Hasn’t the weather been something else this year? Every time the temperature hits the 90-degree mark for a day or two, another front moves in from the Pacific to cool us down again.
We’ve had the same thing in Las Vegas. We’ve only had one 90-degree day this year. No one is complaining. We all know what lies ahead. There were days last summer when Las Vegas matched or topped the Phoenix-area temperatures.
I’ve taken a lot of ribbing about not retiring in a cooler climate for my second home.
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I was reading in The Arizona Republic last week that a groundbreaking ceremony was recently held for the first family–owned White Castle fast food restaurant west of the Mississippi River.
Two Las Vegas locations are operated by a franchisee. One is on “The Strip” and the other is on Fremont Street in the Downtown area.
The popular small hamburgers have been a favorite of Midwesterners since the Depression era when they sold for five cents apiece.
The north Scottsdale location is being built near the Talking Stick Resort and Casino at Via de Ventura and the 101.
The groundbreaking ceremony was a fun affair, in which giant spatulas were used to break ground and rock legend Alice Cooper spoke about being a small boy in the Midwest and “growing up” on the two-by-two-inch burgers that came to be known as sliders.
White Castle CEO Lisa Ingram said Arizona was selected for the first location of a family–owned White Castle restaurant west of the Mississippi River because the state has a big population of former Midwesterners and people who used to live on the East Coast.
Ingram said the timing is right because of improvements in the company’s supply chain. Specifically the company had to figure out how to supply the Vegas operations with buns and patties, which White Castle produces.
“Now that we’ve figured that out, it opened up some opportunities for us to look out West and to look at other markets,” Ingram said.
This is all fine and good about having a White Castle relatively close by. But it was Fountain Hills that introduced White Castle to the Phoenix market, and that event did not receive even a mention at the groundbreaking.
Now that makes a good lead-in to tell the White Castle story again.
The community was planning a 10th anniversary party in 1980 when the White Castle idea originated. A 12-member committee representing different clubs and organizations in town planned a 17-day celebration that began with the Fountain Festival and was to culminate with a major celebration. Committee members spent many hours contemplating what to do to make it something special. After one of the meetings, then Chamber President Bruce Rogers went across the parking lot from the MCO complex to grab a quick burger at the Village Pub.
At the bar as he started to eat his burger, two women, K.C. Evans and Carol Braithwaite, sitting next to him were talking about the best burger they’d ever had – a White Castle. Rogers had grown up in southern California and had never heard of them. He became intrigued when he found out you could only get them east of the Mississippi River and there was a lot of nostalgia about the small square hamburgers that were cooked over a bed of fried onions.
At the next committee meeting, he suggested the possibility of planning a White Castle hamburger event during which we could make the claim of Fountain Hills having the world’s largest takeout order in addition to having the world’s tallest fountain. The two women became members of the White Castle Day planning committee.
White Castle headquarters was contacted to see if it could be done. They hired a firm which figured out a way to quick-freeze the burgers, then ship them cross country to Arizona where they could be microwave-heated back to their original condition.
The Chamber sent out a press release to Valley media that a White Castle Day would be held, and the Chamber was inundated with phone calls.
The original order was for 5000 burgers. With all the interest shown, Rogers decided to up the order to 9,999 hamburgers and one cheeseburger for himself. The event was held to conclude the 17-day celebration. The burgers were sold out in two hours and 40 minutes.
The event received world-wide publicity, exactly what the Chamber and the anniversary committee were looking for. The Chamber also seized the opportunity to turn it into a regular annual fund-raising event. The following year, the order was upped to 100,000 and the original Lone Ranger Clayton Moore rode a white horse into town ahead of the moving van with all of the refrigerated burgers. Television’s Batman, Adam West, was the guest celebrity the following year. In 1985 and ’86, 176,000 burgers were sold each year. That was the maximum number that would fit in a refrigerated truck. Not all of those were cooked during a weekend; many were sold frozen in the case. The ’86 event was the last one held, because White Castle began marketing their hamburgers in grocery stores nation-wide. That process developed to ship the burgers from Ohio to Fountain Hills is what killed our chances of continuing the event.
Suddenly the appeal of Fountain Hills being the only place in the West where a person could buy a White Castle (one or two days a year) was gone.
