I was so enamored with the sop-laden pork that I never stopped drooling long enough to ask if ‘Ezell' was his first name or his last.

Even back in the fifties, Neely's Barbecue was the standout place to eat in East Texas. If a stranger asked where to get good barbecue, he would be pointed in Neely's direction. If the stranger mentioned barbecue in a crowd, the crowd pointed in unison.

Neely's perfected a sandwich called the Brown Pig, which was an upscale Sloppy Joe with a twenty-one-gun salute. It was hickory-smoked chipped pork on a shredded lettuce bed, welded together with a sauce that Mr Neely invented himself. It was heralded as the world's greatest sauce, said to have survived General Sherman and the burning of Atlanta. The popular story was that old man Neely only made his sauce after midnight. The legend went on to say that he waited until all the help was gone for the night, covered his windows, and mixed the concoction underneath a bed sheet with only the glow of a miner's lamp for light. The only written record of his recipe was said to have been encrypted, using codes from a 300-BC Slavic alphabet. Then Neely sealed it in a Prince Albert Tobacco can and hid it in the hollow stump of a horseapple tree someplace along Stagecoach Road. Neely then chewed and swallowed the only map to the spot.