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.

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.

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, 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.

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

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.”

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