HULETT — Brandi Kelly still remembers her first Ham and Jam, a raucous northeast Wyoming party 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 like the original Ham and Jam girls,” Kelly told Cowboy State Daily. “And we would set up to serve the free hog and stuff like that.”
Today, Ham and Jam brings as many 25,000 to 30,000 people to the tiny town of Hulett on any a given year.
In the beginning, it was a much smaller affair than it is today, with a very simple goal — get some of the rally-goers riding around Devils Tower to stop for a little while and enjoy the town.
Free pork and free music worked the magic that made the Ham and Jam. Before too long, there were thousands of rallygoers dropping in 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’s so many famous people who used to come through, and it was really cool.”
It’s been a while since she’s met anyone famous at the Ham and Jam, Kelly said, though they still do roll through now and again.
Police Chief Bill Motley, for example, told Cowboy State Daily he’s met Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and vice-presidential hopeful, as well as Ultimate Fighting Champion President Dana White, during the Ham and Jam.
Kelly still has Goldberg’s autograph and remembers that he was a “way big” guy at the time.
“I mean, I’m 5-5, but he’s huge!” Kelly said.
Wrestling wasn’t something Kelly watched as a kid, but her godfather’s wife was a huge fan. So, she got all the WWF (now branded WWE) autographs she could get to send back to her in Michigan.
“We used to get filmed a lot for the news and stuff like that, too,” Kelly added. “They’d come down with their news cameras and Bikers Weekly would come down and take pictures of us and all that when we were kids.”
Sometimes It was ‘Gross’
It’s not always glamorous being a Ham and Jam girl.
For one thing, their day started very early in the morning. The Ham and Jam girls had lots of cans of pork and beans to open, and other things to prepare.
The girls were also on cleanup patrol, both before and after the event.
“Like, it is really gross now to think about because I’m older,” Kelly said. “But after the whole thing would happen, they had us come in about 4, 5 a.m. in the morning, when we were kids, to pick up all the cigarette butts out of the back beer garden and clean up everything.”
Everything included condoms that had been left in the beer garden.
Some of those may not have been used, Kelly said, since 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’s older, she’s awfully glad she was wearing gloves at the time.
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 done by a guy named Chester. (Courtesy Photo) 
An old Ham and Jam T-shirt design from decades ago done by a guy named Chester. (Courtesy Photo) 
An old Ham and Jam T-shirt design from decades ago done by a guy named Chester. (Courtesy Photo)
Scantily Clad Women
The Ham and Jam of old was quite a bit more raucous when Kelly was a Ham and Jam girl.
She recalls a friend named Chester making up shirts that proclaimed Ham and Jam “No Panties Wednesday.”
“He’s the one who actually came up with that,” she said. “And then some guy named Spider stole his ideas.”
Chester, she added, made Ham and Jam Girls T-shirts for everyone who was serving the pork.
“There were definitely more women at that time wearing more revealing clothes,” Kelly added. “It might seem like they are now, too, if you didn’t know how it was before. But there really were a lot more women, like, walking around topless.”
When she became a little older, Kelly switched from serving pork to working at some of the vendor tents selling food, jewelry, clothes or lemonade. Then she spent 16 years bartending, cooking and waitressing at the Ponderosa Cafe in Hulett.
The chef there is known as the Crabby Chef, but Kelly, when she worked there, was the Crabby Chefette.
Make New Friends, Keep The Old
More recently, Kelly has been helping with the Sundance Burnout, about 40 miles northwest of Hulett on Highway 24 past Devils Tower. She also manages the Stateline Ramblers Band, which played during the burnout.
But it was during her time as a bartender at the Ponderosa that she had a Ham and Jam epiphany, one that deepened her appreciation of the event.
She was waiting on a large group of people, all of them bikers, and they were all talking about the places they’d been, and the things they’d done while they were in the Marine Corps.
It all started to sound very familiar to Kelly.
“I’m like, ‘My dad was a Marine, and he’s probably about your guys’ age,’” Kelly recalled telling them. “And come to find out this whole entire table of guys served with my dad!”
It was about 11 p.m. that night, but Kelly called up her father anyway to tell him she was waiting on a group of guys who served in the Marines with him.
“He was like, ‘Nuh-uh, no way,’” Kelly said. “But he comes running up here and he 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 meet in one tiny town in Wyoming. They remind us that the world isn’t so very large after all, and that our differences aren’t necessarily so very large either. New friendships are always around the next corner, waiting for just a simple smile or some polite conversation to start the balls rolling.
“I’ve met so many really cool people over the years,” Kelly said. “Just being able to be out there, you know, working and talking with everybody. You hear so many great stories.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
