Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,2
Pete Saari picked up his phone and cold-dialed 1-800-THE-CRAVE, the toll-free number for White Castle’s headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. Saari, the CEO of a 3-D printing company based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, had been commissioned to create a personalized urn to host the eternal remains of Mel Burrows, a fifty-seven-year-old mother and motorcycle enthusiast who had lived in New Jersey. The concept for the urn included a replica of a White Castle slider—the fast-food chain’s iconic and diminutive onion and bepickled hamburger. The slider would be nestled inside a rendering of a branded White Castle paper holster that would be set atop a model of a typical White Castle store, perching above the regal-looking decorative crenellated walls. To head off any potential legal catastrophes, Saari needed to get some permissions from White Castle.
The request eventually channeled its way up from the hotline to Jamie Richardson, the company’s vice president, whose two decades at White Castle have not diminished his boyish, irrepressible devotion to the code of “the crave.” “Literally, you hear some of these things and you can’t dream it up,” Richardson explained of Saari’s proposal. “The first thought is, ‘Is that real?’”
It turned out to be very real indeed. Richardson, after calling Saari back, ran the request over to White Castle’s general counsel, who approved it right away. “We did not go through three weeks of wringing our hands and asking, ‘Oh, does that send the right message? Will people think we’re saying that fast food causes early demise? Think of the jokes,’” Richardson said. “No, we said, ‘This is about celebrating someone’s life.’”
It seems fair to say that, given the choice, many people would rather go directly to hell for eternity than spend their corporeal afterlife in the confines of a White Castle–themed urn. However, when Mel Burrows was diagnosed with her terminal illness, the burger joint became an unexpected fixture in her life. Following Mel’s treatments, her sister Stacey would sneak her out of the hospital and, in the perfect act of sororal mischief, the two would steal away to the nearby White Castle. This intimate convention would include conversation and the ceremonial eating of sliders—objects that are themselves physically designed to be tiny reprieves from the world. The motto of their outings until Mel’s death became “Let’s treat ourselves,” which would eventually be featured in large script on the memorial urn produced by Saari. “It might seem a bit silly to some people, but White Castle provided a sense of normalcy during Mel’s treatments,” her sister explained. “And that was a true gift.”
Millions of people eat hamburgers each day, most of the time for much less significant reasons than did Mel and Stacey, but the experiences of these millions are all improbably linked to White Castle and a fry cook named Walt Anderson. And the story of fast food itself also begins with White Castle, in Wichita, Kansas.
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Wichita is an unsung, uniquely American city that should hold Mount Rushmore–esque significance in the national imagination. It’s the city that gave the world Cessna and Boeing, the Koch brothers, Hattie McDaniel, James Reeb, and Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham. Hank Ketcham, the creator of Dennis the Menace, lived his life on the West Coast but set his comic strip about anodyne mischief in Wichita because it embodies a wholesome American idyll, the place for Jack White to disappear, one of the few US cities where the water isn’t fluoridated and where it’s illegal to serve cherry pie à la mode on a Sunday.
But none of that is why Wichita truly deserves prime billing in our collective whimsy. Wichita effectively endowed the United States with its secular wafer—the hamburger. Americans might think of the burger as a national birthright, but a century ago, the only thing less popular than ground beef in the United States was the Irish. In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel about the trials of an immigrant worker, partially set in the waste-filled animal stockyards of Chicago. That might not sound like a page-turner, but as your high school English teacher probably told you, the book was a crucial catalyst for the reforms and regulations of the Progressive Era. Sinclair’s lurid and all-but-unprintable descriptions of factories with spoiling meat pushed the public to think about food safety and meat and pressured the government to act.* And, as a result, US consumers would be wary of ground beef for many years to come with authorities on food and dining like Duncan Hines