Manchester's Chicken Broil: 10,000 dinners off four 100-foot pits

On the third Saturday of July, the small town of Manchester fills the air over Alumni Field with charcoal smoke and the smell of buttered chicken. The Manchester Chicken Broil has run since 1954, and locals will tell you it is the biggest single-day chicken broil in the Midwest. They are probably right.

The numbers are the fun part. Around 500 volunteers tend four broiling pits, each one a hundred feet long, lined end to end and heaped with charcoal. Over a four-hour stretch they cook and hand out something like 10,000 chicken dinners — halves of chicken turned slowly over the coals and basted with butter just before they come off the grate. For a town this size, that is most of the population fed twice over, plus everybody who drives in from the surrounding farm country.

The recipe has a Michigan State pedigree. Back in the early 1950s a poultry man at what was then Michigan State College, Howard Zindell, worked out a method for slow-grilling chicken halves over charcoal, and a couple of his colleagues helped carry the idea to Manchester. The local Exchange Club — businessmen looking for a way to raise money for the town — took it and ran. That first broil in 1954 served about 2,000 meals and cleared a little over a thousand dollars.

It never stopped. Decade after decade the broil poured its profits back into Manchester — parks, scholarships, the fire department, the library — and the running total has long since passed a million dollars. The chicken is the draw, but the money is the point: a whole town’s worth of volunteers, one long July afternoon, turning butter and charcoal into a community fund. Come hungry, and don’t wear anything you mind smelling like smoke for the rest of the day.