one that she was getting ready to retire and to sell the restaurant to my dad. She decided to do that. That's how the restaurant got started. Well, my dad being tall, 6'4, and everybody called him Long, because he was taller everyone at that time. His nickname was Long. Well, my name is Diana. But my friends always called me D. One day dad and I was talking, he said I don't know what to name it. I said, How about talking this over I said, How about people call you Long? They call me D. Let's call it DeLong's. That's how it became DeLong's. But my father's name is Robert Thompson. But a lot of people don't know that. They think his name is DeLong. There was many times when University of Michigan had their musical society would bring in artists, B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles. They all wanted soul food, and they would order the food from DeLong's all the time. There's another person every time he was in town, John Sinclair. John Sinclair always ordered from DeLong's. They would all order a lot. But John Sinclair and another person, dealership owner here at that time, would order 2, 3, $400 worth of food. We've had a lot of people, especially the ones who graduated from University, would come had been a patron of us for a long time. They would move out of state, and my parents would mail it to them. The sauce, the ribs, or whatever they would order. We would they would mail it to them, whatever state it was. This went on for years. This is a picture of my mother, she's taking an order on the telephone, and that's everybody knew Miss Adeline, because Miss Adeline didn't play. She was very serious about what she was doing, but she was very professional. She basically was the behind the business, as they say, every successful male has a female behind them. Well, that was her. I'm showing this picture because this is my father's mentor and a very long time friend. His nickname was Chico. But he always called him Uncle Chico, and he lived in Detroit. But because of the banks in Ann Arbor that did not grant my father money to purchase the building to start his business, this wonderful person, loaned him the money to get started on his business and was his mentor throughout my father's business. A DeLong's Bar-B-Q Pit menu. This is the original menu that they started out with. It has the original food, what they were offering and the prices. Now, the prices were at that time in the 60s was low. There was no problem at that time. Because of time of change, just years gone by, my father and my mother decided to make some changes to the menu, to add more things to it, to grow it, to make it expanded. The high school students from Community High, once they changed the menu to their lunch special, they were able to come over and purchase lunch at a lower price and a lot more tasty than cafeteria food.
• [00:10:32] Diana Mcknight-Morton: My dad's picture's on this mural of all the black leaderships that was here in Ann Arbor. They were here that represented the community here at that time. As you can see, this is my father, DeLong Robert Thompson, and there's the business right there, showing that it was a part of this community.
• [00:11:24] Carlos Roper: I started going to DeLong's back in 1973. I was working as a employee at University of Michigan, and I frequented there, just about every other day of the week.
• [00:11:39] Shirley Beckley: Well, when they first opened, I was a neighbor of DeLong, and Adeline, and Diane. I lived across the street from them. I remember the first time it opened. I'm a lifetime member of DeLong's.
• [00:12:04] Richard Payne: I go back to, cause my mom, she was good friend with Adeline and Robert. I'm not sure which year it was. But when I started working there, I was a delivery driver. He'd had me delivering orders and stuff. What he would always say that I was slow. My brother Ryan worked there too. But he would say that Ryan was always faster than me, and I said, Long, look, he might be faster than me cause he's doing local order, but you got me going 20 miles away delivering his order. But they were big orders. They were a lot of food. That was one of the good things about him. I delivered up on a campus a lot too, and students. They loved it.
• [00:12:53] Amy Stamps-Allen: I'm Amy Stamps-Allen, and I'm a Detroiter. I came up here at the University of Michigan College and met my husband when I was 18, and he introduced me to DeLong's.
• [00:13:06] Carl Allen Jr.: I'm Carl Allen Jr. I'm a homey from Ann Arbor. I knew the DeLong's before they had a restaurant because Mr. Long used to always have the family picnics. I was eating that way before the restaurant was open.
• [00:13:23] Stacy Herderson: When I think of DeLong's, I think of faith, perseverance, and I think of legacy, and the legacy is just the stories that we're hearing today is just the testimony of a restaurant, of a family with faith, a family who was faithful in the neighborhood and in the community. It's still alive and thriving today in our memories and in our hearts.
• [00:13:47] Jerry Ginyard: I was one of the cooks at DeLong's. I was the closer. I would leave one job, have an hour off, then I'd go out to DeLong's, and I'd be the closer there. I would cook, answer the phones, and write down the tickets until one of the girls came, and she ordered Nora, and then I could just stick to just cooking. But I had a job to do, and I did it well.
• [00:14:18] Angela Davis: Everyone that's here at this moment, sharing in this experience with us, has, in some way, shape, or form, participated in the growth of the restaurant.
• [00:14:30] Diana Mcknight-Morton: I've never thought about this, but it is a legacy for our family. But it's also a legacy for the community. The people who knew DeLong's when my parents were there, knew what the food was like. During that time, there were other restaurants that tried to not so much replicate, but I used that word because they could never measure up because it was just a matter of the consistency. It would never changed, and that's what people liked about it. As I mentioned before about people leaving the city of Ann Arbor from graduating from U of M, or somewhere, they would call or send correspondence back to my parents about the restaurant and the food. Well, here's one letter that just stuck out to me. Says, this is dated June 6, 2018. Dear Mrs. Morton, and that's my name, I grew up in downtown Ann Arbor and went to Commie, and used to eat at DeLong's all the time. Actually so much that my mom put a limit on how much fried chicken I was allowed to eat. That's funny. My favorite meal there was fried chicken, barbecue fries, and greens. I can tell you that after living on the East Coast for a few years, I have never once been able to find a restaurant out here that makes barbecue fries the way DeLong's did. Although, I keep looking. The restaurant closed in 2001 for various reasons. My parents, their health had started to fail after 38 years being in business, and it just took his toll, and it's a hard business. My husband and I tried to run it for a while, and then health reasons happened with my husband. Both sides, my parents and I said it's time to let it go. That was the sad part because as I said before, the memories still carries on with people. They still wish that the restaurant was still open, and how much they enjoyed it and just being able to make the order, have it delivered with their friends or family there at the house and everybody having a good time eating the food. [inaudible 00:17:30]