HULETT – Brandi Kelly still remembers her first Ham and Jam, a wild party in northeast Wyoming during the week of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
She was 7 years old and had just moved to Hulett from Michigan about a month before Sturgis.
“My mom and my sisters were all kind of the original Ham and Jam girls,” Kelly told Cowboy State Daily. “And we would get ready to serve the free pork and stuff like that.”
Today, Ham and Jam brings 25,000 to 30,000 people to the small town of Hulett each year.
In the beginning, the event was much smaller than it is today and had a very simple goal: to get some of the rally participants driving around Devils Tower to stop for a moment and enjoy the city.
Free pork and free music were the magic that made the Ham and Jam what it was. It wasn’t long before thousands of rally-goers were stopping by and Kelly was meeting all kinds of cool, famous people.
“Michael J. Fox has been there before, and Pamela Anderson,” she said. “Hulk Hogan and his family used to be there, and Sting, The Giant, Goldberg and all the WWF wrestlers and stuff. I met John Elway – there are so many famous people who used to be here, and it was really cool.”
It’s been a while since she met a famous person at Ham and Jam, Kelly said, but they still stop by from time to time.
Police Chief Bill Motley, for example, told the Cowboy State Daily that during the Ham and Jam he met Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate, and Ultimate Fighting Champion President Dana White.
Kelly still has Goldberg’s autograph and remembers him being a “pretty big” guy back then.
“I mean, I’m 5’5”, but he’s huge!” Kelly said.
Wrestling wasn’t a thing for Kelly as a child, but her godfather’s wife was a huge fan, so she got all the WWF (now WWE) autographs she could get to send to Michigan.
“We also got filmed a lot for the news and stuff like that,” Kelly added. “They would come with their news cameras and Bikers Weekly would come by and take pictures of us and stuff when we were kids.”
Sometimes it was disgusting
Being a ham-and-jam girl isn’t always glamorous.
For one thing, their day started very early in the morning. The Ham and Jam girls had to open lots of cans of pork and beans and prepare other things.
The girls were also on cleanup patrol before and after the event.
“I’m older now and I find it really disgusting to think about it,” Kelly said. “But after the whole thing happened, when we were kids, they had us come in at 4 or 5 in the morning to pick up all the cigarette butts from the back beer garden and clean everything up.”
Everything including condoms left lying in the beer garden.
Some of them may not have been used, Kelly said, because they were also available at a nearby clinic and kept outside. And at 7, Kelly didn’t necessarily know what the condoms were for.
Now that she is older, she is incredibly glad that she wore gloves back then.
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A sea of bikes in Hulett for Ham and Jam 2024. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) -
An old Ham and Jam t-shirt design from decades ago, designed by a guy named Chester. (Photo courtesy) -
An old Ham and Jam t-shirt design from decades ago, designed by a guy named Chester. (Photo courtesy) -
An old Ham and Jam t-shirt design from decades ago, designed by a guy named Chester. (Photo courtesy)
Scantily clad women
The old Ham and Jam was a lot louder when Kelly was a Ham and Jam girl.
She remembers a friend named Chester who made T-shirts with the slogan “No Panties Wednesday” by Ham and Jam.
“He was the one who actually came up with it,” she said. “And then a guy named Spider stole his ideas.”
Chester, she added, made Ham and Jam Girls T-shirts for everyone who served the pork.
“There were definitely more women wearing more revealing clothing back then,” Kelly added. “If you don’t know what it was like back then, you might think it’s the same today. But there were actually a lot more women walking around topless.”
As she got a little older, Kelly moved on from serving pork to working at a few vendor stands selling food, jewelry, clothing, or soda. Then she worked as a bartender, cook, and waitress at the Ponderosa Cafe in Hulett for 16 years.
The head chef there is known as the “Crabby Chef,” but Kelly was the “Crabby Chefette” when she worked there.
Find new friends, keep old ones
More recently, Kelly has helped with the Sundance Burnout, about 40 miles northwest of Hulett on Highway 24 behind Devils Tower. She also leads the Stateline Ramblers Band, which played during the burnout.
But during her time as a bartender at the Ponderosa, she had a revelation about ham and jam that deepened her appreciation for the event.
She was waiting for a large group of people, all bikers, and they were all talking about the places they had been and the things they had done while in the Marine Corps.
For Kelly, everything seemed very familiar.
“I thought to myself, ‘My dad was a Marine and is probably about the same age as your guys,'” Kelly told them. “And then it turned out that this whole table full of guys had served with my dad!”
It was about 11 p.m. that night, but Kelly called her father anyway to tell him she was waiting for a group of men who served with him in the Marines.
“He was like, ‘No, no way,'” Kelly said. “But then he came running and knew every single one of them. He hadn’t seen them since he was in the Marine Corps.”
And that’s the real magic of Ham and Jam, Kelly said.
It’s all the people who come together in a tiny town in Wyoming who remind us that the world isn’t that big after all, and that our differences don’t have to be that big either. New friendships are always just around the corner, waiting for a simple smile or polite conversation to get the ball rolling.
“I’ve met so many really cool people over the years,” Kelly said. “Just being able to be out there, you know, working with everybody and talking. You hear so many great stories.”
Jean-Marie can be reached at [email protected].
