Lodi A&W owner looks to rebuild a restaurant family
What started out as a small root beer stand in Lodi California is now a major franchise with locations throughout the world. In an effort to embrace Lodi’s legacy as the place where it all began, Lodi A&W location owner Pete Knight is in search of the chain’s original burger family.
Knight said the Lodi A&W brings in a lot of people from around the country when they find out Lodi is the birthplace of the franchise.
“Roy Allen came to Lodi in June 1919 and he was there for the World War I homecoming parade and he saw a great opportunity, a community bouncing back after WWI, and he had the recipe for his root beer,” Knight said. “It wasn’t called A&W then, but he mixed up the first batch with the local pharmacist. He had to make it right there with all the local ingredients from the pharmacy and he served it for free and the rest is kind of history.”
According to Knight, Allen rented a local store front at 13 Pine Street, and it was so successful there, he ended moving to Sacramento where he opened up the first A&W location. He would go one to open several locations in Sacramento and in Stockton before franchising in 1925 and becoming the first food franchise. A&W locations would expand across the west coast before making its way east. The current Lodi location was built in 1953.
In 1963, A&W commissioned a fiberglass company to build statues of a “burger family” as a way to advertise the restaurant, according to Knight. The mascot family consisted of the Papa Burger, Mama Burger, Baby Burger and the Teen Burger. A lot of people purchased the statues to put on the roof of their carports or in front of the restaurants.
In the early ’70s, A&W came up with a new mascot, the Rootbeer Bear. All the franchises began to switch over, and the burger family began to disappear. A few of the franchise owners still own the original burger family statues and have them on their roof.
Last year, Knight remodeled the Lodi A&W location and replaced the old carhop canopy with a solar canopy.
“One of our customers came by and he said, ‘you know what you need under there is the burger family’ and all of a sudden a light bulb went off, and I thought ‘that’s a great idea,’ but I didn’t even know where to look,” Knight said.
Weeks later, Knight said a woman in Sonora sent them a message on Facebook and said she had one in her yard and was wondering if he was interesting in purchasing it. It happened to be the baby burger. Knight and his wife took a trip to Sonora and purchased it.
“That kind of started the collecting. I started asking A&W operators and starting putting the word out that I was looking, and somebody told me that there was a guy in Port Orchard, Wash., that bought an A&W up there and had a set in the basement of the restaurant. We found out he had a mama and a baby,” Knight said.
Knight and his wife went to Washington to purchase the statues in January. A month ago, Knight was contacted by a man in Barstow who said he had a statue and asked if he was interested in purchasing it, he said his friend also had one too. The statues ended up being the papa and another baby, and purchasing both statues left Knight with three baby statues, a papa and a mama.
Knight is currently in search of the teen statue, and hopes that by getting the word out he can find some one who has one in their possession.
Once he is able to get all the members, the goal is to fix them back up, paint them and put them on display under the solar canopy. He hopes to get them up by late spring.
“I don’t know that there’s maybe a couple of burger families around the country that are on display, complete. You can find a papa here, a teen there, a mama or baby here or there, but I don’t think there is any complete sets that are on display anywhere,” Knight said. “That’s the goal. It’s the birthplace of A&W. It makes sense. It’s something we can use as a marketing tool to bring people to Lodi.”