For more than two decades, Rob Walker has spent one Saturday each August standing over the smoky cooking pits at the Cutchogue Fire Department’s annual chicken barbecue, learning the small details that turn thousands of chickens into one of the North Fork’s most enduring summer traditions.

Now his son is beside him. And on Saturday, the next Walker in line turned up for work, too. Ryan Walker’s young son James spent part of the morning shucking corn ahead of the 69th annual barbecue, his first small contribution to an event that has become a family tradition.

“He’s almost three years old,” Ryan Walker said. “Next year he’ll be here again.”

The Walkers connection to the Cutchogue Fire Department stretches back another generation. Rob’s father was a Cutchogue firefighter, although his assignment at the barbecue was considerably less demanding than the cooking pits.

“I did ask him one time, you know, what his job was in this whole picture,” Rob recalled on Saturday. “He said he was on the beer tent. I was like, ‘Dad, that’s the easiest job.’”

Rob himself began volunteering at the barbecue more than 20 years ago after another firefighter told him he didn’t have to be a member of the department to pitch in. His first assignment was garbage duty. Eventually, he was invited into the pits.

The experience hooked him. Over the years, Rob learned that cooking the barbecue’s chickens is about understanding heat, wind, fire and patience.

“We cook very slowly,” he said. “It usually takes about two and a half hours.”

Twenty-five chickens are placed on each rack. The cooks continually adjust the amount of charcoal beneath them, accounting for wind and watching carefully for flare-ups that can burn the meat.

The goal, Rob said, is a deep, even brown — “like when you toast the marshmallow” — rather than blackened or charred chicken.

Rob remembers one barbecue when a downpour threatened the fires beneath the pits. Veteran volunteers quickly pulled out enormous rolls of aluminum foil and stretched them across the cooking area, creating a makeshift roof that kept the rain from extinguishing the heat. Losing the fires could cost the cooks an hour or more.

That transfer of knowledge has become more important as a younger generation begins taking over portions of the massive undertaking.

“It is a lot of work,” Rob said. “They have to know how to do it, get organized and everything.”

For Ryan, joining his father at the barbecue was once something he could hardly imagine being allowed to do. Growing up, he viewed the event as belonging to a tight-knit circle of longtime local volunteers and firefighters. Helping cook the chickens was almost aspirational.

“It was like, ‘Oh, I’d love to do that. That’d be a dream to do,’” Ryan said.

But as older volunteers have died, retired or moved away, that dynamic has changed.

“Now it’s like, ‘we need people to do that,’” he said.

Ryan lives upstate with his wife and children and said family responsibilities have prevented him from making the commitment required to serve in the Cutchogue Fire Department. But the barbecue gives him another way to contribute to the community where his family has such deep roots.

Ryan said he still remembers how members of the department turned out for his grandfather’s funeral, long after the elder Walker had stopped serving as a firefighter and moved away.

“Every guy here has been a great influence in my life,” Ryan said. He talked about the respect firefighters showed his grandfather despite the decades that had passed since his active service.

“The way they treated him was better than I think I’ve seen anyone treated by any religion or person in any funeral,” he said.

His sense of obligation to the generations before him is palpable as Ryan talks about the barbecue like something that has to be protected.

“This isn’t going away, and it can’t go away,” he said. “I wouldn’t let it go away.”

The barbecue itself has changed. For two years, the event was held at Peconic Bay Vineyards before returning this year to Cutchogue Fire Department headquarters on New Suffolk Road. Some of its food preparation has changed as health regulations evolved, too.

Rob remembers when his mother and other women associated with the department each prepared enormous batches of potatoes for the event. Each woman would tackle a bag herself.

“My mother would do a 50-pound bag of potatoes,” he recalled.

The barbecue sauce has evolved around health requirements as well, although the basic formula Rob described remains deceptively simple: oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and a special barbecue seasoning. The precise preparation may have been treated as a closely guarded secret over the years, but Rob said the real trick is what happens after the sauce meets the chicken.

“How you cook the chicken — it depends if it’s windy and everything,” he said. “It’s always different every year.” Too much heat creates flare-ups. Too little stretches an already lengthy cooking process.

At home, Rob sometimes recreates the process on a Weber grill using drumsticks and leftover sauce. Even there, he refuses to rush it.

“It still takes two and a half hours,” he said. “Cooking slow, low and slow.”

Ryan, meanwhile, has begun thinking about taking the family connection to the barbecue in an entirely different direction. He and his wife raise meat chickens at their home upstate. Last year, they raised about 250 birds in their backyard, and Ryan envisions gradually expanding that operation to 500 and eventually 1,000 chickens.

His dream is audacious: someday, he would like his family farm to supply chickens for the Cutchogue barbecue itself.

“Even if it took me 20 years, or my son was able to accomplish it,” Ryan said.

For now, however, the Walkers’ contribution is measured in hours beside the pits — and, in James’ case, ears of corn. Rob has watched the barbecue long enough to see how much labor disappears behind what visitors experience as a summer party. Thousands of ears of corn have to be shucked. Thousands of chickens have to be cooked. Volunteers have to be assigned, food prepared and crowds moved through.

“This is total chaos,” he said of the enormous undertaking. “But they make such a beautiful thing out of it.”

And after 69 years, he said, that chaos has become an extraordinarily well-practiced system, built on people returning year after year, learning the little things and eventually teaching them to someone else.

For the Walker family, that progression can now be measured across four generations: Rob’s father working the beer tent, Rob mastering the pits, Ryan cooking alongside the people he grew up admiring — and nearly 3-year-old James Walker shucking corn.

Next year, his father says, the little boy will be back.