In-N-Out Burger Read online

  CHAPTER 3

  Short on experience but long on common sense, Harry sought advice from Carl N. Karcher, one of fast food’s pioneers, who had built a small, growing chain of hot dog stands in Los Angeles called Carl’s Jr. A sharecropper’s son from Upper Sandusky, Ohio, Karcher was an ebullient, salt-of-the-earth character who would go on to build a fortune transforming his handful of hot dog stands into the $1.5 billion, 3,000-unit, multinational Carl Karcher Enterprises. Looking back, Karcher said that he wasn’t surprised that the Snyders decided to seek his counsel. “They came to see me because Harry saw a successful business,” he explained self-assuredly. “A successful fast-food business. He didn’t go to see someone in medical sales.”

  An eighth-grade dropout, Karcher was working long hours on his family’s Ohio farm, milking and feeding cows, when in 1937 an uncle asked young Carl to join him at his Feed and Seed store in Anaheim, California. After careful deliberation, the twenty-year-old picked up and drove over two thousand miles to Anaheim where he worked selling chicken and cattle feed to local farmers for eighteen dollars per week.

  A devout Catholic, Karcher met his future wife, a local girl named Margaret Heinz, at Anaheim’s St. Boniface Church one Sunday. Karcher said he was instantly smitten with Margaret, who was living with her parents and fourteen brothers and sisters in a two-story Spanishstyle home surrounded by orange groves and chickens. However, despite his infatuation with Margaret, Karcher briefly returned to Ohio. “I wasn’t sure about California,” he exclaimed, “but I missed Margaret.” So he turned around and headed back to Anaheim.

  On November 30, 1939, not long after Karcher returned, the couple was married. However, his uncle had refused to rehire his nephew, and Karcher went to work for the Armstrong Bakery on Avalon Boulevard wrapping and delivering bread. “He said anyone that quit he wouldn’t hire back,” explained Karcher. Waking up each morning in the hazy light of dawn, Karcher drove his truck delivering bread to local restaurants. During his rounds, he noticed the increasing number of hot dog stands that were popping up all over the city and quickly calculated the number of buns he was unloading on a weekly basis. “I went to about half a dozen of the hot dog carts twice a day,” he recalled. In the summer of 1941, when the cart on Florence Avenue became available, Karcher snapped it up. “I thought it was a good opportunity to own it,” he said. Karcher secured a loan from the Bank of America using his Plymouth Super Deluxe as collateral and another fifteen dollars that he fished out of his skeptical wife’s purse to purchase his first cart, located across the street from the Goodyear factory. “I was concerned at first,” Margaret Karcher later explained. “Back then, you didn’t think of going into debt, and what were we going to do? We didn’t have the money to buy a hot dog cart.” But Karcher was determined and the transaction was completed. When he showed his wife the handwritten receipt signed “received from Louis Richmond for $326 for cart 7/17/41,” she dryly told her husband. “I guess we have a hot dog cart.”

  Margaret Karcher’s doubts evaporated quickly. The little stand did a brisk business selling hot dogs, chilidogs, and tamales for a dime apiece and soda for a nickel to the plant employees working double shifts during World War II. More than six decades later, Karcher proudly recalled his take on his first day of business: “It was July 17, 1941. We made $14.75.”

  A year later, the Karchers purchased a second cart; Carl worked at one while his wife manned the other. When Karcher was drafted in 1945 (he served as a cook at Fort Ord in Monterey Bay, California), Margaret took over and ran the business. When the war ended eight months later, Karcher returned from his military service to find that the small business he had left behind was thriving.

  By the time the Snyders called upon Carl Karcher in 1948, he had four hot dog stands and had opened his first full-service restaurant called Carl’s Drive-In Barbeque in Anaheim, down the street from Margaret’s family home on North Palm Street (the property would later become the first headquarters of Carl Karcher Enterprises). Less than ten years after leaving his family farm in Ohio, Karcher had reached a level of success that stretched beyond even his own imagination. “I always heard that if you had three or more locations you were a chain operator,” he later said.

