Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,25

shrewd habituation to the birth of the car culture and his psychotic harnessing of media and marketing power to achieve celebrity to his ultimate fate as a small-fry concern absorbed by corporate powers, the Sanders saga cuts a quick epigraph for the early days of American fast food. And born from nothing and triumphant by dint of his persistence through an undulating sea of setbacks, Sanders was an early prototype of the American Dream. And he would be celebrated so. Following his death in 1980, all flags at state buildings in Kentucky were flown at half-mast, and prior to his funeral, Sanders’s body was ordered to lie in state at the state capitol in Frankfort, Kentucky, so that mourners could visit and properly pay homage. John Y. Brown, who had purchased the company from Sanders sixteen years earlier and had since become Kentucky’s governor, spoke at the funeral. There among one hundred thousand graves at Cave Hill Cemetery, Brown eulogized Sanders as “not only our founder and our creator, he was our leader … a living example that the American Dream still exists.”

7 INTO THE CITIES

I had heard for years from our girls that the Big Mac was really something “special,” and while I’ve often credited Mrs. Nixon with making the best hamburgers in the world, we are both convinced that McDonald’s runs a close second.

—RICHARD M. NIXON

In 1965, just months after Harland Sanders sold his chicken operation for what would turn out to be giblets on the dollar, Ray Kroc took McDonald’s public. The company first offered shares at $22.50 (about $178 in 2018 terms), and by the next day, they were worth $30 ($237), making big shareholders wealthy beyond their greasiest dreams overnight. The McDonald’s IPO was one clear sign that fast food had survived its infancy to become a bona fide industrial fixture.* Quick-service chains were now becoming big business, commodities to be traded on the stock market alongside DuPont, General Motors, Boeing, and US Steel. The future shimmered tremulously like a boiling vat of beef tallow, and the already-proliferating fast-food companies would use the same low-cost, highly systematized franchising model to continue their expansion.

As fast food boomed and busier Americans shifted away from dinners at home, food conglomerates took notice. With the corporate powers circling, many fast-food founders either cashed in or cashed out. In the years that followed the McDonald’s IPO, Jack in the Box founder Robert Peterson sold his chain to Ralston Purina, United Brands bought A&W drive-ins, Royal Crown nabbed Arby’s, PepsiCo grabbed both Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, Burger King became part of Pillsbury, Hardee’s was bought by Imasco, and so on.

Other chains weren’t so lucky as the fast-food enterprise concentrated its grip on the American suburban landscape. Among the dearly departed are such defunct chains as Pup ’N’ Taco, Minnie Pearl Chicken, White Tower, Naugles, Red Barn, and (the Seinfeld-famous) Kenny Rogers Roasters. The biggest to fall was the Midwestern chain Burger Chef. The charbroiled-burger outfit, which is widely credited with pioneering both combo meals and kids’ meals, grew to become the second-largest chain in the United States by the time it was bought out by General Foods in 1968. But it both expanded too quickly and stumbled under its new corporate minders; Burger Chef, which had over a thousand locations at its peak, would later be sold off to Hardee’s before disappearing completely from the terrain by the mid-1990s.*

All of this chaotic, sweeping growth came with collateral damage, and not just in terms of competitors slain or major expansions. The arrival of corporations and food conglomerates would have a direct effect on the food itself as more profitable shortcuts and substitutions were sought. For example, two years after being sold by Harland Sanders, Kentucky Fried Chicken would go public in 1966, and like McDonald’s, the stock quickly boomed. Nearly everyone in the company directory, save for Sanders, who was wary of stocks, struck it rich. KFC would be listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1969, and then, in 1971, just seven years after being purchased from the Colonel for $2 million, Kentucky Fried Chicken would again be sold, for $285 million to booze-and-food giant Heublein. It would then pass through a series of corporate handoffs and spin-offs. Harland Sanders would become one of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s fiercest critics as his scrupulous, time-tested methods met with modifications for mass consumption. “Let’s face it, the Colonel’s gravy was fantastic, but you had to be a Rhodes Scholar to cook it,”