Buy Em By The Sack:  Carl Juelke and the Hamburger Inn

Edited By:  Dan Fitzgerald, March 2008

Okay, here is writer rule #1, and here I am violating it:  “never write about relatives, it is the kiss of death.”

There is some truth to this rule.  No one ever really finds your relatives as interesting as you may find them.  I do, however, take exception with my grandfather, Carl Juelke.  I’m going to attempt to make his story as interesting as any non-relative I may write about.  So, here goes.  Write me and let me know if I succeeded or not.

Carl Juelke fell off the face of the earth.  Try to google his name, and nothing will appear.  Try to google Hamburger Inn, and you may be a bit luckier.  There are some restaurant locations that come up.  Most of them are quaint local eateries, joints that serve the best greasy burgers in town.

My grandfather died in 1972.  I was thirteen years old when he passed away.  It was a cold snowy day in February.  In fact, it snowed about a foot that day.  Only the hardiest of souls braved the ceremony at the little Larkinburg Cemetery, in rural Jackson County, Kansas.  There was a luncheon at the country church in Larkinburg that afternoon.  Several pioneers reminisced about him.  They were primarily farmers in the area remembering another farmer.  That is how I remembered my grandfather.  He was a farmer, and a good one.  Every year, his crops seemed to yield more per bushel than the year before. 

But he was not always a farmer.  In fact, farming was perhaps his third or fourth profession.  He was born in 1893 in Atchison County, Kansas, to a large German farm family.  He had eight brothers and sisters. They expected him to carry on the tradition and continue farming.  Carl, however, was not interested in being a farmer.  There was a big world out there, and he wanted to discover it.  Whether he actually explored much of it before World War I, however, remains open to conjecture.  If World War I had not come along, perhaps he would have fulfilled his family’s goals.

Carl Juelke was drafted into the Army in 1917.  On June 5 of that year, thousands of young Kansas farmboys traveled to their closest towns and registered for the draft.  A few months later, he entered the military.  He did not have to travel far.  In fact, he ended up at Fort Riley, about 70 miles from the farm.  Here he spent his time working with engines and repairing machinery.  He had a knack for repairing engines and being a mechanic.  It didn’t matter what it was, he could fix it.  Often, he would make it better than it was originally.    His stint at Fort Riley ended and he was transferred to Fort Hays, in Western Kansas, where he continued working on engines and preparing for actual combat.  Before the transfer happened, the war was over.  During that memorable year, he met a number of friends from all over the country.  Their stories of life in cities and towns outside of Kansas intrigued him. 

Juelke returned to the farm in late 1918.  He was twenty-six years old and bored.  He had a taste of life outside the farm, and he wanted more. 

I wish I could tell readers that he was a great cook.  But I honestly don’t remember him cooking much of anything.   I assume he was a great cook, and he enjoyed it.  Cooking is what led him down the merry path to leave the farm.  The 1920’s was an era of change and opportunity, at least until the depression years came along.  In 1920, Juelke became intrigued with starting his own business.  Among his many talents during the war was cooking for large numbers of soldiers.  The closest town of any size to the family farm was Atchison, Kansas, about 35 miles east on the Missouri River.

Atchison offered employment among the manufacturing plants and flour mills that dotted downtown streets and railroad lines.  The town was, in fact, a prosperous manufacturing blue-collar town.  Several of these plants and mills ran shifts of workers literally twenty-four hours a day.  As one shift would come on, another would leave.  As shifts would leave, the workers would be starving.  The number of restaurants that were available to provide them a hot meal were either very limited, or all closed dependent on the shift times.  This caught Juelke’s attention, especially the workers coming and going from the Pillsbury Mills. 

In 1922, a small parcel of land went up for sale a few hundred feet from the mill property.  It was just across the street from the entrance where the workers would arrive at the beginning of their shift, and leave at the end.  From a marketing standpoint, it held promise.   Juelke had a dream of starting his own small restaurant, but he needed a partner.  His partner became his brother-in-law, Homer Wheeler.  They read with interest the story of another Kansas restaurant enterprise, a little business called White Castle.  White Castle was established in Wichita, Kansas at about the same time.  Their story was similar—they built small, concrete or cinder block restaurants near major downtown locations.  The buildings were painted white and resembled small “castles,” thus the namesake. 

There is some debate as to which hamburger restaurant chain came first—White Castle, or Hamburger Inn.  The answer to this question may fall with White Castle, although it was close.  White Castle began approximately a year before Hamburger Inn.  They didn’t stay in one location very long either—they began building restaurants west towards California.  There is no doubt that White Castle had a profound influence on Juelke and his Hamburger Inn in many ways.  The success of White Castle led to the success of Hamburger Inn.  Both founders believed that familiarity was a good thing.  Travelers would eat at the same restaurant no matter where they traveled (if the restaurant was a good one).  The chain restaurant was born. 

