Dave Thomas

An adopted boy who lived in restaurants

Rex David Thomas was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on July 2, 1932. Rex and Auleva Thomas adopted him when he was six weeks old. When Dave was five, Auleva died, and his early years were spent moving from state to state while his adoptive father sought work. Summers with Grandma Minnie Sinclair in Michigan taught him respect, quality and hard work. Meals out with his father, often at places that made good hamburgers, became the times he felt he had the man to himself. Watching families share a table, he decided he would one day own a restaurant.

Around 1944 he worked at the Regas Restaurant in Knoxville, where the owners treated him like family. After another move, at fifteen he took a job at the Hobby House Restaurant in Fort Wayne, Indiana, learning every station because he meant to own a restaurant someday. Owner Phil Clauss became a mentor. When his father planned another move, Dave stayed, dropped out of high school and worked full time. In the early 1950s he joined the Army, trained at Cook and Baker’s School at Fort Benning, became one of the youngest soldiers to manage an enlisted men’s club, and served in Germany for about two and a half years. He returned to the Hobby House in 1953 and married Lorraine Buskirk in 1954. They raised five children: Pam, Ken, Lori, Molly and Melinda, nicknamed Wendy.

In 1962 Clauss offered him a chance to revive four failing Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Columbus, Ohio. Colonel Harland Sanders became a mentor. Against even the Colonel’s advice, Dave took the challenge, trimmed the menu, swapped chicken meals for radio time, and built a rotating bucket sign. He turned the stores around. Clauss later sold them to him. The sale gave Dave the capital and confidence for what came next.

Square burgers and a window that worked

On November 15, 1969, Dave opened the first Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers at 257 East Broad Street in Columbus. He named it for Melinda’s nickname after trying all five children’s names; siblings had called her Wenda, which became Wendy. He wanted fresh beef, square patties that hung over the bun, and friendly service—a hamburger the way people remembered them. The first menu included hamburgers, chili, fries, soft drinks and a Frosty Dairy Dessert.

In 1970 the first freestanding Wendy’s added a pick-up window. Drive-through windows were not new, but few had made them work. Wendy’s did, and the window helped turn a small Columbus chain into a national brand. In 1973 Dave began franchising by city and region rather than one store at a time, an approach that helped Wendy’s open more than a thousand restaurants in its first hundred months. Under his leadership the chain introduced national salad bars in 1979 and baked potatoes in 1983.

His face later filled television for years. Wendy’s says he starred in more than eight hundred commercials over thirteen years, with a plain “just be nice” manner that made him one of the country’s most recognizable spokesmen. When students challenged his advice to get an education because he had quit school, he went back and earned a high-school equivalency diploma from Coconut Creek High School in Fort Lauderdale, forty-five years after leaving class. Book proceeds from Dave’s Way, Well Done! and Franchising for Dummies went to his adoption foundation.

Thomas and the campaign for adoption

In 1990 Thomas joined a national adoption-awareness campaign at President George H. W. Bush’s invitation. He founded the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption in 1992, focusing on children waiting in foster care. He testified in support of an adoption tax credit, backed public-service advertising and helped develop National Adoption Day partnerships. A United States adoption stamp followed in 2000. Thomas died on January 8, 2002.

Thomas and Sol. D. Bayless Lodge

Thomas was initiated in Sol. D. Bayless Lodge No. 359 in Fort Wayne on April 13, 1959, passed on April 20 and raised on May 25. He later became a Scottish Rite Mason and a Shriner, receiving the thirty-third degree and Grand Cross of the Court of Honour in the 1990s. At the 1997 Scottish Rite biennial session, he delivered the keynote address and remembered Colonel Sanders as a friend and fellow Mason.

How did Thomas turn his own adoption story into sustained public work for children in foster care?

Sources

• Wendy’s, Dave’s Legacy: The Early Years
• Wendy’s, Dave’s Legacy: Military, Family & Business
• Wendy’s, Dave’s Legacy: Founding Wendy’s
• Wendy’s, Dave’s Legacy: Education & Limelight
• Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, Our History and Dave’s Story
• Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon, Rex David Thomas (citing Grand Lodge of Ohio Beacon Vol. 7 Issue 3)
• Grand Lodge of Ohio, The Lasting Legacy of Dave Thomas
• Centennial Lodge No. 326, Colonel Sanders and Dave Thomas