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Image provided by: Buffalo State: The State University of New York
E- \BUFFALO COURIER-.EXPRESS, Sunday. December 6, 1981 Patricia Ward Biederman 'King of Wings' Rates _- Fuss and Feathers John Young is chicken-wing histo- y's forgotten man. ' Buffalonians grow up with the story: How one day e in the first half of §8 the 1960s, the poult- ry people delivered an unsolicited or- der of chicken wings to Frank Bel- lissimo, the late & owner of the An- chor Bar. Bellis & e simo regularly bought chicken backs and necks for use in the spaghetti sauce. What was he to do with an unordered passel of wings? According to legend, he turned, in his culinary need, to his wife, Te- ressa, and the rest is hisfiory, mild, ~ medium or hot. Chicken feathers! cries John Young. Poppycock! Young, the self-styled \king of wings\ insists that he is the one true originator of the Buffalo chick- en wing. Sure enough, the 47-year-old pro- prietor of John Young's Wings and Things has bought, deep-fried and sold tons of little chicken limbs in his time. \I was selling 5,000 pounds of wings in 2962,\ says Young, whose receipts from Will's Poultry have yellowed with age to the shade of a Perdue ' Oven-Stuffer. \To my knowledge, I was the only some- body in Buffalo selling chicken wings. I was out there by myself, you know what I mean?\ Young registered the name ''Young's Wings and Things\ with the Erie County Clerk's Office in 1966, but he's actually eaten chicken wings for decades. ''We were so poor during, and aft- er, the invasion of Pearl Harbor, that all we could afford to eat was chicken wings, the feet, their necks and gravy,\ recalls Young, who grew up with 13 brothers and sisters in Stockton, Ala. \'The chicken wing was a delicacy on our table. We never saw a chicken breast, chicken leg, or thigh, not even a chicken back. It was during those times, I was 13-years old in 1948, the same year I came to Buffalo, that I learned that a chicken had other parts.\ Less imaginative men looked at the chicken wing and saw a crooked , Dear Abby DEAR ABBY: My husband has five children from a previous mar- rlage. Some of them are married with children of their own, and some live with their mother. I am responsible for buying, wrap- ping and sending all the gifts for their birthdays, Christmas, etc. (He pays for them, and he is not cheap.) The problem: I am filled to the gills with his ungrateful children, who never bother calling him to say 'Thank you,\ \Kiss my foot,\ or anything else For all we know, the gifts weren't even received. I know he's hurt, but he insists on sending them presents year after year for every occasion. Should I continue to buy for my husband's children, should I tell him to do it, or should I buy them all a book on manners? TIRED OF IT DEAR TIRED: I agree, your hus- band is foolish to continue sending piece of poultry. Young saw an en- tire city smiling and wiping sauce off its greasy fingers. He remem- bers the very moment a new food was born - an occasion he would not describe as Bellissimo. The year was 1962, and Young had a store at Jefferson and High that catered to hungry teen-agers. One day he was shooting the breeze with his friend Sam Anderson, who had just come back from Washington, D.C. \'John said Sam, \you got that good barbecue sauce. You know, in Washington, D.C., people are going crazy over chicken wings.\ \From then on, I never looked back,\ says Young, while a cooker- full of wings pop and sizzle and a half-dozen sweet-potato pies cool photogenically in his current win- gery, at 998 E. Delavan Ave., right across from the Chevy plant. In fact, says Young, \Mr. Bellis: simo used to come into my place (then at Jefferson and Utica) and eat my chicken wings. He was serv-. ing a lot of spaghetti and stuff - Italian food - but he liked sweet potatoes and greens, what we call 'soul food.\ All food is soul food, of course, but we're talking about heavy food that people used to eat.\ Dominic G. Bellissimo, who now runs the Anchor Bar for his invalid mother, tells his own version of how the Buffalo chicken wing came into being. He dates the event to 1964. A group of regulars were at the bar late one Friday night, and Bellis- simo asked Teressa to make some- thing special for them to have at midnight when Roman Catholics could once again eat meat. © Bellissimo doesn't seem unduly disturbed by Young's contention that he is the real poultry pioneer. Allows Bellissimo, who says he's never met Young and that his fa- ther \'never left the Anchor Bar\; \I have no patent on wings. I'm do- a 0 « ay 548 ”5,155 \ 12:3 ”is“; pes 6 Trillin retold both Bellissimo ver- sions of the wing legend, with no mention of the Me-and-Sam-Ander: wings weekly, most with mombo - son Revisionist version. Put what really \'set firecrackers off\\ for Young was the article's suggestion that Trillin simply ran into Young, instead of arranging a meeting with the local restaurateur. Says Young: \I think he had al- ready_made up his mind how he was going to write it. He just assumed I wasn't gonna holler.