Arthur Pinkard

Arthur Pinkard was a Kansas City barbecue pitmaster who is the human link between Henry Perry — the documented “Father of Kansas City Barbecue” — and Gates Bar-B-Q. An apprentice trained in Perry’s method, Pinkard became pitmaster at Ol’ Kentuck Bar-B-Q at 19th and Vine, and when George and Arzelia Gates bought that business in 1946 he stayed on as their first cook, carrying the Perry technique directly into the Gates lineage. His life is poorly documented; much of what is recorded survives through oral history and the recollections of the Gates family.

Biography

Early life

Arthur Pinkard is generally said to have been born in Alabama around 1880, though no primary documentation (birth record, census entry, or vital record) is cited in the secondary sources that mention him, and the date should be treated as an estimate.¹² Nothing is recorded in the accessible literature about his parents, upbringing, education, or early occupations in the South. As with Henry Perry himself, the thinness of the record reflects the social position of an African American working man in the late-19th- and early-20th-century United States, whose life was rarely documented by the institutions that preserved records of more prominent figures.

Pinkard is reported to have arrived in Kansas City by about 1917, where he worked a series of jobs before entering the barbecue trade.¹ The specifics of those early KC years are not documented.

The Henry Perry connection

The single most important fact recorded about Pinkard is that he learned barbecue from Henry Perry. Perry — who had originated Kansas City barbecue from a downtown stand around 1908 and built a substantial pit operation in the 18th and Vine district — trained a small number of apprentices in his slow-smoking method. Pinkard was among them, alongside the better-remembered Charlie Bryant, whose family line produced Arthur Bryant’s.²³

Through this apprenticeship Pinkard absorbed the Perry technique — slowly smoked meats cooked over a long, low fire — that he would later transmit to the Gates family. The exact years Pinkard worked for or with Perry, and whether he was employed at Perry’s own pit or trained more informally, are not clearly established in the record.

Ol’ Kentuck Bar-B-Q and the Gates lineage (1946)

By the 1940s Pinkard was the pitmaster (or principal cook) at Ol’ Kentuck Bar-B-Q, a barbecue restaurant that also held a liquor license. Sources place Ol’ Kentuck at 19th and Vine, in the heart of the jazz district; some accounts add an earlier or associated location at 24th and Forest, though the location history is not cleanly documented.¹⁴

In 1946, George W. and Arzelia Gates (george-and-arzelia-gates) bought Ol’ Kentuck. According to Ollie Gates — George and Arzelia’s son, who built the modern chain — the family acquired the business from a prior owner named Johnny Thomas, and Pinkard simply came with it: “When Dad bought the restaurant from a guy by the name of Johnny Thomas, [Pinkard] was a part of the fixtures that came with the restaurant.”⁴ (Note that the “Johnny Thomas” seller named by Ollie Gates is not reconciled in the sources with other accounts of Ol’ Kentuck’s ownership; the prior-ownership chain is unresolved.)

Pinkard stayed on as the Gates family’s first pitmaster and taught George Gates — and, by Ollie Gates’s account, the Gates family generally — the slow-cooking process he had learned in the Perry tradition. George Gates then developed the family’s own sauce.¹⁴⁵ This makes Pinkard the direct conduit of Perry’s method into Gates Bar-B-Q: the business that began as Ol’ Kentuck, was later styled “Gates’ Ol’ Kentuck,” and grew into the multi-location Gates Bar-B-Q (Gates & Sons) still operating across the metro.

Later years and death

Pinkard is reported to have retired not long after the Gates takeover, relocated to St. Louis, and died there in 1963.¹ None of these later-life details — the retirement date, the move, or the death — is tied to a primary record in the accessible sources, and all should be treated as unverified. No burial place, surviving family, or obituary has been located for this entry.

Place in the KC barbecue lineage

Kansas City barbecue’s documented lineage radiates outward from Henry Perry through the apprentices he trained. Two threads are conventionally drawn:

• Perry → Charlie Bryant → Arthur Bryant — the line that produced Arthur Bryant’s.
• Perry → Arthur Pinkard → the Gates family — the line that produced Gates Bar-B-Q.

