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Hamburger Charlie
The story of fast food begins in October 1885, near the small town of Seymour, Wisconsin. A friendly and outgoing fifteen-year-old boy named Charlie Nagreen was driving his family’s ox cart down a dirt road amid wide-open fields. Charlie was going to Outagamie County’s first annual fair, where he wanted to earn some extra money selling meatballs. What happened next was the unlikely origin of a delicious sandwich that would one day change the world.
As Charlie sold meatballs at the fair, he noticed that customers had trouble eating them and strolling at the same time. People were impatient. They wanted to visit Mr. John Bull’s popular beehives (encased in glass), to see the fancy new harvesting machines, and to enjoy all the other thrilling attractions at the fair. They didn’t want to waste time eating meatballs. Charlie suddenly had an idea: if he squashed the meatballs and put them between two slices of bread, people could walk and eat. And so Charlie invented the hamburger.
German immigrants lived in Charlie’s hometown of Hortonville, Wisconsin, and he later claimed that the new sandwich was named after the German town of Hamburg, long famous for its ground-beef steaks. Charlie continued selling burgers at the Outagamie County Fair until 1951. By then he was an old man who liked to sing this rhyme while flipping burgers on the grill:
Hamburgers, hamburgers, hamburgers hot!
Onions in the middle, pickle on top.
Makes your lips go flippity flop.
Charlie had not only invented the hamburger but also composed one of the first advertising jingles for it.
A number of other cities—including New Haven, Connecticut; Akron, Ohio; and Hamburg, New York—now claim to be the true birthplace of America’s favorite sandwich. But the residents of Seymour, Wisconsin, will have none of that. The signs that welcome people into Seymour let everybody know they’re entering THE HOME OF THE HAMBURGER. And every August the town has a big parade in honor of Hamburger Charlie.
Despite Charlie’s best efforts, burgers didn’t become America’s national dish overnight. For a long time after that 1885 Outagamie County Fair, hamburger meat had a bad reputation. Many people assumed that ground beef was dirty. According to one historian, during the early 1900s the hamburger was considered “a food for the poor,” polluted and unsafe to eat. Restaurants generally didn’t sell them. Burgers were served at lunch carts parked near factories, at circuses and carnivals. It was widely believed that ground beef was made from rotten old meat full of chemical preservatives. “The hamburger habit is just about as safe,” one food critic warned, “as getting meat out of a garbage can.”
The hamburger’s reputation wasn’t helped when murderers started using ground beef to kill people. In 1910, Alexander J. Moody, a wealthy baker from Chicago, died after somebody put poison in his burger. The police were never able to solve the case. One year later, a Chicago pie maker was poisoned the same way. Similar murder stories appeared in newspapers across the United States. Ground beef seemed like the perfect food in which to hide a deadly poison.
The widespread fear of hamburgers caused a great deal of frustration among butchers. They liked to grind leftover pieces of beef into hamburger meat. They liked selling every scrap of meat in the store. They didn’t want to waste any of it. But most customers preferred to buy solid pieces of steak. That way you could see exactly what you were buying—and feel confident there was nothing poisonous in it.
In 1925, when New Yorkers were asked to name their favorite meal, hamburger ranked nineteenth. Of the 180,000 people who voted for their favorites, just 2,912 voted for hamburger. It beat out gefilte fish (1,361 votes). But the burger lost big to corned beef and cabbage (23,061 votes) and roast loin of pork (5,411 votes). By a wide margin, most New Yorkers even preferred eating cow tongue and spinach (8,400 votes).
Around this time Walt Anderson set out to defend the hamburger from its many critics. A former janitor and short-order cook, Walt loved burgers and opened a small restaurant in Wichita, Kansas, devoted to selling them. Walt grilled the burgers right in front of his customers, so they could see for themselves that the meat and the equipment were clean. The place was so successful that Walt found a business partner and started opening more hamburger restaurants, built in the shape of small white medieval forts. Walt called them White Castles, a name suggesting that the place was solid and the food was pure. White Castle restaurants claimed that their ground beef was delivered twice a day, to insure freshness, and supported an unusual experiment at the University of Minnesota. For thirteen weeks a medical student there consumed nothing but White Castle burgers and water. When the student not only survived the experiment but also seemed pretty healthy, people started to view hamburgers in a new light. Now hamburgers seemed wholesome, not deadly.
