Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,6

a cooler from Detroit, Michigan, to Holy Loch, Scotland, so that they might be shared among the homesick leathernecks aboard the USS Simon Lake. The fastidious Bronx accountant who took a $300 cab ride and a 6:00 A.M. train after a snowstorm imperiled his weekly White Castle ritual of six cheeseburgers and a sack of onion rings. The family of three in Dearborn, Michigan, who, after once forgetting to buy cookies for Santa Claus in time, have since made a tradition of leaving White Castle sliders out on Christmas Eve.

“We get to be a part of people’s lives in ways that are really sometimes seemingly small, but in other ways are much, much bigger than the physical nourishment we provide with the food we sell,” Richardson told me. “It’s about being part of people’s good memories and being an oasis and a place where they can just have that moment of respite.”

The already unusual tale of Mel Burrows’s White Castle urn doesn’t end with a company suit granting permission for a design. From there, it morphs into a story of good business begetting good citizenship. According to White Castle executive Jamie Richardson, Pete Saari was so moved by the two sisters’ story that he decided to create the urn for free. White Castle would make a $10,000 donation in Burrows’s name to the American Cancer Society and induct the sisters into the company’s Hall of Fame.

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For plenty of good reasons some have eschewed the national model that White Castle created and instead sought out culinary experiences that seem personalized and native to their local enclaves. But with all due respect to tin ceilings, Edison bulbs, and boxed wheatgrass, customs can still be meaningful and intimate even in generic plastic booths beneath generic fiberglass ceiling panels. Fast food offers the access and reliability of both the personal and the banal. “A ritual creates a freedom from anxiety that isn’t rote,” Richardson said. “It’s standardization, but within that standardization there’s still an experience that’s a little bit unique.”

2 THE COLONEL

I fed truck drivers and millionaires all at the same table.… I don’t care if I had truck drivers sitting down there and here come a doctor. I didn’t know who he was. I thought everybody could eat at the same table. I didn’t know anything, only to be friendly. So that was my first restaurant.

—HARLAND SANDERS

It’s difficult to imagine a time when the concept of the American Dream didn’t exist. While big thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Emma Lazarus, Frederick Jackson Turner, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Karl Marx offered different depictions of the idea in one form or another, not until 1931 was the term coined and popularized by historian James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America.* As Adams defined it, the dream centers on what he believed to be a strictly American possibility:

The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

It’s easy to trip over the irony that Adams, a wealthy former investment banker living abroad in London, felt so passionately about the promise of America, just as the bite of the Great Depression began to leave the worst of its mark.* But once released into the world, the American Dream became a new romantic and politically charged shorthand for success, prosperity, and upward mobility, dispatched like a bumper sticker every election season as a byword for a land of freedom, heroes, bootstraps, destiny, and opportunity.

Just as Adams’s The Epic of America was receiving an enthusiastic reception on both sides of the Atlantic, a forty-year-old man named Harland Sanders opened up a new roadside gas station on a rough stretch of Appalachian highway. Sanders was an ill-tempered middle school dropout with a huckster’s instincts and showman’s virtuosity. But if one person ever fully proved Adams’s interpretation of the American Dream to be possible, it was Sanders, whose dogged, frustrating