Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,16
store Bob’s Big Boy after the sandwich and started a chain. “A meal in one on a double-deck bun” went one 1950s jingle.
Another notable entry in the big-burger annals belongs to Lovie Yancey. Born in Bastrop, Texas, in 1912, Yancey moved west in the Great Migration that brought millions of black Americans out of the Jim Crow South in the decades after World War I. She opened Mr. Fatburger with her boyfriend in 1947, a three-stool burger stand built in Los Angeles with scrap-metal parts. For five years, Yancey logged long hours behind the counter every single day of the week before splitting from her partner and taking over the entire business. She dropped the extraneous prefix and rechristened the stand Fatburger. Buoyed by Yancey’s watchful care and her amply sized burgers, it became a cultural institution. “The name of the store was my idea,” Yancey said on a good day in 1985. “I wanted to get across the idea of a big burger with everything on it … a meal in itself.”
And though these inventions were certainly impressive, no mega-burger makers would be quite as influential as Burger King cofounders James McLamore and David Edgerton. In 1954, they took over Insta-Burger King, a burger outfit based in the suburbs of Miami.
The venture they inherited was a bit of a mess. In a nod to the tech-centric fascinations of the time, the kitchens had been designed to cook burgers in a fully automated, futuristic fashion using a complex network of conveyor belts. In reality, the system stank and malfunctioned constantly. One day, in a pique of rage, Edgerton sank a hatchet into a fritzing conveyor belt, resolving to build something better himself. That invention would be a continuous-chain charbroiler, which would give the burgers their famous backyard taste and created an industry-standard machine.* No longer a true “Insta” operation, the duo simplified the chain’s name and labored to find a way to make the whole enterprise work. And then, in 1957, they discovered ground-chuck gold. On a visit to a Burger King franchise in Gainesville, the two happened upon a burger at a shabby drive-in nearby that had become wildly popular among locals. The mammoth burger was served on a five-inch bun with a mess of toppings. Right away, they knew Burger King would carry its own version.
Though both men claimed ownership of the idea, the universe generally credits McLamore with Burger King’s history-making variation on the theme. “I suggested that we call our product a Whopper,” McLamore wrote in his autobiography, “knowing that this would convey imagery of something big.” Whatever the truth, the Whopper became the ultimate triple threat: Like its quarter-pound brethren, it was much bigger than most other uninspiring burgers and it was “flame-broiled,” which not only separated it from the legions of griddle burgers, but also fed into an ongoing national cookout craze. Perhaps most consequently, it was the first signature fast-food item to go truly national. Most drive-ins, stands, and diners had hamburgers on offer; Burger King had the Whopper. The Whopper became the franchise’s calling card as the monarchy rapidly expanded. Today, the coronation of a new Burger King is almost always accompanied by the unveiling of an all-caps sign: HOME OF THE WHOPPER.
As with the Whataburger before it, consumer willingness to pay a then eye-popping amount (thirty-seven cents) for a Whopper heralded an adaptation to comfort and plenty. “The pressures of prosperity were inexorable, and by the mid-1950s, it became apparent that hamburgers, like cars, had to become bigger if they wanted to compete,” the late food writer Josh Ozersky noted in his ode The Hamburger. “The Whopper was as inevitable as the hydrogen bomb.” The success of the Whopper inspired countless other signature creations, notably the Big Mac and the Quarter Pounder, along with a subsequent riptide of Big Bufords (Checkers/Rally’s), Jumbo Jacks (Jack in the Box), Thickburgers (Hardee’s/Carl’s Jr.), American Colossals (Burgerville), doubles, triples, quads, and innumerable megasized local heroes—the Kodiak Roadrunner (Arctic Roadrunner), the Big Baby (Nicky’s the Real McCoy), the Big One (Ward’s), the Lotaburger (Blake’s), and so on.
But what made the Whopper landmark material wasn’t just its size or its specialty preparation or its clever branding. Or that it emblematized the growing appetites of a country that was hurtling forward, headlights on, toward wealth and plenitude. Or even that the Whopper represented the latest dilation of a new, productive, impatient way of life—“a meal in itself,” as it would be advertised. In a laden, meaningful way, the