In-N-Out Burger

by Stacy Perman

  Perhaps as a result of the couple’s own hardscrabble childhoods—or perhaps in spite of them—Harry and Esther were determined that their boys would not grow up to be spoiled. As youngsters, Guy and Rich were given chores and put to work at In-N-Out doing odd jobs like picking up trash and later peeling potatoes and working the grill, gradually moving up the ranks—and they were paid just like everybody else. Early in life, they learned the value of hard work and the rewards that accompanied it.

  Perhaps more than anything it was the Snyders’ work ethic that was drilled into their sons. Once, when Rich was about eleven, he wrote “HELP CLEAN UP” on a chalkboard in the back room of In-N-Out. Harry misread the note. He thought his son was referring to the associates as help and gave him a bitter verbal lashing. “Never call anybody help,” he hissed. “These people are our associates and we embrace them like family.” Rich was eventually able to clear up the misunderstanding with his father, but it was a lesson he never forgot.

  Harry Snyder’s parenting had much in common with his management philosophy. He was a hard-driving perfectionist who lived by the very high standards he set and expected his sons to follow suit. Esther was usually ready to defer to Harry’s authority (at least on the surface). When it came to her children, she was quite accommodating—even indulgent. While Harry’s own father, Hendrick, was a tough disciplinarian who on occasion resorted to fisticuffs, Harry himself believed in teaching obedience and moral behavior to his own sons for the most part by imposing rigid expectations. “They respected their father,” explained a longtime friend. “But truthfully, I think they were also a little afraid of him.”

  It may have been that Harry still held onto some of the values of his parents’ generation. Although Dr. Benjamin Spock’s best-seller The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care was changing the way that postwar parents raised their boomer children by encouraging natural affection over strict discipline, Harry wasn’t generally given to blindly following the suggestions of others—especially when he had his own sense of the order of things. Indeed, Harry did what was not an uncommon practice among fathers who wanted to instill values and discipline in their sons; he sent them to military school. For a time, the Snyder boys attended Brown Military Academy in the neighboring San Gabriel Valley suburb of Glendora. An all-male Christian school, it was modeled after the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. At the time, it was the largest military school on the West Coast.

  At the academy, the students were given full dress uniforms based on those worn in the War of 1812. During ceremonial occasions and the school’s monthly parades, students were required to wear their tight gray coatees, trousers, cross belts, white gloves, and tar bucket shakos. In sun-splashed, 1960s Southern California, one can only imagine how that kind of anachronistic display went over with teenage boys whose major interests had turned to fun and fast cars.

  Harry had the opportunity to find out at least once, when his sons played hooky from school. It was an infraction clearly not in line with the academy’s stringent standards. However, for some reason the administration did not inform the Snyders of the transgression. According to an intimate, Harry eventually found out. A man of volcanic temperament, Harry Snyder appeared at the school immediately to set Brown’s supervisors straight. “He reamed them,” explained the friend. “He yelled, ‘Don’t ever cover for my kids! When they do something wrong, I want to know.’”

  When Brown was sold to Azusa Pacific College and the campus closed in 1967, the Snyder boys were enrolled in Bonita High School, a public school in the San Gabriel Valley suburb of La Verne. At Bonita, where Guy began as a sophomore and Rich a freshman, neither of the brothers appeared to distinguish themselves academically. In the Echoes, the school’s yearbook where their activities are cataloged, the only evidence of Guy can be found in his annual class pictures. Of the two, Rich was the more active. In 1967, while still a freshman, Rich was a member of the school’s rocket club and the varsity football team. Guy Snyder, according to classmates, was the better-known brother among the students on campus, perhaps because of his outsized antics.

  In line with his growing rebellious streak, Guy was known to ditch class. A thrill-seeker, one of his favorite after-school antics was doing donuts in a tractor in the large field in front of the family’s house, just going around and around in circles and conducting mini-races that usually ended up in the street, incurring the wrath of the local sheriff. “He was fun-loving and ready to party,” remembered Elaine Setterland, a classmate at Bonita. “Guy had this green muscle car, and after school all the kids would jump in and they’d go to the In-N-Out Burger.” Although there were only a few stores in the chain at the time, already the burger shops had a large and devoted local following. At least twice a year during big school events, the Snyders brought in a trailer and served In-N-Out Burgers to all the kids—no doubt scoring points for the Snyder brothers with the Bonita High School student body.

  The Snyder boys seemed to be surrounded by friends, including a group who lived at the McKinley Home for Boys (an orphanage located not far from the Snyders’ home) whom Rich and Guy had befriended. One of them, Wilbur Stites, became the Snyders’ foster child after Rich asked his parents if the twelve-year-old boy could come live with them. Although Harry and Esther raised him like a third son, Wilbur always called them Mr. and Mrs. Snyder. He was a bright boy, and the Snyders offered to pay his college tuition, but Wilbur declined, preferring to work in In-N-Out’s maintenance department.

  According to Susie Ericson (née Nissen), one of Rich’s Bonita classmates, the brothers were “pranksters and fun-loving and they had a lot of friends.” But they were also, she said, “terribly shy and awkward.” And they were greatly overweight. In his football photograph published in the Bonita High School yearbook, Rich, although just a freshman, is clearly the largest person on the team.

  Ericson said that Harry Snyder was fairly strict about allowing his children’s friends over to the house. Like most things, when it came to his sons, Harry was no-nonsense through and through. He laid down the law when it came to sweets, banning them from the Snyder home. At night, he’d wait up for Guy and Rich, punishing them if they didn’t make their curfew. Esther was more lenient; she welcomed everyone, feeding them, cooking up steaks, and not telling Harry when the boys came home late.

