Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,15
country offered a scoping promise of prosperity for many—though not all. In American Empire, historian Joshua Freeman lays out the staggering particulars of America’s postwar inheritance. By the war’s end, half of the world’s manufactured goods were produced in the United States. “By 1947,” he notes, “American workers produced 57 percent of the world’s steel, 43 percent of its electricity, 62 percent of its oil, and 80 percent of its automobiles.” In 1950, the US gross national product was more than triple that of its nearest follower and biggest foe, the Soviet Union.
By 1956, nearly 8 million Americans had used their GI Bill benefits on college degrees or vocational training. And by 1966, 20 percent of the single-family homes built since the war had been financed through GI Bill mortgages. For the next quarter of a century abundance arrived to stay—with high wages, steady productivity gains, and affordable goods. This climate of accelerated development rubbed away at least some of the country’s parochial limitations. The preexisting barriers would be replaced with the kind of fabled opportunity that would beget national self-legendizing long after the promises of the era had been weathered by time and broken by hubris, brute force, and corporate lust.
Fittingly, Harmon Dobson’s Whataburger stand opened the same day that newspapers around the country reported that all eighty thousand of the remaining volunteer reserves would be mobilized by the Marines for the Korean War. The physical war against the Communists in Korea would be fought with M2 carbines; the ideological battle, however, the containment, would be fought through capitalism. American victories would be brightly strung in industry and innovation and gauged in split-level houses with yards, color televisions, and two-car garages. Out back, on backyard patios, were fired-up grills always covered with burgers, a national emblem of the postwar potluck after years of austerity and meat rationing. After all, nothing better expressed the superiority of the American way than its abundance. Abundance that blended faith with science and freedom and individual destiny with consumerism and hard work. Abundance that armed you against an ideologue in a kitchen debate. Abundance that literally rained down from the sky.
In 1950, a beachgoer strolling the Gulf Coast on a hot August day might have caught a glimpse of a tiny plane up in the ether toting a WHATABURGER banner. Harmon Dobson was in the pilot’s seat. He had taught himself how to fly and was now, with his young son, dropping coupons for free burgers from the sky like confetti. “I would sit in the back seat and throw the coupons out,” Tom Dobson, now the company’s chairman of the board, told me. “That’s still just as vivid in my mind as if it was today. He’d fly over town and we wouldn’t be very high, maybe a thousand feet, in a little Piper Super Cub, one seat behind the other. He had an air horn on that thing and he’d honk the horn, and whenever he honked the horn, I would throw coupons out the back window all over town. I was probably, maybe six, seven. And then he got in trouble because of the air horn and he was littering. It was very effective advertising. Everybody’d look up and see that air horn and then everyone would talk about it, ‘Oh, yeah, that Whataburger man is dropping coupons out of the sky again.’”
Texans, for better and worse, have always cherished a swaggering, size-obsessed, idiosyncratic spirit. This affinity explains everything good or eccentric or colorful in the state from the Alamo to Ann Richards, big hair to Bum Phillips, and Selena to the space program. Not surprisingly, denizens of the Lone Star State were ready to welcome a pricier, Texas-sized burger into the canon. FOLKS, WE PRICED OUR BURGERS TOO LOW AND WE LOST OUR SHIRTS, Dobson painted on a sign after some early success. SORRY, BUT WE GOTTA RAISE THE PRICE TO 30 CENTS. About seventy years after its humble start, Whataburger is (as of 2018) now the country’s sixth-largest burger chain in terms of sales and the largest privately held burger company.
Like the hamburger itself, the jumbo-sized burger was an innovation with several disconnected authors in scattered places. One day out in the growing roadside Eden of Southern California, Bob Wian of Bob’s Pantry created a double-decker burger as a joke for some regulars who asked for something different. He called the sandwich the Big Boy. But everyone took the Big Mac forerunner quite seriously, and Wian soon renamed his