a person · NCBum Dennis

Latham Wade 'Bum' Dennis (June 12, 1937 – December 9, 2022) opened Bum's Restaurant in downtown Ayden in 1963 with his wife Shirley and cooked whole hogs over wood coals there for the rest of his working life, with a table of vegetables beside the barbecue that few eastern pits keep. He was of the Dennis family that counts Skilton Dennis's 1830 wagon as the start of the trade, and a kinsman of Pete Jones of the Skylight Inn. His son Larry, at the pit since he was nine, runs the restaurant.

His mother could not settle on a name for weeks, and people said a man without a name would grow up to be a bum; she named him Latham, and Bum stuck. He was born in Pitt County on June 12, 1937, finished Ayden High School in 1956 and joined the Navy that year. In 1963 he and Shirley opened the restaurant that carries his nickname; he cut the wood for the pits, opened for breakfast at 5:30 and closed at nine every day but Sunday. The family's barbecue, he and Larry told Rien Fertel for the Southern Foodways Alliance in December 2011, runs back through six generations of Dennises to the wagon of 1830. 'People have been cooking with wood for 500,000 years,' Larry told Our State. 'We just never stopped.' Bum's own account of the trade, as he gave it to Fertel: 'In this type restaurant business, what you got to do you got to love it and it's a way of life. You get up every morning and that's what you do.' When Daniel Wallace visited for Our State in 2014 Bum had retired but came in to serve breakfast around five, silver handlebar moustache and all, and Shirley sat at her table with her friend Hilda Worthington; Larry arrived at four to burn oak and pecan down to coals and did everything but kill the pig. Bum died at his home, Raven Hall, on December 9, 2022, at eighty-five.

Dead: December 9, 2022, at home in Ayden, aged eighty-five. Larry Dennis runs Bum's Restaurant at 566 East Third Street; the Dennis family's whole hog and vegetable table continue there.