In-N-Out Burger by Stacy Perman Read Free Book Online Page B

venture. Noddin reportedly put up some $5,000 in start-up capital.
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    Harry Snyder’s instinct was a good one. Southern California was the most heavily motorized place on the planet. Already by 1940 there were over 1 million cars in Los Angeles—five automobiles for every four families. It was reported at the time that Angelinos spent more money on their cars than their clothes. Moreover, the Los Angeles Police Department had more traffic officers than the San Francisco Police Department had policemen on their entire force.
    In the wake of World War II, small food stands selling burgers, tamales, and hot dogs were spreading across the Southland like wild-fire. They were—at least in the beginning—little more than shacks fronted by a couple of stools, needing only a minimal amount of space.
    The legendary Original Tommy’s World Famous Hamburgers got its start when Oklahoma City–born Tommy Koulax, the son of Greek immigrants, began selling his twelve-ounce chili cheeseburgers out of an eight-foot by fifteen-foot cinderblock stand on the corner of Beverly and Rampart boulevards in downtown Los Angeles. Koulax, a shipyard welder during World War II, initially used his 1929 Model A Ford as his storeroom. On May 15, 1946, Tommy’s first day of business, Koulax drummed up eight dollars in sales. “My grandmother told me he spent so much time there that he slept on top of the onion sacks,” recalled Koulax’s granddaughter Dawna Bernal. So busy was the “Shack,” as it was affectionately known, that in 1949, Koulax turned Tommy’s into a twenty-four-hour stand, enlarging the tiny space by adding an awning. In 1965, Koulax was able to purchase the entire southeast corner of Beverly and Rampart (eventually he came to own three of the four corners). And in 1970, Koulax boasted that Tommy’s had raked in $1 million; soon he began to expand his popular chain across Los Angeles. When Koulax died in 1992 at the age of seventy-three, there were seventeen Tommy stands and the original was selling twenty-five thousand burgers each week.
    Like Tommy’s, many of the stands were fairly lucrative. There was a demand for cheap food from a constant flow of customers who worked in nearby factories, mills, offices, and shops. Not coincidentally, this casual new way of dining dovetailed with the rise of car culture and the establishment of the extensive interstate highway system that was starting to crisscross the nation. With better roads, people could travel farther. Along the way people would need places to rest, sleep, and above all eat.
    These little burger stands heralded a new way of eating. And this new way of eating eventually had an impact on America’s economy, topography, popular culture, and even the way Americans were viewed abroad. In time, there were negative consequences, to be sure, but in the period immediately following World War II, these little burger stands signaled sweeping changes in the country. And the capital of this grand sweep of changes was Southern California, where love for the automobile was perhaps only rivaled by love for the hamburger.

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