Why Burger King Got Banned from One Small Illinois Town

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. You’ve probably heard of Burger King. With over seven thousand locations and one of the most recognizable brands in America, you likely don’t know about the Burger King, singular, not plural. To tell the story of a war between two hamburger joints with the same name, is Chris Curdek, the town historian of Mattoon, Illinois. You’ll also be hearing from our Hillsdale intern, Nate Gallagher. Let’s get into the story.

00:00:52
Speaker 2: When I was a teenager, I started working at the Burger King in 1965, and I worked there until 1970. So I always tell people here at our history center that the Burger King put me through college. So I have a real close personal connection with the owners. And I was there during the time period when the famous Burger King versus Burger King legal action was going on. While this is a story about hamburgers, it doesn’t start on the grill. Instead, it begins somewhere far cooler. It was a soft-serve ice cream stand. In 1952, Gene Hoots bought it and continued to operate it, and the ice cream stand, it was called The Frigid Queen. Directly across the street from what became the Burger King and The Frigid Queen stand was the local telephone company operator station. So in the course of the day, all the ladies, primarily, that worked in the operator building would come across the street to get an ice cream cone, and they started asking him, “Hey, there’s no place near here for lunch. Have you ever thought about serving lunch?” So Gene originally put just a single grill and one deep-fat fryer in the back of the ice cream stand and started serving hamburgers, and so that was basically the birth of the Burger King. At that time, he was unaware that the chain of Burger King started down around Tampa, Florida.

00:02:29
Speaker 1: Jay Way at Burger King? Well,

00:02:35
Speaker 2: Gene, when he opened it as the Burger King, he had the foresight to register the Burger King name in the state of Illinois. But several years later, the Burger King chain opened a store up in Champaign, which is where the University of Illinois is. So, and that’s only forty-five minutes away from Mattoon. So at that time, Gene decided that that was getting too close for comfort. So when they opened the store in Champaign, Gene Hoots filed suit against the Burger King chain in state court. The national chain had not registered their name, so they kind of tried to pull a sleight of hand. They registered their name nationally and sued him in federal court, saying, “We’ve registered the name nationally.” And that lawsuit went on for several years and was finally adjudicated, I believe, in 1968 in the District Federal Court in Danville, Illinois. They ruled that even though his copyright was in the state, his copyright was superseded by the national copyright of the Burger King chain. But the settlement decreed that the Burger King chain could not locate within a twenty-five-mile radius of Mattoon, and that ruling still holds today. Well, a lot of people here knew about it, and of course, you know, everybody in Mattoon was really pulling for the Hootses to prevail, because by that time it was really, the restaurant was kind of a local icon, and of course, it was the story of, you know, Goliath and the Giant. Well, like I said, I worked there for five years when I was going to college. By that time, I was the night closer, and during that time I just developed a very intimate friendship with both of them. They were just tremendous people. They gave a jump start to a lot of high school kids; you know, a lot of us, it was our first job. To this day, and I’ve had a forty-seven-year career in business, and I still would look back and say several of the key moments I learned in business I learned working with Gene and Betty Hoots. One of the things that I always remember about working for them, and especially when I was the night manager, is they were hands-on. I mean, they worked in the restaurant every day. Every day at noon, Betty came in and worked on the dressing table, and at any given time in the evening, Gene might walk in the back door to see how things were going. And one of the things I learned from him and remembered for my whole business career is one of his sayings was, “The shadow of the boss is worth three employees.” Putting in that context, you never knew when he was going to walk in the back door, and so you conducted yourself accordingly. And in our high school years, when it came time for, you know, the junior-senior prom or something, they would come in and work in the evening so that their, what they called, their kids, you know, could go to the high school functions. I never missed a function because I had to go to work as long as I, you know, cleared it with them first, and they always called us their kids. It would be interesting to know how many kids actually got their working start working for the Mattoon Burger King to this day. The thing that you hear, and of course I’m here at our history center at the library, and we get a lot of it as visitors here that are returning to Mattoon and come back to kind of see some of the old-day stuff, and it is just again, it’s kind of one of those standing legacies in Mattoon that the people that have moved away when they come back to Mattoon, the first thing they want to do is go to the Burger King because it is really, it is a touchstone to all of our teenage years, going all the way back, you know, to the 1950s and the 1960s, through the seventies and through today. There is still that cachet of going back to the Burger King and reliving those days.

00:06:23
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Nate Gallagher, who is a college student at Hillsdale, where you can go to learn all the things that are good and beautiful in life and important in life. But also, let’s face it, this is an important aspect of a town in this country, Mattoon, Illinois, that takes their Burger King, their Burger King, very seriously, and a terrific story about a national brand coming up against a local brand. And by the way, this has happened time and again in this great country. Luckily for the Burger King, the court sided with their ability to have a protective zone around twenty-five miles, a part of the civil law in this country and common law that allows business to be equitable and fair. The story of the Burger King, the Mattoon, Illinois Burger King. Here on Our American Stories, Lee H. Habib here, and I’m inviting you to help Our American Stories celebrate this country’s 250th birthday, coming soon. If you want to help inspire countless others to love America like we do, and want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories told here about a good and beautiful country, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Any amount helps. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give.