Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,5

flourish meant luring middle-class families into the ranks of the White Castle faithful, particularly after the Great Depression diminished his working-class clientele. In 1932, around the time Aunt Sammy, the USDA-devised matronly better half of Uncle Sam, was dishing out questionable nutritional advice and recipes to homemakers on the radio five days a week on hundreds of stations across the country, Ingram hired a dynamic saleswoman named Ella Louise Agniel to play “Julia Joyce,” a corporate hostess who would preach the gospel of White Castle to the same demographic.

In his 1997 book, Selling ’Em by the Sack, David Gerard Hogan details how Joyce, forged partially in the image of General Mills’ own fictitious shill, Betty Crocker, would appear at women’s groups around the country as a White Castle emissary armed with bags of sliders along with talking points about the nutritional merits of hamburgers and the time and effort they’d save in the kitchen. Inevitably, Joyce would drag her guests to drop in on a nearby White Castle restaurant, where they would marvel at its clean, orderly, and high-tech operation. As Agniel’s efforts proved out, she quickly rose to become a trusted voice and high-level figure in the White Castle hierarchy. “By the end of the decade it was not unusual to see businessmen and housewives standing in line next to construction workers, policemen, and taxi drivers,” notes Hogan. And so, White Castle managed to sell nearly twice as many burgers in 1937 as it did in 1930.

But as dazzling as all these feats were, White Castle’s greatest contribution remains the rise and redemption of the hamburger, which forever changed the country and the world. Prior to World War I, with its bloodthirsty nationalist chanteys, the United States was a physically and spiritually disconnected land. Little, if anything, would qualify as quintessentially American in a country where different languages, cuisines, and forms of entertainment held the knit of ethnic enclaves and immigrant communities. Without a drop of legal booze, the gaze was nationalized during the Roaring Twenties and made this tribalism seem provincial. Americans started to see the same films and tuned in to the same radio shows, drove their Model Ts, and lived in cities as a majority for the first time ever. Soon they wanted the same gyrating washing machines and the same electric refrigerators and Radiolas from the same national department stores. They wanted to load their pantries with national brands like Wonder Bread, Cream of Wheat, and Minute tapioca from the very same grocery aisles. And they wanted the hamburger, a thoroughly modern sandwich that came enciphered with humankind’s evolutionary longing for fire-cooked meat.

In this climate, passing fashions like cloche hats and flagpole sitting briefly took hold, while other fancies like premarital sex and mah-jongg somehow became more widespread and permanent fixtures in American society. Where a cartoon character such as Betty Boop (1930) reflected the flapperism of the era, J. Wellington Wimpy (1929),* Popeye’s financially reckless and burger-obsessed hanger-on, not only embodied the American id, but also offered proof of the hamburger’s arrival as the national food—an arrival meticulously and masterfully orchestrated by White Castle and Billy Ingram.

The White Castle slider was, by no means, the first hamburger to appear on a menu or a griddle. Nevertheless, before Anderson and Ingram, the hamburger in all of its scattered iterations was just a weird, peonic meat sando, without ideal, definition, or exemplar, living in a dusty and disconnected network of fiefdoms. And you can’t have a kingdom without a castle.

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Despite his successes, Billy Ingram had a conservative approach to growth, which meant that White Castle remained (and remains) a privately held, family-owned, slider-sized enterprise. The company would ultimately be overshadowed by bigger, fast-franchising chains. Today, White Castle still operates in many of the same neighborhoods it did in the 1920s, where, even in the land of oversize burgers, the slider retains its cult status.

The company also tells the story of the American devotion to the sacrament of fast food better than even Billy Ingram ever could. Today, the company celebrates its most loyal fans by enshrining them in the Cravers’ Hall of Fame. There’s the couple from Montana that drove all the way to a White Castle in Chicago for Valentine’s Day, then turned around to get home for work the next day. The woman with a castle-themed ankle tattoo in Mt. Pulaski, Illinois, who decorates her home with old store fixtures. The sister of the navy mechanic who smuggled twenty-five frozen sliders in