were filled with pencils, erasers, rubber bands, and paper clips, and threw all of these things into the laundry truck on top of all the ledgers. I directed the building manager to burn all the material in the furnace. This whole episode absolutely appalled Mrs. Kelley. She stared at me in disbelief, but the books were burned, and nothing was left in the office except for our two desks and chairs.
Mrs. Kelley wouldn’t speak to me for several weeks. With no bookkeeping to do, I noticed that she kept very busy in the kitchen, the bakeshop, and on the counter supervising our food preparation and customer servicing. Within a short period of time, the service on the cafeteria line and the quality of our food gradually began to improve.
Several weeks after the incident, she finally came to me. “Mr. McLamore, I hated you when you burned all of my books. I had been keeping them faithfully for over twenty-five years, but I can now see that you were right. They were not serving a useful purpose. I have the time now to do the things that I was trained for and I am enjoying my work much more. I am also pleased to see that our business is improving.”
From that moment on, Mrs. Kelley and I were the very best of friends. In fact, she was almost like a mother to me. No doubt I had been too impetuous and abrupt in handling the matter, but dramatizing it got us focused on the right issues. Redundancy eliminated.
Mrs. Kelley and I concentrated on building sales and profits. What we accomplished was impressive because, as it turned out, we made more profit during my first year than the YMCA had made in the entire previous thirty years combined.
My experience at the YMCA made me begin to think in terms of organizing people and developing operating systems. This seemed to be the necessary first step in building a profit-making enterprise. It was not only a thrill for me to have produced such impressive results, but it gave me a sense of other kinds of opportunities that might become available in the food-service industry. At a young age and already successful in my first job, I began to believe that I was capable of achieving solid results in the restaurant business. I was learning how much fun it was to make a profit, and the pleasure and satisfaction of doing so would stay with me for the rest of my life.
I began to think in terms of my own situation. My $267 per month salary was very low even by 1947 standards, and it was difficult to envision raising a family and owning a house and farm on such a small income.
When her time came, Nancy went to the hospital and delivered a beautiful girl who we named Pamela (although we always called her Pam). I also thought it would be nice to have a little dog, so I bought a boxer puppy that we named Bambi. With a new baby and a puppy, we had managed to double the size of the family overnight!
A few weeks later, Nancy was sitting in a chair in the living room with Pam and Bambi cuddled up beside her while I was reading the paper. Hearing a strange noise, I looked up and saw a crack in the plaster working its way across the ceiling above us. Grabbing Nancy, the baby, and the dog, I rushed them out of the room just as the entire ceiling crashed down in a cloud of dust. With our modest furnishings and new apartment pretty badly damaged, I thought it might be a good time to look for another place to live.
I came across an advertisement offering a five-acre farm for sale near Newark, Delaware, a community just a few miles from Wilmington. After lunch we drove out and looked at the farm, with three bedrooms, a nice fireplace, a large kitchen, living room, and dining room. It sat on five acres of land bordering a wooded area and a lake. We fell in love with it and bought it for nine thousand dollars. This became our first real home, and even though it was modest by any standards, it was all ours and we thought it was wonderful.
My job at the YMCA by that time was going very well. I made a point of meeting as many local businessmen as I could because I wanted to develop a profitable banquet business. I felt that by serving lunches and dinners to large gatherings I would make use of the three banquet rooms. The idea caught on quickly and profits from this growing banquet business came in steadily. The management of the YMCA was impressed with our financial performance. I was making more money for them than they had ever thought possible.
One of the local restaurateurs in Wilmington had taken note of my success at the YMCA, and, after a number of meetings, he convinced me to quit my job to go to work for him. The results were nearly catastrophic. It turned out that we just didn’t get along very well. After a few months in this job I was dismissed one evening after a particularly difficult confrontation. I drove back to the farm that evening and broke the news to Nancy. It was particularly troubling because we had very little money left and Nancy was pregnant again.
While at the YMCA, I had noticed a restaurant across the street that seemed to be busy twenty-four hours a day. It was called Toddle House and it was part of a chain of quick-service, short-order restaurants that enjoyed significant growth in the ’30s and ’40s. The first White Castle opened in 1921 in Wichita, Kansas. The founder of White Castle, Billy Ingram, is generally acknowledged as being the father of the hamburger. His very successful White Castle concept was cloned by a number of imitators, one of which was Toddle House. By 1949, when I began to look for a business of my own, food-service chains such as these had become well established and were operating very successfully.
Customers in those restaurants were served at a straight-line restaurant counter with only ten seats. All the food preparation was done behind the counter and in front of the customers. Clean stainless steel equipment was used throughout. The menu consisted of short orders and breakfast items such as orange juice, eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, waffles, toast, coffee, and, of course, the main feature was hamburgers.
In the 1920s and 1930s, White Castle and their numerous imitators offered variations on a basic theme. Toddle House was one of a number of restaurant chains piggybacking the styling and success of the original White Castle. Their restaurants were clean and efficient, and they delivered a great price-value package to their customers. Open twenty-four hours a day, they proved to be popular places to go for quick, affordable food any time. Run properly and in good locations, they were very profitable operations.
It seemed that the Toddle House was busy every time I went by, no matter what time of day or night. The ten seats were full most of the time, and often there were people standing up waiting to be served. It looked like a sound business to me and I began to think that a similar operation could be equally successful.
Next door to the Toddle House was a vacant building that had once been a bicycle repair shop. I introduced myself to the landlady and found that she was very anxious to rent the facility for three hundred dollars a month. I felt that if I copied the Toddle House concept, I could operate a successful competing business of my own right next door to it.
I signed a lease for the building and designed a food-service concept that was just a little bit fancier than the Toddle House, but essentially the same kind of operation. Instead of putting in a straight-line counter, I decided to install a horseshoe-shaped counter with fourteen seats. I decided to make the interior of the restaurant much different than the Toddle House. Instead of having a small space for food preparation and customer seating, I designed a much larger interior. The production area would consist of stainless steel tables, a fryer, gas grill, refrigerator, exhaust hood, coffee maker, and drink station.
I felt the larger area inside the restaurant could be made very attractive by using linoleum flooring and wallpaper. This would give the customers a pleasant view of the food preparation processes and provide a certain amount of ambiance. In the event the seats were fully occupied when customers arrived, I had comfortable seating to accommodate the overflow.
I installed one of the first air-conditioning units that were just then coming into the commercial market. Air-conditioning was still a novel customer luxury in retail shops. This gave me a distinct competitive advantage over the Toddle House, which didn’t have one. I remembered the discomfort of trying to sleep in hot hotel rooms, and I was fully aware that eating in hot restaurants wasn’t any fun either.
All of this scrambling to design, build, and open the restaurant took place in the summer and fall of 1949. Several other important events were taking place at the same time. Our second child, Lynne, arrived on September 16 of that year. While I was busy designing, planning, and building the restaurant, Nancy took on the challenge of running a bigger household.