The Kitchen Table

In the late eighties, we worked for a while with Carl’s, Jr., the hamburger chain. I’m not sure why.

One reason, I guess, was Carl himself.

For such a simple guy, Carl Karcher was sure a bundle of contradictions.

He gave large sums to the ultra-right John Birch Society, opposed abortion rights, and posted $1 million to support the Briggs Amendment that would have forbidden gays from teaching in public schools.

He became fluent in Spanish so he could talk to his employees, many of whom spoke Spanish as their first language.

He was good friends with Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Even after he had made millions, he still lived in the modest one story home he’d first bought in a simple Anaheim neighborhood. I went there: a lacy house with pictures from long ago.

He was the founder of Carl’s, Jr., an international hamburger chain, but he loved going into the kitchen of the fine restaurants he ate in, where he would be smilingly welcomed by an amused staff of accomplished French, Italian, or Mexican cooks.

Carl Karcher was born in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, the son of German and Belgian parents. The ancestry made sense, when you saw him. He was a big Percheron, a draft horse of a man, six foot two and wide as a door, with a face like a slumping pumpkin.

In his early twenties, Carl moved to Anaheim, California, where he worked for his uncle. A bakery offered him a better job, increasing his salary by $6 a month. It gave him enough money to marry Margaret Magdelene Heinz, with whom he would have 12 children and discuss the day’s events over a martini at 6:00 p.m. every night.

One day in 1941, Carl was walking through the City Hall Plaza in Los Angeles when he spotted a guy selling hotdogs from a cart. He struck up a conversation and found out that the man wanted to get out of the business. On July 17th, he borrowed $311 against his Plymouth, took $15 from Margaret’s purse, and bought the whole thing, lock stock and cart. Sold hotdogs and tamales. Four years later, on January 16th, he ditched the cart and opened a restaurant called Carl’s Drive-In Barbecue.

The specificity of the dates is significant. Carl remembered the exact time and date of every event in his entire life. This was a minor miracle to someone like me, who has no calendar, doesn’t carry a watch, and confuses last week with last year. Carl would say things to me like, “No, Jeff, that meeting took place right here on April 14th of last year. It was early in the morning, around 7:30 I think, and you were sitting right there by the door.”

He was always right about such things. And he had a lot to remember: I met him when he was 75.

Carl opened a second, smaller place that he called Carl’s, Jr. He probably thought the name was hilarious because he adopted it for the entire chain of 100 restaurants he owned by 1974. There were 300 by 1981. His picture was displayed in each and every one of them. As he would proudly tell you, he invented the drive-through, the salad bar, and was the first mainstream chain to employ Mexican-Americans, probably because most of them were illegals and worked below minimum wage, but it’s still something. Despite his success, Carl always flew coach. He liked sitting with the real people. “First class is for vice presidents,” he told me one day.

We won a pitch for the Carl’s, Jr. business in 1989. It was not easy. A new marketing director held the competition for the account and awarded it to us. Told the press. We had a big party. A few days later, he called to say that Carl had read about this choice and told him that no such decision was official until Carl confirmed it himself. We would do the whole pitch over again, for Carl.

On the day of the pitch, we witnessed something we’d only heard rumors of. Carl entered the room with a big smile, enveloped each of us in his enormous, calloused right hand, and then asked us all to stand to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. We did so, straining to recall grade school. Then he asked us to remain standing for the Prayer of St. Francis. None of us knew that, but luckily he didn’t expect us to. He recited it, slowly and meaningfully in his slurred growly voice. These were things he did at the beginning of every meeting, every day:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

We won the pitch and went to work. Our pitch had explicitly done away with years of TV commercials starring Carl himself. Carl didn’t seem to notice this at the pitch. When he figured it out, though, he called me and reminded me that the most effective commercials would be ones with him in them. I politely told him why it was a bad idea. He thanked me and told me to call him when we had scheduled the first shoot.

The real reason having Carl in the TV was a bad idea was that you couldn’t understand a word he said any more. Age had taken its toll on his voice, and seeing him struggle on camera was sad and awkward.

One of our writers, Dave O’Hare, came up with a terrific solution. We would animate Carl and have him talk to an also-animated version of the star logo on the Carl’s, Jr. sign. Happy Star, as Carl called him, would always want to do new-fangled things that Carl would put the kibosh on. This enabled us to record Carl over and over, until we could actually understand what he said.

As it turned out, O’Hare had a great rapport with Carl, and I suggested that Dave might want to play Happy Star himself. Our recording sessions took place in Carl’s rather spare office in Anaheim. Carl loved the sessions; he loved Happy Star (he always called O’Hare by that name) and he loved to ad lib, which he was not at all good at but loved nonetheless.

I called Carl on his private line a couple of mornings a week. He was always upbeat. He was excited about the advertising. He adored being in business. He told me about weekends with his grandchildren.

One day in his office, in his impossibly incomprehensible locution, he asked me a question:

“Ja bleeve purse dent reggin save da connter?”

I could usually figure out what Carl was saying, but not this time.

“I’m sorry, Carl. What was that?”

“I said, ‘Ja believe Presdent Raygun saved da country?’”

“I like you a lot, Carl,” I told him, “but you know my politics aren’t going be like yours. I think we should avoid that one.”

“So ya don’t beve it then?”

“Nope.”

“I knew that.”

There was a long silence. It was the last time we ever talked about that.

On Carl’s, Jr.’s 50th anniversary, a big party was held at, of all places, the Disneyland Hotel. It was black tie, Ronald and Nancy Reagan were there, and Bob Hope performed. Woody Allen is right about Hope: he is funny as hell, but a LOT dirtier than you would imagine, seeing him in movies and on TV. Margaret and Carl beamed at the head table.

Not long after that, his own company fired him. Not officially, but that’s what it was, a firing. Citing sluggish business results, they removed him as chairman and CEO, and made him sit ineffectually on a board of hostile Carl-haters. No more animation. No more Happy Star.

And soon thereafter, no more us. New marketing people branded us the agency that liked Carl, and it was easy to move us on. I went in to see Carl. He was glum, staring out the window.

“I’m sorry, Jeff,” he said. “I couldn’t stop ‘em.”

“I know.”

“I liked being Carl and Happy Star.”

“I know.”

In 2008, long after I’d seen him for the last time, I flew down to his funeral. Carl had died of Parkinson’s Disease, just a little short of his 91st birthday. The service was held in the Catholic church he’d gone to since he moved to Anaheim. The neighborhood around it had gone pretty bad over the years, gang graffiti and an intimidating smattering of people on the street as I parked my car in the darkness and walked back to the church. The place was empty, but I was 45 minutes early, so I went to a Mexican restaurant down the street and tried to look tough as I ate a couple tostadas.

When I got back to the church, there was a line that stretched three blocks down the street. I got into it and stood at the back of the packed church as his children, his employees, his friends spoke in endlessly fond tones.

His daughter, Margaret Jean read from First Corinthians: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, the gifts that await us.” And Carl’s funniest child, the school marmish Rosemary Clarissa said her Dad was “a special man who didn’t act special.” There was a big murmur after that one.

The choir sang something from Revelations:

Peace be to all, let grace abound
Where two or three are gathered round;
The Lord is there, the loving Lamb,
The first, the last, the Great I AM.

People who didn’t know each other said hello as we walked out into the night. Carl would have liked that.