  At thirty-one years old, Karcher was a few years younger than Harry Snyder—but he was an elder statesman when it came to the fast-food business. That first meeting would be the start of a lifelong friendship between the Karchers and the Snyders, who went on to become friendly rivals. The two couples had much in common. Tireless and hands-on, each pair worked as a team, and both couples went on to build their businesses based on equal doses of hard work, strong faith, and dedication to family (the Karchers eventually had twelve children). Karcher’s hardscrabble childhood had produced the belief that luck was something you made yourself, a lesson with which Harry Snyder was all too familiar himself.

  When Karcher met the Snyders, Carl told them to focus on a great product and to maintain the personal touch. “It’s so important to make people feel special,” he explained. Karcher also shared his core value. “My whole philosophy is never give up.” However, during that first meeting, Karcher found that the aspiring entrepreneurs already had very specific ideas about how they planned to run their business and treat their employees. Many decades later, when he was “ninety-years young,” Karcher still appeared struck by it. “They were very particular about their people smiling,” he said. “They wanted their employees to feel like they were part of the company, like they were owners themselves.”

  Despite suffering from the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease, Karcher could still recall his first impression of Harry and Esther Snyder. “They were two great people who were dedicated to each other,” he said. Affable and surprisingly munificent, Karcher explained that at the time he had no problem sharing his expertise with the couple. “I have always said that competition just makes you stronger. You shouldn’t be afraid of the competition. They make you stay on top of your game. If another chain started near a Carl’s Jr., it showed that we had a good location and it brought more people in. I told the Snyders that it’s very important to have respect for your competitors. I may have had a different philosophy than some of the others. But I believe that your competitors are really your friends. They keep you on your toes.”

  On October 22, 1948, the Snyders opened their first burger joint across the street from their house on Garvey Avenue. It was a modest, low-slung box on a very small lot. It was Harry’s philosophy to stress fresh ingredients and high quality. As his nephew Bob Meserve (who began working for his aunt and uncle in 1962, when he was seventeen years old) explained, Harry “wanted to take the lettuce out of the ground, the tomato off the vine, and the onion and prepare the burger fresh right now. That was his goal.”

  The couple sold a spartan menu of twenty-five-cent hamburgers, thirty-cent cheeseburgers, fifteen-cent french fries, and ten-cent soft drinks. Aside from a tiny nearby grocery, Nordling’s Market, and the large trailer park directly across the road on Garvey, the neighborhood was marked by wide swaths of land crossed by dirt roads and the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance. The stand was situated on the road to the neighboring town of El Monte; Baldwin Park itself was located on the well-traveled route between Los Angeles and Palm Springs.

  It was Harry who came up with the new venture’s name—IN-N-OUT HAMBURGERS—and the couple erected a red neon sign with elongated corners, white block lettering, and stripes. The sign, pitched by the side of the road, broadcast In-N-Out’s early motto: “NO DELAY.”

  Harry had anticipated the significant role that the car would continue to play in California. Baldwin Park was one of many small towns linked by streetcars that were fast transforming themselves into tract houses connected by a network of high-speed highways. The highways soon replaced the streetcars altogether. American life was becoming increasingly mobile. The exodus from the cities in favor of the suburbs meant that people had longer commutes. More women were working and less an
d less time was devoted to food preparation in the home. One of the first casualties of the new on-the-go lifestyle was the sit-down meal.

  These little restaurants cropping up all over on the roadsides were known simply as the drive-in. Many consider the Pig Stand, which opened on the corner of Sunset and Vermont in Hollywood in 1932, to be the first. It got its start in Texas in 1921 by Dallas candy and tobacco magnate Jessie G. Kirby, who appreciated the growing attachment people had to their cars, and his partner Reuben W. Jackson, a prominent physician. The early Texas Pig Stands used waiters who took orders and served customers still parked in their cars. By the time the chain had grown to sixty locations, carhop drive-ins were popping up all over.

