BARBECUE TRADITION SURVIVES; SHEMWELL SPURNED BOOKS FOR COOKING

CAIRO, Ill. -- It wasn't until his senior year at Southeast Missouri State University that Darrell Shemwell decided running a restaurant was to be his career.

"I went through high school and college thinking I was going to be a school teacher," said Shemwell, owner and operator of Shemwell Barbecue Downtown Restaurant, 1102 Washington. "During my senior year when I was doing my student-teaching, I decided teaching just wasn't for me."

Shemwell completed the year and was graduated with an education degree in biology.

"I really didn't want to go back to school," said Shemwell. "My mother was running the barbecue restaurant at the time and wanted me to become a part of the operation. I had been working around the barbecue restaurant since I was 12 or 13, when I started hopping curbs," he said. "Later I helped inside the restaurant taking orders. My parents founded the restaurant in the 1930s."

Shemwell and his wife, Nancy Sue, have been operating the restaurant the past 22 years.

Shemwell's barbecue is well-known over a wide area. Shemwell's father, Luther Cashman Shemwell, and two of his brothers, Hedger Shemwell and Marvin Shemwell, started the business. Over the years they have built a faithful clientele."

The clientele, like the restaurant, has been handed down to the present generation.

"We have some customers we see only once or twice a year," said Shemwell. "These are people who left the area and have returned to visit and to eat barbecue. We have other customers who visit us regularly," he said.

With two Shemwell restaurants in Cairo, there naturally is some confusion.

Howard Shemwell, who had been involved with the original Shemwell Barbecue, broke away from the family operation about a quarter-century ago and opened Howard and Cornell Barbecue at 2203 Sycamore.

"There's a lot of rivalry between the two places," said Shemwell. "But it's not a bloodthirsty type of competition."

The mid-town operation is now owned by Skip Shemwell.

"He cooks his barbecue much the same way we do," said Shemwell. "But I still have the original barbecue-sauce recipe, which was developed by my father. When Howard broke away from the operation, he added or subtracted a few ingredients from the sauce to make it different." In many cases, barbecue is noted from the sauce used.

"The Downtown restaurant has been in its location at the corner of 11th and Sycamore since the early 1940s," said Shemwell. "A lot of our business is the combination of my dad creating an early clientele with a style of barbecue people want."

"We've continued that style," said Shemwell. "Usually, if a customer will eat with us once, they will become a repeat customer."

The term barbecue, incidentally, come from the French words, "barbe" and "queue," which mean whiskers to tail.

The secret to barbecue prepared by early French hunters was in slow cooking and hickory wood. Much of today's barbecue is prepared in the same slow-cook method.

"The secret is a lot of time for preparing the barbecue," said Shemwell. "We burn oak and hickory into a coal, then throw the coals under the meat with a shovel. We have an old-fashioned barbecue pit. It's the original pit and has been here as long as the restaurant. So we're talking about 50 years of seasoning for the pit."

The Shemwells do all of the cooking on the pit. "We cook almost every day to insure that we have fresh barbecue" he said. "There are maybe only eight or 10 days throughout the year that we don't cook."

Will it continue as Shemwell's Barbecue in future years?

"We have a daughter, Kimberly Sue Davis, who helps in the operation," said Shemwell. "And our 13-year-old son, Dustin Heath Shemwell, helps some, filling up the wood carts and busing tables. I don't know whether he will develop any further interest."

The downtown restaurant is open from 8 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. daily.

"We have a good trade," said Shemwell. "But we always have room for more."

When Shemwell isn't putting in time at the restaurant, he may be found at Worthington Hunting Club near the Horseshoe Lake Wildlife Refuge, where he calls Canada geese and serves as a hunting guide. "I've been calling geese for 12 to 15 years," he said. "Although it is a source of income, I look at it as more or less vacation time. I really like getting out to the goose pits."

Some days are long for Shemwell: from 3 a.m. in the goose pits to 8:30 p.m. at the restaurant. But from honkers to hoofers (pork ones, that is), Shemwell finds satisfaction in what each day brings.