When Van Sykes was all of 12 years old, his father would drop him off at their family-run barbecue joint for an all-night vigil working the pit.
And that's how the boy grew up to became a barbecue man.
"I know a lot of people would think, 'Good Lord, a 12-year-old in a building all night with a fire?'" the soon-to-be-62-year-old Sykes remembers. "But there again, you've got to go back to that time. It was not uncommon to expect your children to carry some of the load somewhere. And I needed to learn to do it.
"And let me tell you," Sykes adds, "that's when you learn to barbecue. When it's 3:30, 4:00, 4:30 in the morning and you've been staring into that (pit) and you smell completely like it and you've got this nice, greasy sheen to you, and you've got to keep turning that meat, you've got to keep stoking that fire, and you're trying not to fall asleep. I mean, at 12 years old, I could down a pot of coffee.
"But that's when you learn to become a barbecue man."
Sykes has kept the fires burning at Bob Sykes Bar-B-Q ever since.
This year, the venerable Bessemer barbecue institution is celebrating its 60th year in business, a milestone that goes back to when Van's parents, Bob and Maxine Sykes, opened their first restaurant, a hamburger and milkshake shop called the Ice Spot, in Birmingham's Central Park neighborhood in 1957. About that same time, Bob Sykes built his first barbecue pit.
The Sykes family eventually decided to go whole hog into the barbecue business, and relocated to Bessemer, where Bob Sykes Bar-B-Q settled into its current location at 1724 Ninth Ave. North in 1977.
The 60th anniversary celebration is going on throughout the year with promotions and specials, but it will be front and center this Saturday, May 20, at the eighth annual Bob Sykes BBQ & Blues Festival in DeBardeleben Park in downtown Bessemer.
In addition to barbecue sandwiches and ribs, the festival features local, regional and national blues artists, as well as children's activities. (Go here for a lineup, ticket information and more details.)
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"I can't believe these milestones are coming the way they are," Van Sykes says. "It went so fast from 50 (years) to 60. I still have shirts that say '50th anniversary.' That's how the decades go, I guess.
"I'm just astounded every day that we've been here selling the same thing, the same way, for all these years and it still continues to thrive. So that's what I'm celebrating."
The younger Sykes' father died in 1992, and his mother passed away in 2015, but Van and his nephew Jason Jewell have carried on a family tradition.
"Daddy told me when I was a little boy that you have to work hard for good barbecue," he says. "And I really believe that's true. I'm not disparaging anybody. I love everybody's barbecue. I'm just simply making a comparison that we've resisted the temptation to do anything different than what Daddy taught me to do when I was 10 or 12 years old.
"I feel like I'm still representing that old superhighway barbecue establishment or era or whatever you want to call it, where you would get on that (Bessemer) superhighway and you would start at Old Plantation and eventually you would find your way all of the way down to Bessemer and Bob Sykes. You would pass the Hickory Hut, you would pass Dickey Plough's, you are going to pass Monroe's, Russell's, and Lochamy's and Crumley's."
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All those places have long since closed or been sold, but Bob Sykes Bar-B-Que has kept that tradition of slow-cooked, hickory-smoked "real pit" barbecue alive.
"The more I look at what we do, my observation is the way we are cooking this now has become more of a craftsman, sort of artisan kind of barbecue," Van Sykes says. "It's just a very old-school product."
What: Bob Sykes BBQ & Blues Festival, featuring the Chris Simmons Band, Albert White MusicMaker Revue, Eight O'Five Jive, Markey Blue, the Norman Jackson Band and Joe Louis Walker.
When: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday, May 20
Where: DeBardeleben Park, 1623 Second Ave. North, Bessemer
Website: bobskykesblues.com.