I thought this question would be easy to find, but I’ve searched Google, Wikipedia, other Asking sites, and I cannot find it anywhere! I think this means tailgate party, because tailgating cars would be a little hard to pinpoint where it starts. But if anyone could find it, that would be great. Thanks in advance.
Depends on how flexible you want to be about “tailgating”. There were probably guys getting drunk and cooking the B.C. version of Ballpark Franks before the big David v. Goliath death match.
Very easy to find newspaper stories about this in the late 1950’s. Harder to find earlier.