White Castle was popular among workingmen in the East and the Midwest, but it didn’t attract many women or children. It didn’t turn hamburgers into America’s favorite sandwich or create the modern fast-food business. A pair of brothers in southern California did all that, along with a traveling salesman who for years had failed at just about everything he tried.
Richard and Maurice (Mac) McDonald left New Hampshire in the 1930s, hoping to find jobs in southern California’s movie business. For a while they built scenery at a Hollywood studio, saved their money, and then bought their own movie theater in Glendale, California. The theater was a flop, and the two brothers struggled to come up with ideas for how to make a living.
All around them, southern California was giving birth to a whole new way of life—and a new way of eating. Los Angeles was growing at the very moment when ordinary people could finally afford to buy cars. New roads were being built, and farmland was rapidly being turned into houses, shops, and parking lots. Between 1920 and 1940, the number of people in southern California almost tripled, as families from across the United States moved there to find work and enjoy the warm, sunny weather. By 1940 there were about a million cars in Los Angeles, more than anywhere else in the United States. Los Angeles soon became unlike any other city in the world, sprawling for miles and miles. It was a city of the future, designed to be traveled by car.
The new mood in southern California encouraged people to question how things had been done in the past and to come up with fresh ideas. Anything felt possible in a place that was changing so quickly. Cars gave people a sense of freedom, a feeling of control over their lives—and a love of speed. All the changes sweeping through Los Angeles seemed to preach the same basic message: faster is better. The world’s first motel was built there (allowing you to park your car right in front of your room), as well as the first drive-through bank (allowing you to get money without getting out of your car). More importantly, a whole new kind of restaurant appeared.
“People with cars are so lazy they don’t want to get out of them to eat!” said Jesse G. Kirby, the founder of a drive-in restaurant. When you parked at Kirby’s Pig Stand, a waitress came to the car to take your order, then brought your food to the car. Los Angeles was soon full of Pig Stands and other restaurants just like them. In the rest of the United States, drive-in restaurants were usually open only during the summer. In Los Angeles, it felt like summer all year long. The drive-ins never had to close, and an exciting new business was born.
So many drive-in restaurants opened in southern California that they had to compete for attention. Restaurant owners often painted the drive-ins in loud colors and covered them in flashy neon lights, hoping to catch the eye of people driving past at high speed. The owners hired pretty girls to work as waitresses and came up with all sorts of memorable uniforms for them. The young waitresses, known as “carhops,” were often dressed up like cowgirls, cheerleaders, or Scottish girls in kilts. Carhops weren’t paid by the hour. They earned money from tips and received a small share of the money their customers spent. The more food and drinks a customer ordered, the more money a carhop earned. As a result, carhops tended to be very nice to their customers and encouraged them to eat and drink a lot.
Drive-in restaurants soon became popular hangouts for teenage boys. Drive-ins seemed cool. They were something really new and different—a mix of pretty girls and cars and late-night food. Before long, the bright lights of drive-ins were beckoning customers at intersections all over Los Angeles. Eager to cash in on the new craze, Richard and Mac McDonald opened their own drive-in restaurant in 1937. Located in Pasadena, California, it had three carhops and sold mostly hot dogs. A few years later Richard and Mac moved the restaurant to a larger building in San Bernardino and opened the McDonald Brothers Burger Bar Drive-In. The new restaurant was right next to a high school, employed twenty carhops, and soon made the McDonald brothers rich.
By the end of the 1940s, however, the McDonald brothers had grown tired of the drive-in business. They were tired of constantly looking for new carhops and cooks as the old ones left for jobs that paid more money. They were tired of replacing the dishes, glassware, and silverware that their teenage customers often broke or stole. And they were tired of their teenage customers. The brothers thought about selling their restaurant. Instead, they decided to try something new.
Richard and Mac fired all their carhops in 1948. They closed the McDonald Brothers Burger Bar Drive-In, installed larger grills, and reopened three months later with a radical new system for preparing food. The system was designed to prepare food faster, lower the prices, and increase sales. The brothers got rid of most of the items on the menu. They got rid of everything that had to be eaten with a knife, spoon, or fork. They got rid of regular plates and glasses, replacing them with paper cups and paper plates. All the food on the new menu could be held in your hand and eaten while driving a car. The only sandwiches the new restaurant sold were hamburgers and cheeseburgers.
