This week’s Fountain Hills History Lesson is about an event in 1980, a year of celebration in Fountain Hills as the community marked its 10th anniversary.

A planning committee was formed consisting of members of the Chamber of Commerce, the Fountain Hills Civic Association and MCO Properties. The committee was chaired by Phyllis Martin, one of the MCO representatives.

I was asked if I would serve as one of the Chamber representatives. We first met in June and did so weekly until the celebration was held over 17 days in November.

When the main committee got together, most of the discussion was about the “big event” that would conclude the celebration and hopefully that would bring a great amount of good publicity for the community. One suggestion was to hold the biggest cake walk around the Fountain Park.

Another was to have a record number of kids of all ages participating in a board game such as Monopoly or Life.

We kept coming up short on ideas. After one of the meetings, Chamber President Bruce Rogers walked to the Village Pub for a quick burger. He sat at the bar next to two women who overheard him order a burger. The two women were K.C. Evans and Carol Braithwaite, who had moved here from Co-lumbus, Ohio, and had be-come Chamber volunteers.

You’ll never have a better burger than a White Castle, Bruce.” Braithwaite said.

He replied, “Never heard of it.” He had grown up in Southern California, and the small burgers were only sold east of the Mississippi River. They became popular during the Great Depression. 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, Rogers 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.

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 5,000 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 fundraising 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 the re-frigerated burgers. In 1985 and ’86, 176,000 burgers were sold each year. That was the maximum number that would fit in a refrigerated truck.

We didn’t cook all of those during a weekend. Many were sold frozen in the case. The ’86 event was the last one held, be-cause White Castle began marketing their hamburgers in grocery stores nationwide. 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.

I’ll give you the rest of the news of 1980 in our next Fountain Hills History Lesson.