  Drive-ins became an adventure in eating. It was said that the number of drive-in restaurants rivaled the number of automobiles in Southern California. Food stands with bright neon signs and carhop girls, those attractive young women dressed up in flashy costumes who served patrons in their cars using specially made trays attached to car windows, dotted the landscape. In fact, they came to define the landscape. Popular in Southern California, they soon spread to the rest of the country. “Houston Drive-In Trade Gets Girl Show with Its Hamburgers,” was the headline accompanying a 1940 Life magazine cover story featuring Sivil’s Drive-In in Texas—the story featured a full-length photograph of a Sivil’s carhop outfitted head-to-toe in her satin majorette costume.

  The surge in motorists and motoring meant that there was a captive audience of potential customers. And to attract them, the drive-ins used architecture, the kitschier and louder the better. Square and rectangular buildings became circular neon palaces; fanciful colored lights swirled and flickered, inviting passersby. Nothing was too whimsical or outlandish. There were drive-ins in the shape of outsized hot dogs, bowls of chili, donuts, and even gigantic root beer bottles. On the California border with Tijuana, the Gorro Drive Inn was built in the shape of a giant sombrero. And Seattle’s well-known Igloo Drive-In had two domed igloos that could seat seventy inside while carhops dressed in ski-togs and white boots in the winter and short skirts in the summer served “Husky Burgers” and “Boeing Bombers” in the parking lot.

  Then In-N-Out arrived.

  The Snyders’ burger shack was tiny, it had no indoor seating, and there was little room for a full-fledged drive-in with carhops. Harry, an amateur electronics enthusiast, came up with an idea that would compensate for these deficits. He dispensed with the carhops altogether and replaced them with an invention of his own: a simple two-way speaker box made out of a few off-the-shelf electrical components that was connected to the eatery’s kitchen. That way, motorists could order at one end of a driveway into a small white box attached to a pole dug into the road and then proceed over the gravel drive-through lane to pick up their food at the other end.

  That’s how Harry ended up with the name In-N-Out Hamburgers. The simple, to-the-point name reflected the uncomplicated view of the Snyders. Later abbreviated to In-N-Out Burgers, it was lucid shorthand for this new model burger joint: customers driving in to order their food and then driving out without leaving their cars. Harry’s two-way speaker box was an invention that was as innovative as it was practical; it perfectly reflected America’s growing interest in technological gadgetry and its growing obsession with rapid consumption and carryout food. In-N-Out Burger was just the right kind of eatery for a new kind of America, an America that was constantly on the go.

  Yet, Harry’s new speakerphone drive-through format got off to something of a troubled start. In 1948, most customers were bewildered by the invention that in time became as standard and familiar as fast food itself. The Snyders had to show customers how to use the drive-through; they even enlisted their young sons to help.

  Astonishingly, Harry Snyder and In-N-Out have received scant recognition for coming up with what is essentially the formula for today’s drive-through system. Certainly, others have come forward to claim credit. Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s, boasted that he invented “the first modern day, drive-through window,” when he rolled out his second Wendy’s location in Columbus, Ohio—but that was in 1971, a good twenty-three years after Snyder’s invention. Even McDonald’s first drive-through window didn’t appear until 1975, when it opened its initial model in Sierra Vista, Arizona, near the Fort Huachuca military base. In 1951, Jack in the Box introduced its own intercom “food machine” in San Diego. Back in 1931, the Pig Stand had devised a kind of primitive drive-through where motorists drove in and placed their order with a young male order taker and then exited—but their system relied upon an entirely human ordering and delivery process.

  A clutch of what were called “drive-up windows” didn’t really appear on the scene with any kind of critical mass until the mid-1950s. Soon resourceful drive-in owners began deploying a host of electronic ordering devices that promised both novelty and speed. However, they were hardly streamlined or elegant, and were made with such items as vacuum tubes, bulky switches, and carbon microphones. In many cases, carhops were still used to deliver the food. One of the best-known of the time was Sonic America’s Drive-in. In 1954, the Stillwater, Oklahoma, shop introduced its own electronic ordering service, billed as “Service with the Speed of Sound!” Motorists pulled up to a row of parking positions and ordered their food through a handheld line connected to Sonic’s kitchen.