The McDonald brothers also changed how the work was done in the kitchen. Instead of having one skilled cook who knew how to prepare many kinds of food, they hired a few people to prepare the same thing again and again. Workers in the kitchen became like workers on a factory assembly line, repeating the same simple tasks all day. One person grilled the hamburgers; another person put them in buns and wrapped them in paper; another person made the milk shakes; another person cooked French fries. Skilled cooks were no longer necessary. Workers only needed to learn how to do one thing, not many things. People were easy to hire for these jobs, easy to fire, and unlikely to demand a big paycheck. Richard and Mac had turned their restaurant kitchen into a little factory for making cheap fast food.
All the hamburgers were sold with the same toppings: ketchup, onions, mustard, and two pickles. No substitutions were allowed. And since there were no carhops, nobody brought the food to your car. You had to get out of the car, wait in line, and get the food yourself. The McDonald brothers called this new arrangement the Speedee Service System. An ad of theirs later spelled out some of its benefits for restaurant owners: “Imagine—No Car Hops—No Waitresses—No Dishwashers—No Bus Boys—The McDonald System is Self-Service!”
Richard McDonald designed a new building for the restaurant, aiming to make it easy to spot from the road. Although Richard had no training as an architect, the building that he sketched became one of the most important and influential designs of the twentieth century. On two sides of the roof he put golden arches. They were lit by neon at night, and from a distance looked like the letter M. His design combined advertising with architecture and created one of the most famous corporate logos in the world.
The Speedee Service System, however, got off to a slow start. Customers drove up to the restaurant, sat in their cars, and waited to be served. They honked their horns and wondered what had happened to the carhops. People weren’t used to waiting in line and getting their own food. Within a few weeks, however, customers learned the new routine and started to arrive in droves. But the McDonald brothers didn’t want their restaurant to become a teenage hangout. They wanted to attract as many people as possible and worried that hiring young girls would attract the wrong crowd. So they employed only young men behind the counter. Families started to line up at the McDonald brothers’ new restaurant. One historian described the lasting impact of their new self-service system: “Working-class families could finally afford to feed their kids restaurant food.”
The first McDonald’s was so successful that other restaurant owners were soon visiting it, taking notes, and opening places just like it. “Our food was exactly the same as McDonald’s,” the founder of a rival fast-food chain later admitted. “If I had looked at McDonald’s and saw someone flipping hamburgers while he was hanging by his feet, I would have copied it.”
Carl Karcher drove to the new McDonald’s from Anaheim, California, where he ran Carl’s Drive-In Barbeque. After seeing the long lines of people waiting to eat McDonald’s fifteen-cent burgers, he went home and opened his own self-service restaurant, naming it Carl’s Jr. Keith G. Cramer, the owner of Keith’s Drive-In Restaurant in Daytona Beach, Florida, heard about the McDonald brothers, flew to California, ate at their restaurant, returned home, and with his father-in-law opened the first Insta-Burger King. Glen W. Bell, Jr., fought in World War II, came back to California, and ate at the new McDonald’s. He decided to copy it and use the kitchen’s assembly-line system to make Mexican food. The restaurant chain he founded came to be known as Taco Bell.
The people who started America’s mighty fast-food companies weren’t rich or famous. They didn’t work for big banks or corporations. Most of them never even went to college. They were self-made men who worked hard and took risks in pursuit of their dreams. They were door-to-door salesmen, orphans, and high school dropouts. They were true entrepreneurs.
William Rosenberg dropped out of school at the age of fourteen, delivered telegrams for Western Union, drove an ice cream truck, worked as a door-to-door salesman, sold sandwiches and coffee to factory workers in Boston, and then opened a small doughnut shop. He named it Dunkin’ Donuts. Dave Thomas started working in a restaurant at the age of twelve, left his adoptive father, took a room at the YMCA, dropped out of school at fifteen, served as a busboy and a cook, and later opened his own fast-food place in Columbus, Ohio, calling it Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers Restaurant. Thomas S. Monaghan spent much of his childhood in a Catholic orphanage and a series of foster homes, barely graduated from high school, joined the Marines, and bought a pizzeria with his brother in Ypsilanti, Michigan, getting hold of the restaurant with a first payment of just $75. Eight months later his brother decided to quit, accepting a used Volkswagen Beetle for his share of the business—which was soon called Domino’s Pizza. At the age of seventeen, Frederick DeLuca borrowed $1,000 from a family friend and opened a sandwich shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He named it Subway.