\ So far, Young, who is as soft-spoken as he is adamant, has only been able to protest to Trillin's secretary. \He's a big man in that New Yorker,\ says Young of Trillin. So . big he's been \in conference\ whe- never Young has called. Young doesn't deny that the Bel- lissimos contributed to the evolution a sugar cane field. At his present location, Young sells 2,300 pounds of sauce. \I bet I don't get three calls a week for blue cheese and celery,\ he adds. Discouraged by the looting of East Side businesses in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder, Young left Buffalo for lincis in 1970. He returned last year, deter- mined to set the record straight on who first transformed the chicken's humble appendage into an edible 'symbol of Buffalo's greatness. \Go out into the community and ask people, 'Who invented the Buf- falo chicken wing?' and you'll hear Poultry pioneer John Young invested $2,000 in original painting for his East Side wingery. the names 'John Young' and 'Wings and Things,'\ he says. His fame once spread all the way to Vietnam, where homesick GIs included a «large order of wings with mombo sauce among the things they missed about Buffalo, he adds proudly. Young retains an altorney to write stern letters to those misin- formed on the birth of the wing. And, for $2,000, he commissioned a huge painting of \Buffalo N.Y., the Chicken Wing Capital of the World,\ which fills much of one wall of his restaurant. In the painting, the figure of John Young, \the king of wings\ in gold crown and ermine-trimmed red robe, emerges from the clouds counier-expazss above the Queen City in a shower of sparks, scaring the pinfeathers off a flamboyant rooster. Now that the Buffalo chicken wing trembles on the brink of na- tional acceptance (twice the gift to the nation that Millard Fillmore was), Young wants his due. When oil men in Oklahoma City and dudes in Denver are making post-wing small talk, musing over tables lit- tered with skinny little chicken bones and paper napkin snowballs, Young wants the talk to turn to him, pioneering first son of a riverboat cook, not to someone who grew up eating tortellini and red sauce. \I want to get credit for what T- did,\ the East Side Edison of the chicken wing says simply. Warr BisNey's CINDERELLA'S CHRISTMAS CRISIS ing my thing, let him do his thing. If he wants to claim he's the origina? tor, let him claim it. . . He's entitled to make a living just like I'm enti- tled to make a living.\ In spite of Young's documentation, his case was more or less dismissed in \An Attempt to Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing,\ the New Yorker piece by Calvin Trillin that brought the wing to the attention of a nation that fool ishly thought snow was the basis of the local economy (Aug. 25, 1980). gifts-to ingrates-and-L-don't-blame. you for balking. But look At it this way - you are doing it for HIM, not THEM, 0 DEAR ABBY: I am a middle aged woman engaged to be married in three months. My fiance has been a widower for 10 years. I am going to move into his house after we're married, but there is something I haven't discussed with him and it's bothering me. I do not want to sleep in the same bed that he occupied with his wife for 20 years, but I don't know how to bring the subject up, Abby. Am I being unreasonable? If you agree with me, how do 1 approach him? NO OLD MEMORIES, THANK YOU DEAR NOM: Unreasonable? No way! Come right out and tell him you want a new bedroom set. And if it would be easier to clip this co- umn and slip it into his shirt pocket - be my guest. uhvenSAL PRESS S¥NDiCa te of the Buffalo chicken wing. Con- cedes Young: \'That's the credit I give Frank for, coming up with the blue cheese and the celery. They did do that.\ © \ When you buy one of Young's ori<' ginal-style wings, you get both halves, elbow unsevered, not two drumeites. And Young's classic version is smothered in his special \mombo sauce.\ A secret blend of 24 herbs and spices, mambo sauce is the key to the success of his wings, says Young, who acquired the re- cipe In Jamaica from an old man in we NEVER GET WHAT Wick HEE-HEE! WON'T CINDERELLA BE SURPRISED When SHE FINDS ANYTHING FROM we Go THESE LETTERS aRE Gone:! SANTA CLAUS, with 'THE $0 WHY SHOULD LEeTTeRs? ThE ORpHANS? 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