ends race, age and social status. Better, then bigger, has been a business philosophy driving Waffle House since the first restaurant opened its doors on Labor Day 1955 in Avondale Estates, an Atlanta suburb. It was founded by neighbors Joe Rogers Sr., a former Toddle House executive, and Tom Forkner, an Atlanta realtor. The restaurant's expansion was so deliberate that despite the franchise frenzy of the late 1950s and early 1960s, there were only five Waffle Houses in 1961. Joe Rogers Jr. chuckles that he was an 8-year-old unpaid window washer when unit No. 1 started business. "I started working for pay when I was 14," he adds. "I've just grown up in it and done every job there was to do." Rogers graduated from Avondale High School, where he excelled in math and science, and attended Georgia Tech with ambitions to become an electrical engineer. "Somehow I found my way into management because I think I realized that's where I really wanted to be," Rogers says. After graduating from Tech with a degree in industrial management in 1968, Rogers served a year in the Air National Guard. He attended Harvard Business School to earn his master's degree, intending to become an investment banker. It wasn't until his second year at Harvard that Rogers saw Waffle House as his career. With his master's degree in hand, Rogers joined the Waffle House chain of about 75 restaurants in 1971 as vice president of finance. Two years later, Rogers succeeded his father as president of the company. His dad, Rogers says, decided "it was time for his generation to step aside and, if there was a future to be shaped, let the people who were going to live it shape it." Rogers recruited a cadre of former Georgia Tech classmates and friends to form a newera Waffle House management team. Thornton, an Alpha Tau Omega fraternity brother at Tech, was one of the first. What Tech people have always had in common is a willingness to work — and a very good, sensible approach to things," Rogers says. Thornton remembers the call from a fraternity brother inviting him to meet with Rogers about a job opportunity at Waffle House: "A bunch of us are getting together — old ATOs and Georgia Tech people — and we're going to apply some of the enlightened business principles that we picked Pal] 2000 • GEORGIA TECH
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