40 years before eliminating Dollar Dog Night, the Phillies had a chicken frank controversy

Ken Wochele was an engineer at Boeing’s Ridley Park plant, where areas of the facility were deemed restricted and only accessible to certain employees. The company manufactured Chinook helicopters and V-22 Ospreys, making it easy to understand why some things were off-limits.

But even the security at Boeing could not match the senior citizen who guarded the spice room at Medford Meats. It was her duty to protect the secret of how a Chester factory could turn an ordinary hot dog into a Phillies Frank.

“It was top secret,” said Wochele, who worked on the hot-dog line in the 1980s while studying at Widener.

The woman — no one else was allowed in the room — brought out the spices in brown bags and gave them to the workers on the assembly line. They added the finishing touches for the wieners that were shipped to Veterans Stadium and grocery stores.

“You couldn’t go near it,” Wochele said. “Super secret.”

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The secret worked as Medford Meats — which started in 1864 in Frankford — supplied the Phillies with hot dogs once The Vet opened in 1971. The Phillies Franks were top dogs as Medford Meats produced 300,000 a day during the baseball season. But in 1984, the hot dogs were benched when the ballpark’s concessionaire swapped Phillies Franks for chicken franks produced by Perdue.

For two seasons, vendors walked around the Vet offering only hot dogs made of chicken. The decision was rooted in cost-cutting and mostly met with jeers. Even Bob Costas clucked at the idea.

“Let me say this,” the broadcaster told the Daily News in June of 1984. “The Phillies have a great franchise but between the artificial surface and now the chicken franks, Mike Schmidt will have to hit 76 home runs just to balance the ledger. I’ll put it to you this way, anybody who would eat a chicken frank, probably would pay scalpers’ rate for USFL tickets.”

Forty years later, the Phillies have a new hot-dog dilemma. Tuesday will be the team’s second “Hatfield Phillies Franks BOGO Night.” Fans can purchase two hot dogs for $5. The promotion debuted April 2. The team scrapped “Dollar Dog Night” after 27 seasons, citing the long lines which clogged the concourses last season and rowdy fans who tossed wieners around the seating bowl as the stimulus for change. For some, the decision went over like a chicken frank.

“Last year was kind of the tipping point. People were throwing hot dogs,” said John Weber, the Phillies’ senior vice president of ticket operations and projects. “We still want to provide an opportunity for a discounted concession item. Two hot dogs for $5 and still come out to the game.”

“The fan experience was just not what we want it to be,” he added. “Our goal as an organization is to always provide a first-class fan experience to all of our fans. We didn’t meet those goals for those three Dollar Dog days, for sure. We set out to come up with a solution and hopefully this works for everyone.”

» READ MORE: The Phillies got rid of Dollar Dog Nights. Most fans were distraught — but not everyone thinks it’s a bad idea.

The Phillies moved into the Vet in 1971, giving Medford president Bernie Ryan the idea to partner with the team. The Los Angeles Dodgers had Dodger Dogs and the Red Sox had Fenway Franks. The Phils needed their own dog and “Phillies Franks” were born.

“If you love the Phillies, you’ll love Phillies Franks,” Medford’s slogan said.

Medford started in 1864 when Charles B. Medford, a hog slaughterer, opened a meatpacking company in Frankford. The company moved to Chester in the 1930s and operated as a slaughterhouse until 1969. The Chester plant produced everything from hot sausage and bologna to ham and hot dogs. The Phillies Franks were a No. 1 seller.

“It was a great sales method of selling more frankfurters,” said William L. Medford, the founder’s great-grandson and final company president.

When Medford sold to Hatfield in 1994, the Chester plant employed 147 people and had annual sales of $35 million. Phillies Franks — which are now made by Hatfield — were big business.

“It was a big deal,” Medford said. “It gave us a lot of extra sales and also some recognition.”

The Phillies Franks sold at the Vet were smaller than the ones sold at grocery stores. The stadium’s concessionaire — Nilon Bros. Inc. — requested Medford to produce 12 hot dogs per pound for the stadium instead of the 10 hot dogs per pound Medford sold elsewhere.

The smaller dogs gave Nilon — which gave the city 42% of their gross sales — more chance to profit; it also prevented vendors from bringing in their own beef. Medford made them special for Nilon and shipped them to the stadium in nets.

“My dad would tell me that Medford was OK with people thinking the hot dogs at the stadium were Ballpark Franks,” said Wochele, whose father, Ken, was Medford’s executive vice president of sales. “Because what they would do is freeze these stockings when they didn’t sell them and then they’d cook them again and freeze them again. There would be complaints about them turning different colors or tasting funny.”

The Phillies won the pennant in 1983 but finished the following season in fourth place. Maybe it was the team’s aging roster or maybe it was the fowl in the stands. Nilon Bros. told Medford before the season that Phillies Franks were out, as chicken dogs were the only way the company could offer fans a $1 dog.

The Daily News labeled the chicken dogs as “cardboard in a blanket.” The Nilon Bros. said the chicken dogs were well received earlier that year during the USFL’s Philadelphia Stars games, but admitted that one Phillies fan said “chicken violated the tradition of baseball.”

“In the sixth inning an exasperated woman at a concession stand, barked at a customer,” Clark DeLeon wrote in his Inquirer column from 1984′s home opener. “If I hear ‘Where’s the beef?’ one more time, I’m going to put this hot dog somewhere it will hurt.”

» READ MORE: In memory of Dollar Dog Night, a beloved tradition that met a sudden end at 27

The Phillies played two seasons without hot dogs but Medford continued to produce Phillies Franks for grocery stores. Wochele’s father told The Inquirer in the spring of 1984 that customers knew the difference and Medford would “promote the living hell” out of Phillies Franks. It was a frankfurter feud.

“It tasted a little chickeny but it was the texture that I always remembered,” said Wochele, when asked to describe a chicken frank. “It had like a rubbery texture. It would kind of snap when you bit it.”

A new concessionaire arrived in 1986 and brought back the dogs. Phillies Franks became a part of the team’s fabric. Fans sat in the 700 Level in the 1980s and 1990s for free, thanks to vouchers they found inside the hot dogs bought at grocery stores. Dollar Dog Night was introduced in 1997 as a way to drum up sales at Veterans Stadium for a team that lost 94 games. The team’s signature hot dog became a popular promotion and the Phanatic started to shoot them into the crowd with his own hydraulic hotdog cannon.

The dogs aren’t always perfect — “Let’s be honest,” DeLeon wrote in 1986. “The hot dogs at the Vet were terrible.” — but they aren’t made of chicken. And that is part of the secret.