The story of Harland Sanders is perhaps the most remarkable. Sanders left school at the age of twelve, worked as a farmhand, a mule tender, and a railway fireman. At various times he worked as a lawyer without having a law degree and delivered babies without having a medical degree. He sold insurance door to door, sold Michelin tires, and operated a gas station in Corbin, Kentucky. He served home-cooked food at a small dining room table in the back of the gas station, later opened a popular restaurant and motel, and then had to sell them both to pay off debts. At the age of sixty-five, Sanders became a traveling salesman once again, offering restaurant owners the “secret recipe” for his fried chicken.
The first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant opened in 1952, near Salt Lake City, Utah. Lacking money to promote the restaurant, Sanders dressed up like a Kentucky colonel, wearing a white suit and a black string tie. The outfit gained a lot of attention, and Sanders helped turn KFC into the largest fast-food chicken chain. His smiling face and Kentucky colonel outfit now appear on restaurant signs and fried chicken buckets all over the world. But the truth is, Colonel Sanders never served in the military. He just liked to dress up like a colonel.
Although the McDonald brothers were a big success in San Bernardino, if it weren’t for a salesman named Ray Kroc, the rest of the world might never have heard of them or their hamburgers. Kroc was selling milk-shake mixers in 1954 when he first visited the McDonald’s self-service restaurant. The brothers were two of his best customers. The milk-shake machine that Kroc sold was called a Multimixer. It could make five milk shakes at once. Kroc wondered why the McDonald brothers needed eight of these machines. That was a lot of milk shakes for one small burger joint. Over the years Kroc had visited a lot of restaurant kitchens, demonstrating all the special features of the Multimixer. But he’d never seen anything like the McDonald’s Speedee Service System. Kroc looked at the new restaurant “through the eyes of a salesman” and dreamed about putting McDonald’s at busy intersections across the United States.
Up until that day Kroc’s life had been full of failure, missed opportunities, and disappointment. He’d grown up in Oak Park, Illinois, not far from Chicago, where his father worked for a telegram company. Kroc was a charming and funny young man. He set out to be a jazz musician, played in a band at nightclubs, and worked at a Chicago radio station. Unable to earn a good living as a musician, he became a traveling salesman. He’d picked up a few tricks of the trade while briefly employed at his uncle’s coffee shop. “That was where I learned you could influence people with a smile and with enthusiasm,” Kroc later admitted, “and sell them a sundae when what they’d come for was a cup of coffee.”
For years Kroc struggled to find the product that would earn him a fortune. At various times he sold coffee beans, sheet music, paper cups, Florida real estate, powdered instant drinks called Malt-A-Plenty and Shake-A-Plenty, a gadget that could dispense whipped cream or shaving cream, and square ice cream scoops. The main problem with square scoops of ice cream, he discovered, was that they slid off the plate when you tried to eat them. Despite one setback after another, Kroc kept at it, always convinced that success was waiting just around the corner. “If you believe in it, and you believe in it hard,” he later said, “it’s impossible to fail. I don’t care what it is—you can get it!”
After meeting with the McDonald brothers, Kroc was eager to go into business with them and spread their Speedee Service System nationwide. Richard and Mac were less ambitious. They were already earning more than $100,000 a year from their restaurant, a huge amount in those days. Nevertheless, Kroc convinced the brothers to let him open new McDonald’s restaurants. Richard and Mac could stay at home while Kroc traveled around the country making them even richer. A contract was signed, and the three men became business partners.
After gaining the right to use the McDonald’s name and the Speedee Service System, Kroc faced a big problem. He didn’t have the money to open new restaurants across the United States. And banks wouldn’t lend money to the high school dropouts and dreamers like him who were trying to create fast-food businesses. The banks thought it was too risky. So Kroc used a new type of franchising deal to get the money.
Under one of these deals, a local businessman would build a new McDonald’s restaurant with his own money—and Kroc would tell him exactly how to run it. The profits from the restaurant would be shared. Franchising arrangements had been around for decades, but Kroc came up with one that proved extremely successful. Franchising became central to the growth not only of McDonald’s but of the entire fast-food business. It allowed companies to open many restaurants without spending much money and gave local businessmen a chance to make a lot of money without having to figure out how to run a restaurant.