  Soon, a host of electronic ordering devices with names like Aut-O-Hop, Dine-A-Mike, and Teletray came onto the market. Despite their proliferation, they did not come into play until several years after Snyder pioneered In-N-Out Burger’s own two-way speakerphone. As Esther Snyder once proudly told the Los Angeles Times, In-N-Out was known as “the granddaddy of the drive-throughs.”

  At the very least, Snyder’s stamp on the car and fast-food cultures certainly popularized the device and served as a prototype for all other fast-food establishments. And while In-N-Out modestly bills itself as “California’s first drive-through,” in all probability it was the country’s first as well. In-N-Out’s “granddaddy” gave rise to an entire world of drive-through banks, liquor stores, pharmacies, restaurants, dry cleaners, and even drive-through wedding chapels. In fact, the drive-through became so pervasive that decades later, in the 1990s, car manufacturers began to outfit front seats with cup holders to facilitate dashboard dining. Fast-food restaurants created meals tailor-made for one-handed steering and one-handed eating free from spills and dripping. More than a half century after Harry Snyder premiered his invention, the fast-food industry spawned a host of high tech gadgets all founded on the same premise as that first two-way speakerphone. However, according to government records, Harry Snyder never took out a patent on his invention.

  At the start of In-N-Out Burger, it was just Esther and Harry. The Snyders did everything themselves. They prepared the hamburger patties (using an ice cream scooper to mold them and then their own palms to flatten them), peeled the potatoes, sliced the onions and tomatoes, and stirred up the secret sauce (that Harry concocted and would spend years perfecting). Harry ran the gas grill; Esther was in charge of the books. She had a real talent for numbers and a mind like a steel trap. She used her home kitchen table as an office. The couple worked punishing hours, often logging fourteen-or fifteen-hour days. The long hours and hard work never daunted Esther, in large part because she never for an instant doubted her husband. “Anything he decided to do usually turned out well,” she once said, “because he would work quite hard. He was a person who, if you gave him a job and it was difficult, he would figure it out and not let go until he knew it well.”

  On In-N-Out’s first day of business, the couple sold a total of forty-seven hamburgers. During their first month, they sold two thousand, bringing in an estimated $1,100. In recalling those early weeks, Esther Snyder once said “Many cold, smoggy nights were spent during the first few months of operation, but it was worthwhile.” During the early years, the Snyders made great personal sacrifices. They rarely spent money on themselves; in fact, it wa
s some time before they bought a television. Instead, the couple funneled every cent they made back into the business.

  From the start, Baldwin Park’s locals lined up to eat at In-N-Out. Some of the Snyders’ biggest fans lived just across the street at the trailer park on Garvey. A few of the Barnes Circus families still lived there and often a few could be seen rigging a high wire three feet off the ground to practice their act while others rode their unicycles around the park’s perimeter. They’d have barbecues and picnics and run across the street to pick up bagfuls of In-N-Out burgers. In fact, a whole generation of kids who lived in Baldwin Park’s trailer parks grew up on In-N-Out. “Our early support came from the kind people of Baldwin Park,” Esther proudly declared. “Those were the days we made our many friendships with the residents of Baldwin Park.”

  Margaret Howard was sixteen years old when In-N-Out first opened up. Howard lived with her family on a chicken ranch in Baldwin Park. At seventy-five years old she still vividly recalled the first time she ate there. “I remember because I was in high school and they were real good hamburgers,” she explained. “My father didn’t like us to eat out. He wanted my brother and I to eat our meals at home, so we conned our friends to take us there.” When that didn’t work, Howard said that she purposefully missed the school bus from Covina High School and walked the ten miles home. “That way I could go to In-N-Out on the way back. I got chewed out for it when I got home,” she laughed. “But I got to eat at In-N-Out.” Soon enough, going to great lengths in order to eat one of their fresh and juicy burgers had become a common practice among In-N-Out’s rabid fans.