Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,14

said. “I like to buy things I understand. And I understand why people come to Dairy Queen, why I come to Dairy Queen. When I buy … that I’m making a bet that ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred years from now people will be doing the same thing. And so far it has worked out that way.”

Dairy Queen wouldn’t just become a pioneer in the field of soft ice cream. It would also become a pioneer in the field of franchising. All of this speaks to the seductive and petrifying power of American iconography meeting American corporate power. The war effort, with its rationing and limits on nonessential production, kept Dairy Queen from expanding until all the Sherb Nobles returned home. In the ensuing years, Dairy Queen, with the help of a band of merry franchisors, would spring from a handful of stores to nearly fifteen hundred by 1950. Then onward to twenty-six hundred by 1955.

Among the many to notice was a man named Ray Kroc, a struggling paper-cup and milkshake-machine salesman from burbs of Chicago. Kroc became intimately familiar with Dairy Queen’s aggressive franchising model, and he would later partner with Harry Sonneborn, a former Tastee-Freez vice president, to steer McDonald’s from a roadside stand run by two brothers into a corporate leviathan run by thousands of franchisees and shareholders. But it would be several years before all that. From 1945 on, you may know the history as well as I do.

4 FREEDOM FROM WANT

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

In 1950, four years before Ray Kroc would be struck dumb by the sight of the McDonald brothers’ burger outfit in Southern California, Harmon Dobson opened his own first burger joint in Corpus Christi, along the Gulf Coast of Texas. It was nothing special to look at: a small, portable metal stand with a walk-up window. But Dobson, who had spent his career dabbling in diamonds, wildcatting oil rigs, and hawking used cars, compensated for this modest block of black and white with one grandiose offering. Having dealt in the precious and the crude alike, Dobson had created something that was both: a Texas-sized hamburger. A Whataburger.

As we know, the burgers of this era were diminutive by contemporary standards—generally two ounces of beef or less and long sold for a nickel or a dime. Austerity burgers for all economic seasons. (Even diner burgers of the time, which were larger than sliders, were served on four-inch buns, which would now seem quaint and petite.) Dobson served up his heavyweight rebuke with double the beef, double the bread, double the hands required. Just to fulfill this meatly vision, he had to start a side business with a local baker to develop a special pan mold large enough for the specialty five-inch burger buns. What Whataburger would lack in the heartland economy of White Castle, it would make up for in Texan heft. The slider had been born in Wichita as a two-by-two-inch sandwich with onions and a cute slice of pickle for a nickel. A Whataburger came with three slices of tomato, four dill-pickle slices, chopped onions, lettuce, mustard, and ketchup. A quarter-pounder for a quarter.

In its bill of fare and name, Whataburger embodied an aspirational call for the changing landscape of the 1950s. It didn’t sound regal and stately or humble and homespun. “What a burger!” represented the radio dial of the national disposition turning from austerity, lima-bean casseroles, and Perry Como to plenitude, meat loaf, and rock ’n’ roll.

The early 1950s were an auspicious time to start a business venture, but particularly one featuring oversize burgers. The economy had bounced back from a short postwar recession, inflated prices had fallen, and ground beef was on its way to becoming as cheap as it would ever be in postwar US history. Fears of a traumatic return to the colorlessness of Depression life had been overblown; 1950 would be the last year that all the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture were shot in black and white. The twentieth century was half over, and the American century was just underway and would be coming through in vivid, brilliant Technicolor palettes.

Though the tropes of the simple, rigid, optimistic conservatism of midcentury American life generally tend to inspire either fetish or nausea, for a while there stood good reason for all the mythmaking. The United States had emerged from World War II suddenly confident, renewed, and energetic. After a decade and a half of economic depression, poverty, and war, the