a big wave of new business. I had to attract the reader’s attention to the advertisement itself. People needed to read what the advertising suggested, and Dinner Bell Charlie did that. He sold the steak, and he told people where they could get it. In addition to that, he invited others to see for themselves what this new personality really amounted to. There would be similarities in building the success of Burger King’s Whopper.
Unfortunately, at the same time the Brickell Bridge Restaurant began to perform very well, the Colonial Inn was heading downhill. The manager I put in charge had taken my very simple food-service concept and complicated it by adding all sorts of items to the menu. The result was that our quality had been compromised as an image of a well-managed, short-order restaurant specializing in hamburgers. Sales declined and so did the restaurant’s profitability. During the early years of the Brickell Bridge Restaurant’s struggles, the profits from the Colonial Inn had kept the wolf away from the family door. Now with that restaurant in trouble, I had to contend with problems caused by the management I had left in charge.
I had the good fortune at the Brickell Bridge Restaurant to meet a young man named Bill Bilohorka. Bill was a recent graduate of the Penn State School of Hotel and Restaurant Management, and one day he just walked in off the street and asked me for a job. With sales at the Brickell Bridge growing steadily, I was able to afford to take him on as an assistant manager, and he did a terrific job right from the beginning. I turned to Bill when things at the Colonial Inn started to go downhill and asked him if he would be willing to go to Wilmington, take over the restaurant, and try to sell it for me. It was obvious that absentee ownership a thousand miles from home was not working.
The urgent requirement to change management at the Colonial Inn occurred at a most inopportune time. Nancy was pregnant for the third time, and we were still living in our small, rented home. As July of 1953 approached and business at the Colonial Inn continued to deteriorate, I received ultimatums from my manager that I would have to sell the business to him on his terms or he would simply walk out on me. He assumed I was in a situation where I had no other choice.
Just as we reached a critical period in our negotiations, Nancy went into labor and I rushed her to Jackson Memorial Hospital on July 14, where she delivered a wonderful, healthy baby boy on her own birthday. We decided to call the baby Sterling Whitman McLamore. When I went to the hospital, I told Nancy about the situation in Wilmington. I had to leave that night and Bill Bilohorka had agreed to go with me and take over the restaurant. I said goodbye before heading to the airport with Bill. These memories of Nancy’s strength and character will always remain closely fixed in my mind.
When Bill and I arrived in Wilmington, I fired the manager and put Bill in charge of the restaurant, confident the Colonial Inn was in good hands. I returned to Miami a few days later. Nancy took on the responsibilities of managing the home and looking after two young girls and a new baby boy as if nothing had happened. I went back to my regular schedule at the Brickell Bridge Restaurant—sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. Business was good and getting better all the time. I kept my fingers crossed that Bill would be able to sell the Colonial Inn.
Of particular interest to me at the time was this new son of ours. I felt bad leaving Nancy alone to look after things while I was in Delaware for a few days. Ever since we were married, I worked long hours in restaurants struggling to make a success. Our growing family was very important to us, and I was looking forward to spending more time with them.
Bill was fortunate enough to find a buyer who paid us a reasonable sum for the business to close the deal. I retained a young attorney, Andrew J. Christie, newly graduated from law school and just starting in practice, to draw up the papers and effect the sale.
After Bill sold the Colonial Inn, he returned to Miami and rejoined me at the Brickell Bridge Restaurant where business was going well and profits satisfactory. By early 1954, I began discussing the possibility of joining Dave Edgerton, whom I had recently met, in the Insta-Burger King business. For some time, I had been thinking about starting a chain of restaurants myself. Dave’s enthusiasm for an idea to establish a chain of limited-menu restaurants intrigued me enough to investigate the matter. I liked what Dave showed me, but it was obvious that I needed to sell the Brickell Bridge Restaurant in order to come up with the capital necessary to get into this new business. It was Bill Bilohorka who came up with the money to buy the restaurant from me during the spring of that year.
Nancy and Bill showed me just how much the right partner could pave the way toward success when one might be floundering on their own. If you’re going to take on a partner, trust and a shared vision for a common goal is tantamount to both your successes.
With the sale of both the Colonial Inn and the Brickell Bridge Restaurant, I was ready to take on new and different challenges. I didn’t realize that the road ahead was full of potholes.
Dave Edgerton, cofounder of Burger King
David R. Edgerton, Jr. was brought up in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Illinois. He attended the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University and later found his way into the Howard Johnson’s organization where he worked his way up to manager status in the Miami area. He told me that he had managed their restaurant located in DuPont Plaza area in downtown Miami at the same time I was operating the Brickell Bridge Restaurant a scant 250 yards away on the west side of the Miami River.
By 1953, Dave was considering the possibility of opening a Dairy Queen franchise. He knew that the margins in soft ice cream sales were high, and he was attempting to learn more about the potential profitability of this business. One of his trips took him to Jacksonville, Florida, during the summer of 1953. Driving on Beach Boulevard in the community of Jacksonville Beach, he noticed a building under construction that looked very much like a Dairy Queen. He stopped in to have a closer look and met Keith G. Cramer and Matthew L. Burns. They informed Dave that this new business would be called “Insta-Burger” and have a menu consisting of eighteen-cent hamburgers, eighteen-cent milkshakes, ten-cent French fries, and ten-cent Coca Cola, root beer, and orange soft drinks.
The concept would be called a self-service drive-in to distinguish the restaurant from a carhop operation, which was the usual kind of service offered by drive-ins during that era. Cramer’s previous experience was at Keith’s Drive-In, a restaurant he operated in Daytona Beach. Both he and his father-in-law, Matthew Burns, were experienced food-service operators, who had recently visited the McDonald’s Speedy Service System drive-in located in San Bernardino, California. The McDonald brothers were not new to the restaurant business either. They had established their first carhop drive-in in 1937. After the war ended, they opened a single very successful carhop drive-in located at Fourteenth and E. Street in San Bernardino.
Although successful, it was turning into a teenage hangout, which tended to discourage a number of would-be customers. Realizing that over three-fourths of their food sales were in hamburgers, the McDonalds decided to redesign the operation, eliminate the carhops, and introduce a new concept which was the idea of self-service. Their focus was on speed of service and low prices. In their rebuilt, but much smaller restaurant, they served a grilled ten-to-the-pound hamburger patty on a bun for fifteen cents. It was dressed with ketchup, mustard, chopped onions, and two pickle slices, their prescribed way of serving a hamburger. Customers could order it any other way at the same price, but they had to wait a long time for their order to be filled.
The McDonald brothers’ new and innovative concept of food service caught on rapidly. The quick speed of service appealed to their new customers. Fresh French fries, milkshakes, and soft drinks
