Buy ‘em by the Sack!— White Castle’s 100th

Buy ’em by the Sack!

WHITE CASTLE’S 100TH BY RANDALL EDWARDS

At a crucial turning point in the hero’s journey of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, downtrodden investment banker Harold Lee makes the shift from anxious to assertive and tells stoner buddy Kumar Patel what he really wants: “The feeling that comes over a man when he gets exactly what he desires. I need that feeling!”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Kumar asks, in the 2004 comedy film. “We gotta go to White Castle.” For 100 years, the burger chain that launched fast food and made the hamburger America’s go-to meal on the go has depended on those desires—they prefer the word craving—to keep customers coming to the Castle, 24 hours a day and seven days a week. On March 10, White Castle celebrates the 100th anniversary of the launch of the White Castle System of Eating Houses, a company founded by Walter Anderson and Edgar Waldo “Billy” Ingram Sr. and based in Ohio since 1934. The company’s backstory actually begins a few years before 1921, however, when (according to legend) Anderson grew frustrated with the slow pace of frying a meatball on a griddle and used his spatula to smash the ground beef into a flat patty, thus frying the first hamburger. BURGERS FOR A NICKEL

White Castle makes no serious assertion that Anderson invented the hamburger. In fact, there are multiple locations in the U.S. where claim is laid to having first served a flat patty of ground beef between two pieces of bread. But the hamburger is undoubtedly an American creation, and by 1920 Walt Anderson had developed a small but successful business selling them for 5 cents each in four makeshift burger joints in Wichita, Kansas. Anderson, an itinerant grill cook with a history of failed business ventures, had nonetheless figured out how to make his hungry customers happy. He urged his customers to “buy ‘em by the sack,” a phrase still used in marketing the small burgers popularized by the chain. Ingram, a successful Wichita businessman, entered the story when Anderson wanted to expand and needed a co-signer for additional capital, according to David Gerard Hogan’s Selling ‘em by the Sack,” a history of the company and its impact on fast food. The early 1920s was a pivotal period in American culinary history, explains Hogan, a scholar of fastfood history and chair of the History and Political Science Department at Heidelberg University.

All images in this story are from the Ohio History Connection's White Castle Collection. Explore many more images from the White Castle Collection at ohiomemory.org. Click on "Collections," then "White Castle Digital Collection."

Billboard near the Louisville airport, 1939 Customers at the counter, circa 1950s

White Castle interior, circa 1930s White Castle delivery truck, St. Louis, 1930s

Growing cities, advances in mass transportation, automobiles and shift working combined to make a warm meal, served quickly from a convenient location, more popular with the American working class, Hogan says. A potential obstacle to White Castle’s success, however, was the tainted reputation of ground meat, which had suffered from the publication of various exposés about the meat-packing industry. CLEANLINESS AND STABILITY

Ingram’s first contribution to Anderson’s business was not to change the meal, which remained centered around a small hamburger with grilled onions, but to package it in a way that it would become more palatable to a broad range of American diners. The earliest decisions, starting with the name, aimed to legitimize the hamburger, with “White” reflecting cleanliness and “Castle” evoking stability. The original “castles,” built in Wichita, Omaha and Kansas City between 1921 and 1925, were whitewashed structures with fortress-like architecture, loosely modeled on Chicago’s famed Water Tower, the only public building to survive the Great Chicago Fire. Ingram demanded scrupulous cleanliness from his employees, who ground the meat out in the open, where diners could watch. The first White Castles, like Anderson’s diners, were situated near the gates of factories and from the early days of the business remained open 24 hours. The late night availability of the burgers, today associated with satisfying the cravings of young partiers, began as an appeal to shift workers, says company Vice President Jamie Richardson. “We’ve been a 24-hour business since the 1920s and we think of it as a late-night oasis for all our fans and friends, whether a group of friends out late at night or someone working the late shift.” A STANDARDIZED BUSINESS

From the beginning, Ingram focused on standardizing all aspects of the business, from the layout and construction of the buildings to the menu of hamburgers, coffee, Coca-Cola (a business partner from the beginning) and pie. “More than just the burger, the delivery system is what Ingram really pushed,” Hogan said in an interview. “It was selling in volume, it was selling fast and furious, getting them in and getting them out the door with a sack of the product.” So while Walt Anderson may not have invented the hamburger, historians generally credit White Castle with bringing assembly line processes to casual dining, creating the distinctly American style of restaurant known as fast food.