Juelke and Wheeler invested $500 in the construction of a small cinder-block restaurant in Atchison in 1922.  It was just large enough for a row of chairs at the counter and a row of booths and tables.  Behind the counter was a large workspace where burgers were cooked and sodas and “near beer” were dispensed.  In the back was a small storage area, where supplies and a large freezer, or ice box, were located.  It is unknown how long it took for the building to go up.  Juelke painted the structure white with black letters.  It became the Hamburger Inn #1. 

Hamburger Inn #1 literally took off.  It was a huge success.  It was one of the only places open all night, and anyone in Atchison with a hunger for food at all hours suddenly had a place to go.  With success came a few problems.  Guessing supply and demand was sometimes tricky.  It was not an easy task to replenish hamburger meat in the middle of the night.  Hiring and keeping good help was another problem.  Getting dependable help in the middle of the night was not easy.  If a cook didn’t show up, Juelke or Wheeler would have to take over.  Sometimes it meant that they were working eighteen to twenty hours in a row just to keep the restaurant going.  Experience would cure many of these problems. 

The secret to the success of the Hamburger Inn was good fast food and faster turn-around.  With only a few stools at the counter and a few tables, turn-around and take-out orders were crucial.  There were perhaps as many take-out orders as there were sit-down customers.  The food was fast, hot and delicious.  Some of Juelke’s popular menu items included, of course, hamburgers.  White Castle’s hamburgers are now famous.  They are small, square patties with holes for efficient all-around cooking.  Throw on some cheese, mustard, ketchup, and fried onions, and the customers were happy.  The Hamburger Inn burgers were small, round, and grilled in kidney soot for added flavor.  People nowadays would grimace at “kidney soot,” as it was essentially grease.  But folks bought them by the sack full.

This brings us to the old saying, Buy Em By the Sack.  This saying is attributed to White Castle.  However, it was actually Carl Juelke who came up with the saying for the Hamburger Inn.  He emblazoned the saying across the front of each of his hamburger stands.  A sack of Carl’s finest was probably around a dozen of the best sliders you could find.  At five cents a burger, it was a real bargain.  A few decades later, the copyrighted saying was adopted by White Castle.   Another popular restaurant chain, Steak n Shake, has adopted a similar old saying, “takehomasack.”  Buy Em By the Sack was essentially a marketing ploy to get folks to buy burgers by the dozen. 

After a year of success, Carl was ready to try his luck elsewhere.  He left the Atchison restaurant in capable hands and looked over surrounding territory in 1923.  He was looking for the same type of setting that he had with the Atchison restaurant—a small industrial town where businesses ran twenty-four hour shifts.  He was not interested in competing directly with White Castle.  At the time, White Castle was looking west in their restaurant expansions.  California, Colorado, Washington, and other states were their primary focus.  Juelke decided to pursue the Midwest and East for potential building sites.

His next stop was Kearney, Nebraska.  Kearney and Atchison were quite similar industrial and railroad towns.  The second Hamburger Inn was built there.  At the same time, Falls City, Nebraska, just across the Kansas-Nebraska line, offered promise.  That was where Hamburger Inn #3 was built.  Each building was identical to the first one--- a small cinder-block building painted white.

As each place was constructed, it meant that Carl was busy getting the business off the ground.  He would spend a few months in each town getting the restaurant going, hire managers and cooks, then move on.  Some of the places he sold.  They would continue operating under the company name.  Whether he received any dividends or monthly fees for the name is uncertain.  Chances are, when it came to selling them, he did not. 

There are as many questions that remain a mystery about Hamburger Inn as there are answers.  One of the central questions is, how many of them were there and in what cities?   I know of some of them, but obviously not all.  Between 1923 and 1934, Juelke and Wheeler built hamburger stands in Sioux City, Iowa; East St Louis, Illinois; Springfield, Illinois; Evansville, Indiana; Portsmouth, Ohio; Wheeling, West Virginia; and Huntington, West Virginia.

Two of Juelke’s brothers, Otto and Albert, caught hamburger fever and they also began building Hamburger Inns.  Otto was a native of North Dakota.  He cut a swath through the Northern Plains and Great Lakes states like Sherman marching to the sea.  Albert took over some of the operations that Carl established.  He kept several going and may be attributed to opening several other new ones. 

