Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,21

cook and eventually opened his wildly popular hamburger stand, Hardee’s. Taco Bell founder Glen Bell, who was also a cook in the Pacific during World War II, rode the rails looking for work, hauled adobe bricks out of an army-surplus truck, and repaired telephones before introducing the taco to much of America. One of Bell’s employees, an air force vet named Ed Hackbarth (Del Taco), was the ninth of ten children, whose widowed mother washed clothes and took in boarders to help her family survive the Great Depression. Carl Karcher (Carl’s Jr.), an Ohio farmhand with a middle school education, parlayed a humble hot dog stand into a thousand-unit burger chain after returning from the war. William Rosenberg (Dunkin’ Donuts) dropped out of middle school at fourteen, delivered telegrams for Western Union, and worked as an electrician for Bethlehem Steel. S. Truett Cathy (Chick-fil-A), one of seven kids, spent part of his teenage years during the Depression in the nation’s first public housing project; he later started his Atlanta chain by buying at discount from Delta chicken breasts that had been deemed either too big or too small and frying them into sandwiches. Al Copeland (Popeyes), another high school dropout, grew up in poverty in 1940s New Orleans, logging time on welfare under his grandmother’s care in St. Thomas, another early public housing project in America. “I never forget being poor,” Copeland said in his later years. “I know what it is, and I don’t want it.”

What the founders of American fast food also shared was a recognition of the burgeoning national paradigm—America was (and, in many quarters, continues to be) a young, growing, and hungry country that required fast, cheap sustenance. Family-friendly food that could be eaten on the go, using hands instead of utensils and plates, and served in wrappers that could be tossed out on the way to somewhere else.

In its infancy, the fast-food industry possessed the unique innocence that came from being native to its target audience; from founders and franchisees to cooks and customers, it was an industry of literal moms and pops. Like the Colonel, Edith and Gus Belt sold beer and fried chicken at a gas station in Normal, Illinois, before the Great Depression forced them into their fruitful second act as the burger-meisters of Steak ’n Shake. Esther and Harry Snyder were practically newlyweds when they opened their first In-N-Out franchise in Baldwin Park, California.* But ultimately, like Aerosmith, Johnny Rotten, and organic food, nothing good can remain pure forever. As we’ll see, once fast food caught on, it became susceptible to corruption and would be adulterated by the pushes and pulls of American industry. In the early 1960s, the American corporate apparatus—aided by the rise of television and advertising—would take new form and swiftly end the days of innocence.

6 BIG BUSINESS

A Buddhist monk walks up to a hot dog stand and says, “Make me one with everything.”

—ANCIENT DAD JOKE

Harland Sanders had spent his life laboring to bend a resistant universe to his will. But twenty-five years after first opening his service station in Corbin, Kentucky, the Colonel found himself pressed against the most immovable object yet—the US Interstate Highway System. In the mid-1950s, not long after passing on a handsome offer for his business, he learned that the route of the newly created I-75 would bypass his shop in Corbin and quickly render the Dixie Highway obsolete. Seemingly overnight, Sanders’s bustling outfit became a dusty remnant on a forgotten highway, and he closed up another shop, selling it at a loss. He was sixty-five, broke again, and at a crossroads.

After decades of hustle and gristle, Sanders hadn’t just reached retirement age, he was nearly at the life expectancy for an American man at the time. He suffered from arthritis and failing eyesight. He had lived a wild life, full of schemes, gambits, and countless fistfights. He was an institution, a well-known pillar of hickory and fury, and a peerless salesman who had invented a product he believed in. He had earned the right to sit back on his porch and get by on his $100 Social Security checks. And for many, that might have been enough. But Harland Sanders wasn’t just any salesman and he wasn’t just any hustler; Harland Sanders was the Colonel.

A few years before his Corbin operation closed, Sanders had started signing franchise agreements with a scattering of restaurant owners whom he had convinced to sell his increasingly famous chicken. They were small-fry deals accorded by handshakes, a