Ingram also brought vertical integration to his restaurant business, creating allied companies to manufacture the white uniform caps and other paper products used at White Castle (Paperlynen Co., 1932) and construct the stores (Porcelain Steel Buildings Co., 1934).

Walt Anderson and Billy Ingram, founders of White Castle Systems Inc., about 1927

Ingram bought out Anderson’s share in the company in 1933 and over the next few years made Columbus, Ohio, a major center of the fast food industry by moving the corporate headquarters to the city, along with Paperlynen and the Porcelain Steel Buildings Co. IMITATION IS FLATTERY

White Castle was an instant success. By October 1925, the company sold 84,000 hamburgers in a week. Just as quickly, the chain’s success spawned copycats, with similarly styled buildings popping up all over the country under banners like White Fortress

White Castle Number 6, Wichita, Kansas, 1923. White Castle opened its first Ohio restaurants in Cincinnati in 1927 and Columbus in 1929.

and White Turret, profiting from Ingram’s successful rehabilitation of the hamburger’s reputation.

White Castle was an instant success. By October 1925, the company sold 84,000 hamburgers in a week.

In fact, Hogan says White Castle made the hamburger the first true American ethnic food, which may have had a more lasting impact than the development of the fast food industry. As a nation of immigrants, the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century was highly Balkanized in its cuisine. Within the first few decades of the century, the hamburger became a symbol of America’s fastpaced, hard-driving culture. Ingram “turned the hamburger from being considered virtually inedible to becoming the daily meal for millions of Americans,” Hogan writes. Twenty years after Billy Ingram moved his highly successful fast-food chain to Ohio, Ray Kroc visited a McDonald brothers’ restaurant in California and sold them on the idea of franchising. In the post-war era, McDonald’s and other fast-food chains spread throughout the country and, eventually, around the world, while White Castle, after suffering a decline in the 1940s, remained a mostly regional brand, primarily in the Midwest and Northeast.

Brochure in the shape of a White Castle, 1932

Truck moving Minneapolis White Castle Number 15, 1957

White Castle employees wearing white shirts, black bow ties and paper hats, 1930s

Brochure map showing White Castle locations, 1932.

Three young women enjoy coffee and hamburgers at the counter of an unidentified White Castle in the 1930s.

The company history says it was the first fast-food chain to hit the 1 billion burger sales mark, as early as 1961, despite being late to move into the rapidly growing suburbs. But the company has since been eclipsed by McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and several other burger-based chains. And the principal reason for its more measured growth was that Ingram refused to offer franchises or go public. With Lisa Ingram, Billy Ingram’s great-granddaughter, now serving as CEO, White Castle remains a familyowned business and still doesn’t franchise. And with about 370 locations in 13 states, White Castle’s rank among the major quick-serve-industry brands is near the bottom of the top 50. Richardson says the refusal to franchise or go public may limit the chain’s growth, but it’s allowed the brand to maintain a close relationship with its customers and employees, both of which are remarkably loyal.

Left: White Castle created a standard of uniformity. Top: Buns from White Castle cities. Bottom: Chart showing how women should dress at work. White Castle had high expectations for the appearance of all employees. “Being privately held gives us permission to consider not only next month but three years or five years and 10 years down the road,” he says. “We’ve always focused on being the best and not the biggest.”

Randall Edwards is a freelance writer who lives in Columbus.

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In Selling ‘em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food, David G. Hogan “traces the history of the hamburger’s rise as a distinctive American culinary and ethnic symbol through the prism of one of its earliest promoters.” The chain was, according to the author, “the first to market both the hamburger and the ‘to go’ carry-out style to American consumers.”