Huntington, West Virginia became Hamburger Inn central.  No less than eleven, and as many as fourteen, were built here.  In the 1960’s, several still remained.  From Huntington, West Virginia, it appears that several other cities in the mid-Atlantic may have been the sites for other Hamburger Inns.  Richmond, Virginia, was one of them. 

Carl wore many hats.  He was a pawn broker and a real estate expert on top of a restaurateur.   During the 1930’s, many folks were desperate for money.  He would buy diamond rings and other gems from locals who were desperate for money.  He traded one of his hamburger stands for ten acres of swampland in Florida.  This was during the 1920’s Florida land boom just prior to two devastating hurricanes which brought it to a halt.  He sat on the ten acres, believing he could make a profit some day.  He paid $1,000 for ten acres that was eventually at the back door of Walt Disney World.  In 1982, this same ten acres was sold for $200,000. 

Being a restaurant pioneer took its toll.  His family life suffered.  He was constantly called out in the middle of the night when a cook would not show up or a server quit at a moment’s notice.  In towns where there were multiple locations, the work multiplied.  His wife had enough.  Several times, she packed her bags, took their daughter, and returned to Kansas for months at a time.  Moving from town to town was not her idea of fun.  She wanted roots.  One time in Ohio, she left for six months and then grudgingly returned.  It was apparent that divorce loomed in his future unless he agreed to return to the Kansas farm.  What made the decision hard was that he enjoyed the hamburger business, and he was good at it.  Folks loved the Hamburger Inn and they came in droves.  Often there was not an empty seat in the little place to eat. 

In the West, White Castle reigned supreme.  They grabbed all the attention because they had a massive advertising campaign.  The Wichita-based restaurant chain was becoming a staple wherever they went.  Their brand was becoming well known.  They were doing what Carl and Hamburger Inn wanted to do:  achieve success on a grand scale.  In so doing, the chain became restless and began their focus eastward.  Most food historians will claim that White Castle was the biggest hamburger chain in the United States prior to the McDonald’s era of the 1950’s.  They may be correct, or they may not.  The problem is, we don’t know how many Hamburger Inns were out there.  Carl’s motivation was to build a restaurant, build up the clientele, and sell it to someone locally.  They would continue the restaurant and Carl would move on to conquer another city.  Therefore, the lack of cohesiveness means that the Hamburger Inn at some point in the late 1920’s or early 1930’s may have surpassed the number of restaurants claimed by White Castle.  But we will never know. 

I’ve done some research on this.  There were three brothers working independently, knocking out these cinder block restaurants all over the East.  Many have surfaced on the internet, and some of these are still in business with the very same name.  The survivors are a small percentage of the grand total.  There were easily fifty Hamburger Inns all open and operating up until 1933.  These are the ones I know about.  Of this number, at least fifteen are ones I just recently discovered.  Unfortunately, the grand total may never be known.

Carl gave his marriage one final test in 1932, when he attempted to build 7 Hamburger Inns in Wheeling, West Virginia, and 13 or 14 in Huntington.  If his marriage was not suffering already, this was the ultimate test.  It proved to be his undoing.  The restaurants were built, and in the middle of the madness, his wife gave him an ultimatum:  return to the family farm in Larkinburg, Kansas and be a farmer, or his wife would go back and file for divorce.   No one knows what really went through his head, but the answer was to return to Kansas, which he did by 1934.  The restaurants were all sold off and the Hamburger Inn empire came to an end. 

Between 1934 and 1972, Carl remained a prosperous farmer.  Once in awhile, he would invent a piece of farm machinery out of twisted metal or start a sawmill business or any one of a number of small ventures.  Restaurants were not part of that.  His health went gradually downhill in 1971 due to a bleeding ulcer, and he died in February 1972.  Most of the secrets regarding the Hamburger Inn went with him to the grave.  As his grandson, I am only starting to piece together where he went and when.

White Castle, on the other hand, became a household name in many regions.  Where there was not a White Castle hamburger stand, there were a dozen cheese or hamburgers in the local grocer’s freezer.  My sons love them.  White Castle could not successfully compete with McDonald’s or Burger King, primarily because they were much better at automation.  Personally, I think White Castle’s burgers are better, in a one to one competition.  However, no one can doubt the influence that McDonalds and Burger King has had on American fast food.  Recently they have come under fire with books like Fast Food Nation, or documentaries like Super Size Me.  In reading Fast Food Nation, perhaps the fast food history Bible of all time, Carl Juelke is not mentioned anywhere. 

If you can add anything to this documentary, please write me.  I am still compiling information on the Hamburger Inn.  I think there is more information on new restaurants yet undiscovered.  I do not intend to shake White Castle’s reputation, but maybe shake it up a little.  I hope this story made you hungry for a burger!