Oh, yeah, it was 1981.
Several of my siblings and I rode our horses over to my sister's
house. She and her husband lived behind a restaurant that had a
drive-through lane.
We thought it would be fun to place an order at the drive-through
lane and then ride our horses to the drive-through window to pick up
our food. You can imagine the employee's surprise when we pulled
around the corner of the building on our horses. She said that we
were the first people to ever do that.
Anyway, thinking about that gave me the idea for this week's
story. The story is about a man named Rex who was voted "Most Likely
to Succeed" by his high school class -- despite the fact that he
dropped out of high school at age 15!
Rex became a big TV star, but he was not an actor. He was also a
huge philanthropist, as he and his wife donated millions to various
children's charities.
Rex was born in Atlantic City, N.J., in 1932, never knowing his
birth mother. She was a single mom who gave him up for adoption. Rex
took his adoptive father's name, and his adoptive mother died when
Rex was just 5. Rex's construction worker dad remarried twice, but
both of these women died young, too. Rex's dad moved the family to a
new city whenever he took a new construction job.
Rex found his purpose early in life, and that purpose was to run
the best restaurant in the world. At age 12, he began working at a
restaurant in Fort Wayne, Ind., which was called Hobby House. It was
here that Rex met the legendary Col. Harland Sanders of KFC fame.
When his dad moved again, Rex decided to stay in Fort Wayne. He
dropped out of school -- which he said was the biggest mistake of
his life -- and went to work full time. He went on to marry a
waitress at the restaurant. She was named Lorraine Buskirk. They had
five children, and the youngest one was named Melinda (her nickname
was Wendy).
Later, in 1962, Sanders asked Rex to move to Columbus, Ohio, to
take over four struggling restaurants in exchange for a 45 percent
stake. Rex did so well in turning them around that he sold his stake
back to Sanders for $1.5 million just five years later. One of Rex's
many innovations in the restaurant business was to create the
Kentucky Fried Chicken sign with the red-striped rotating bucket of
chicken.
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Rex went back to get his GED diploma 45 years after he dropped
out of school, even attending the prom with his wife, which is when
he was voted "Most Likely to Succeed." By the way, he and his wife
were also voted prom king and queen.
And what about that fast-food restaurant where we rode our horses
through the drive-through lane way back in 1981?
That would be our local Wendy's restaurant, which is part of the
chain that Rex David Thomas founded in 1969 in Columbus, Ohio. You
know him as Dave Thomas. Dave Thomas didn't invent the drive-up
window, but he was the first one to make it succeed. Later, he
became the first person to open salad bars in all of his
restaurants.
This high-school dropout was smart enough to figure out how to
grow a restaurant chain faster than anyone else could, too. He
offered franchises to people for an entire state or region, whereas
other franchise operations merely offered them on a city-by-city
basis. This helped Dave Thomas grow his Wendy's chain from 100
restaurants to 1,000 restaurants quicker than either McDonald's or
Burger King did.
He went on to build his chain into a $7 billion company with more
than 6,000 restaurants. His 800 TV commercials earned him a place in
the Guinness Book of World Records.
His biggest and proudest accomplishment, though, was the work he
did on behalf of children. One of his contributions is his Dave
Thomas Foundation for Adoption (http://www.davethomasfoundation.org),
which he and his wife established in 1992 -- one year before he
graduated from high school. Dave Thomas was once shy about the fact
that he was adopted, but he overcame that and went on to promote
adoption until the day he died, in 2002.
[By
PAUL NIEMANN]
Paul Niemann's column has appeared in
more than 75 newspapers and counting. He is the author of the
"Invention Mysteries" series of books and can be reached at
niemann7@aol.com.
Copyright Paul Niemann 2009
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columns)
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