The key to a successful franchise can be described in a single word: sameness. Ray Kroc insisted that everything be the same at every one of the new McDonald’s restaurants. The signs had to be the same. The buildings had to be the same. The menus had to be the same. And, most importantly, the food had to taste exactly the same. If the fries were lousy at one McDonald’s, Kroc worried that it would hurt business at every McDonald’s. He had little patience for McDonald’s restaurant owners who tried to do things differently, who would not conform to his rules. “We have found out . . . that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists,” Kroc once said. “We will make conformists out of them in a hurry. The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.”
Kroc didn’t look for wealthy people to put up the money for new McDonald’s restaurants. He tried to find businessmen who would actually run the restaurants as well as own them—people willing to give up their former lives and devote themselves fully to McDonald’s. These new owners had to start with just one restaurant. They would have to follow Kroc’s orders. And if they behaved well, they would get the chance to open a second McDonald’s. Most of all, Kroc demanded loyalty. He believed so completely in McDonald’s that the company almost seemed to him like a new religion. Anyone who broke the rules was likely to be punished. And any other restaurant chain that tried to steal McDonald’s customers was headed for trouble. Kroc had a harsh view of how to compete with fast-food rivals. “This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog,” he argued. “I’ll kill ’em, and I’m going to kill ’em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way of survival of the fittest.”
While Kroc traveled the country, spreading the word about the Speedee Service System, Richard and Mac relaxed in San Bernardino. Kroc began to resent the McDonald brothers, claiming that while he was doing all the hard work—“grinding it out, grunting and sweating like a galley slave”—they were sitting at home, reaping the rewards. His original agreement with the McDonalds gave them the right to block any changes to the Speedee Service System. The brothers had the final word in running the restaurants that carried their name, a fact that angered Kroc. In 1961, Kroc borrowed money to buy Richard and Mac’s share of the company. The brothers each received about $1 million. That sounds like a lot of money. But as the company grew, so did the value of what they gave up. If Richard and Mac had kept their share of McDonald’s instead of selling it to Ray Kroc, by the 1990s their income would have reached more than $180 million a year.
As part of the buyout deal, the McDonald brothers insisted on keeping their original restaurant in San Bernardino. Kroc let Richard and Mac keep that one restaurant, but forced them to change its name. “Eventually I opened a McDonald’s across the street from that store, which they had renamed The Big M,” Kroc later admitted, “and it ran them out of business.”
Led by McDonald’s, the fast-food industry spread across the United States. The southern California way of life was no longer so unusual. The federal government was building the interstate highway system, encouraging people to travel by automobile. Other cities began to rely on cars instead of trains, and new suburbs grew throughout the country, just as they had in Los Angeles. Between 1960 and 1973, the number of McDonald’s restaurants increased from 200 to almost 3,000. Gasoline shortages in 1973 gave the fast-food industry a brief scare, as many people worried that America’s love affair with the automobile was about to end. When that crisis passed, McDonald’s began to open restaurants in downtown city centers as well as in the suburbs. One by one, the founding fathers of the fast-food business sold their companies or retired. An industry that had started in the 1950s with a series of small, local fast-food chains became dominated in the 1980s by multinational corporations. Family-owned restaurants found it hard to compete with these giants and began to disappear.
The success of McDonald’s had an enormous impact on other small businesses, too. Franchising deals seemed like an easy way to create new companies in everything from the auto parts business (Meineke Discount Mufflers) to the weight-control business (Jenny Craig International). Some companies grew through franchising, others by owning all their stores. The most important thing that many businesses copied from McDonald’s was the total dedication to sameness. They started selling the same products the same way in hundreds of buildings that looked exactly the same. In 1969, Donald and Doris Fisher decided to open a store in San Francisco that would sell blue jeans the way that McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC sold fast food. They called their store the Gap. Thirty years later, there were more than 1,700 Gap, GapKids, and BabyGap stores in the United States. American cities and towns that once looked very different from one another—that once had mainly small, family-owned businesses—all began to look the same.
Hamburger Charlie could hardly have imagined, as he squished those meatballs between two pieces of bread at the Outagamie County Fair, how much change one sandwich could set in motion. Hamburgers eventually became a lot more popular than cow tongue and spinach. Altogether, Americans now eat about 13 billion hamburgers every year. If you put all those burgers in a straight line, they would circle the earth more than thirty-two times.
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