Pinkard is therefore the named hinge of the Gates branch. Without him, the most direct documented claim connecting Gates to Perry would not exist; he is the person through whom the technique physically passed from one operation to the other in 1946.

Cultural legacy

Pinkard is a recurring touchstone in accounts of KC barbecue heritage, almost always cited in his transmitting role rather than for biographical detail. A photograph of Pinkard reportedly hangs in Gates establishments, presented as part of the chain’s origin story and its claim to the Perry lineage.¹ (The number of locations displaying the photo, and its provenance, are not documented here.)

Within the KS.City project, Pinkard is referenced in the Heritage Recognition Year-1 research as a foundational figure in the Perry lineage that the recognition program honors. He is not himself a currently-operating business and carries no Registry tier.

Source materials

The documentary record on Pinkard is thin and almost entirely secondary. The fullest treatment in print is generally attributed to Doug Worgul’s The Grand Barbecue: A Celebration of the History, Places, Personalities and Techniques of Kansas City Barbecue (Kansas City Star Books, 2001), the standard history of the subject.⁶ Worgul’s book has not been consulted directly for this entry and should be treated as the priority primary-literature source for any future verification. Institutional collections likely to hold further material include the Kansas City Public Library / Missouri Valley Special Collections and the Black Archives of Mid-America.

See also

• henry-perry
• gates-bar-b-q
• george-and-arzelia-gates
• charlie-bryant
• arthur-bryants-barbeque
• 18th-and-vine
• heritage-recognition-y1-research

Sources

Footnotes

1. Kansas City Public Library — “KC Black History: Who were the pioneers who made here the ‘BBQ capital of the world’?” Published Feb. 2022. https://kclibrary.org/news/2022-02/kc-black-history-who-were-pioneers-who-made-here-%E2%80%98bbq-capital-world%E2%80%99 — source for Pinkard’s c.1880 Alabama birth, c.1917 KC arrival, Perry apprenticeship, Ol’ Kentuck pitmaster role, retirement, move to St. Louis, 1963 death, and the photograph in Gates locations. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. KCUR (NPR Kansas City) — “Meet Henry Perry, the Black entrepreneur who created Kansas City barbecue in the early 1900s.” Published 2021-02-13. https://www.kcur.org/arts-life/2021-02-13/kansas-city-barbecue-bbq-henry-perry-gates-arthur-bryants-history — “Arthur Pinkard became the first cook for the Gates family”; establishes Perry’s apprentice network. ↩ ↩²

3. KCUR — “Kansas City Barbecue Legends Ollie Gates And Arthur Bryant Inducted Into Hall Of Fame.” Published 2021-09-18. https://www.kcur.org/arts-life/2021-09-18/kansas-city-barbecue-legends-ollie-gates-and-arthur-bryant-inducted-into-hall-of-fame ↩

4. Feast Magazine — “The Kings of Kansas City Barbecue.” https://www.feastmagazine.com/features/kansas-city/article_df738fb4-8761-11e7-ac98-8323da185876.html — Ollie Gates quote (“part of the fixtures that came with the restaurant”; seller “Johnny Thomas”); 1946 purchase; liquor-license motive; Pinkard taught the Gateses Perry’s method. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Northeast News — “Remember This? Gates Ol’ Kentuck Barbecue.” https://northeastnews.net/pages/remember-this-gates-ol-kentuck-barbecue/ — Ol’ Kentuck at 19th and Vine; George W. Gates acquired it in 1946; “Pinkard taught Gates the slow cooking process and Gates created his own sauce recipe”; 1951 fire; 1957 reopening at 1221 Brooklyn. ↩

6. Doug Worgul, The Grand Barbecue: A Celebration of the History, Places, Personalities and Techniques of Kansas City Barbecue (Kansas City: Kansas City Star Books, 2001). Standard reference history; cited secondhand here, not consulted directly. ↩