Let's All Do The BBQ: A Look Back At NMC's Discontinued Summer Kickoff Tradition

Once upon a time, it was Traverse City’s de-facto summer kickoff, a beloved community event that drew thousands of people every year for more than half a century. As of May 19, though, it’s been five years since the last in-person incarnation of the Northwestern Michigan College Barbecue. In 2020, NMC and the Oleson Foundation, longtime partners in the annual spring fundraiser, announced that they would be ending the tradition after 65 years and nearly $2 million raised. As the sun rises on another summer in Traverse City, The Ticker looks back at the history – and eventual conclusion – of this iconic northern Michigan event.

Telling the story of the NMC BBQ requires winding back the clock to 1956, when a pair of local grocers decided to host a spring community picnic fundraiser. The grocers, Gerald and Francis Oleson, had founded Oleson’s Food Stores 30 years earlier and were now looking for a way to give back to the area’s community college. Working with NMC and its “Wigwam Club” – the name, at the time, of the college’s alumni group – the Olesons pulled off a massive event that marshalled the collaborative forces of the entire community.

In his 1973 book, Northwestern Michigan College: The First Twenty Years, 1951–1971, President Emeritus Preston N. Tanis wrote about how “business places, units of government, and many individuals and organizations cooperated” to bring that first NMC Barbecue to life. The Olesons donated all the food. Munson Hospital opened up its kitchen facilities to help prepare “large quantities of beef.” The Traverse City parks department brought the picnic tables. A group of female students at NMC offered a baby-sitting service. Finally, an army of volunteers handled the actual food prep and food service.

All the collaboration paid off: 68 years ago today, on Sunday, May 27, 1956, the first NMC Barbecue went off without a hitch. Despite blustery, overcast conditions, “a total of 4,821 people were served and $5,150 raised for the purchase of equipment for a new physics laboratory.” In fact, according to Tanis, the barbecue was such a hit that newspapers throughout the state picked up the story, reporting the event to be “the largest and most successful fundraising project ever launched in behalf of a Michigan college.”

“So encouraged and enthusiastic were members of the Wigwam Club that plans were made immediately to stage the event another year,” Tanis wrote.

Over the next six and a half decades, the NMC Barbecue became a community staple. Held every May on the Sunday before Memorial Day, the event reliably engaged students, faculty, staff, donors, volunteers, and community members by inviting them to campus to enjoy what was described in a later NMC history book as “the biggest-known buffalo burger grill-fest anywhere.”

At its peak, the barbecue was many things: a fundraiser, a massive meal, an end-of-school and start-of-summer celebration, and a community gathering that drew roughly a third of the local population. In 1971, the barbecue’s 15th year, it amassed more than 14,000 guests and generated $15,000 in proceeds. According to Tanis’s book, for the 1971 barbecue alone, the Olesons “furnished 15,000 steakettes, 15,000 buns, 100 bushels of potatoes for the potato salad, 2 tons of baked beans, 9,000 cartons of milk, 120 pounds of coffee, 13,000 servings of ice cream, and large quantities of relishes, vegetables and coleslaw.”

The proceeds from the NMC Barbecue helped build the college from a fledgling institution into what it is today. Funds from the event went into launching both the Great Lakes Maritime Academy and NMC’s nursing program, paid for the college’s first-ever computer, furnished and equipped most of the buildings and departments on campus, and more. Key NMC facilities, from the Okerstrom Fine Arts Building to the Joseph H. Rogers Observatory, may never have come to be without fundraising support from the barbecue.

Though it remained a popular part of NMC’s annual calendar for decades, the barbecue declined over the years, both in terms of fundraising importance and community attendance. In Northwestern Michigan College: The Second Twenty Years, 1971–1991 – published in 1994 – one-time NMC faculty member Al Shumsky wrote that, while the barbecue “was still going strong in 1991,” proceeds from the event “were no longer so significant compared to the whole college budget.” As for ticket sales, in 2019, fewer than 4,000 people attended the barbecue – a healthy number, but a far cry from its peak.

That 2019 event ended up being the NMC Barbecue’s last hurrah. In 2020, COVID-19 forced a virtual pivot, and in July of that same year, NMC and the Oleson Foundation announced the barbecue would not return. In an all-campus email sharing the news, Diana Fairbanks – the college’s associate vice president of public relations, marketing, and communications – cited declining ticket sales and attendance among the reasons for the decision. Despite the cancellation, the Oleson Foundation pledged to continue its support of the college, while NMC vowed “to host a celebration for volunteers, supporters, and community members when it is safe to do so in the future.”

Four years later, with large in-person gatherings a possibility once more, would NMC ever consider reviving the barbecue, or launching a similarly community-centric event to take its place?

According to Communications Director Cari Noga, the NMC Barbecue is truly gone for good, but that doesn’t mean the spirit of the celebration has dissipated. These days, NMC still hopes to attract the public to campus, but with a more student-centered approach.

“One of the hard parts about the barbecue was that it was held after classes had ended, which meant most of the students were gone,” Noga says. “So, having more events and experiences on campus when students are around to participate, that’s more consistent with the way we're teaching these days, given our focus on experiential learning.”

In particular, Noga points to events like Taste of Success, a springtime event hosted by the Great Lakes Culinary Institute, or to the concerts and music festivals put on by the college’s Audio Tech program, as examples of where NMC has chosen to put its events focus instead.

“I like to think that some of the character of the barbecue has transferred over to these other events that are happening on our campus,” she says.