  The Snyder boys spent a great deal of time over at the Nissen house on Oakmead Lane in La Verne. The Nissens were a large, loving and boisterous family—in addition to Susie, the Nissen siblings included Kenny, Johnny, and Kathy. In particular, Guy gravitated toward Kenny. The boys were the same year in school and shared a love of cars. “They were always out there in the driveway,” remembered Kathy. “They were just working on cars and fiddling on cars.” As Susie explained, “Guy always loved having people around him. He was lonely and overweight and he didn’t feel confident. When he found a true friend, he was really good to them.”

  During their high school years, the brothers possessed one-half of the all-important teenage social equation: a set of wheels. However, when it came to the other half—girls—Guy and Rich came up short. Painfully timid around the opposite sex, neither dated much or had girlfriends that anybody could recall. They were, however, at ease with Susie and Kathy Nissen, “because we were like little sisters to them,” explained Susie.

  At some point, Guy developed a crush on Kathy. And when he was not quite eighteen, he made a gallant and rather old-fashioned gesture. He got up the courage to ask her father, Norm Nissen, for permission to ask his thirteen-year-old daughter out on a date. However, Norm turned him down. “My dad said, ‘Noooo, you’re too old,’” explained Kathy. It was another thirty years before Guy got up the nerve to ask her out again.

  In 1965, when Guy was fourteen years old and Rich was just thirteen, a golfing buddy of Harry Snyder’s convinced him to invest in a 50 percent stake in a new drag strip called the Irwindale Raceway. Built in 1964 with a quarter-mile track, the “Dale” (as it came to be known) was
one of the numerous sanctioned drag strips sprouting up in Southern California in the wake of the founding of the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA). The investment soon proved to be a canny move that further solidified the association between cars and In-N-Out that began with the drive-through. It was also a natural extension of the time when In-N-Out was a stop on the illegal street-racing circuit.

  Born in the salt flats and dry lakebeds of the Mojave Desert during the 1930s—where hot-rodders first topped speeds of 100 mph—drag racing had changed greatly in the postwar years. Where dragsters once had free rein to run the lakebeds at El Mirage and Lake Muroc, they increasingly found themselves edged out by the U.S. Air Force. Taking advantage of the temperate climate and the flat, vast, and remote lakebeds, the air force began testing new jets and rockets there. On October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier while flying the experimental Bell X-1 in the sky over Lake Muroc at Mach One at an altitude of 45,000 feet.

  A year later, Alex Xydias, a B-17 engineer during the war and no stranger to the lakebeds, opened the So-Cal Speed Shop on Olive Avenue in Burbank. It was at El Mirage that Xydias hit a record 130.55 miles per hour in his belly-tanker made from a Ford V-8 60-horsepowered engine and a simple open-wheel aluminum frame. Soon, the lakebed days were numbered. In 1949, Muroc was officially converted into Edwards Air Force Base and became the testing ground for X-15s and later the landing site of the space shuttle. The dragsters were forced to move their action from the salt flats to urban asphalt.

  While some of the contests were held on abandoned airstrips, the majority of them were held on city streets, luring crowds and creating a public nuisance. Law enforcement took a decidedly dim view of the dragsters, and had long sought to clamp down on the illegal street scene, implementing ordinances against hot-rodding and closing down streets altogether.

  For many young men, racing powerful, noisy cars at maximum speed was not just a bullet of freedom but was a revolt against the parochial values of their parents. It wasn’t just a sentiment among hot-rodders; it could be found among the automakers in Detroit as well. In fact, Clare MacKichan, one of the design engineers behind the seminal 1955 Chevy, later explained that the car’s design target was to represent “youth, speed, and lightness”

  In an effort to “create order from chaos” (as he put it), in 1951, Wally Parks, a dragster himself and the editor of Hot Rod magazine, launched the NHRA. A former military tank test driver for General Motors who had served in the South Pacific during World War II, Parks saw the long-term advantages of organized drag racing on off-road sites. In creating the NHRA, Parks realized that he could promote and legitimize the sport of legal speed racing while combating its low-rent, outlaw image. The NHRA implemented safety rules and performance standards and began operating a number of drag strips and races under its own sanctioned program. For a time, the NHRA sponsored a traveling Safety Safari, a portable drag strip caravan that promoted the sport across the country. As a result, drag racing became a hugely popular spectator sport, at times even eclipsing baseball and football games, and soon attracted commercial sponsors.

  The sport had so transcended its humble beginnings that it was the subject of an April 29, 1957, Life magazine cover story: “Hot Rod Fever.” By the early 1960s, the NHRA had over 130 approved strips in forty states under its sanctioned umbrella. The Dale was one of them.

  Located just west of Irwindale Avenue and north of 1st Street, near the boundary of Irwindale and Azusa, the strip was perfectly primed to become a hotbed of Southern California’s growing hotrod activity. The city of Irwindale, a flat expanse dotted with rock quarries, small industrial parks, and the occasional battalion of palm trees, was just twenty miles east of downtown Los Angeles and a short three miles from Baldwin Park. Flat, dry, dusty, and ferociously hot in the summer, Irwindale had more rock quarries than residents. In fact, the city was nicknamed Jardin de Roca (Spanish for “Garden of Rocks”) owing to the fact that nearly every highway in California and a number of those west of the Mississippi were made from Irwindale’s rock and gravel pits.

  At the time of Harry’s involvement with the drag strip, there were only a handful of In-N-Out Burger outlets fanning out from Baldwin Park. Each was hugely successful, replicating the popularity of the original, claiming long meandering lines of near-rush-hour proportions from opening to closing time. But In-N-Out Burger was still something of a local phenomenon, clustered strictly within the San Gabriel Valley. The Dale opened up In-N-Out to a much wider audience.

  Possibly owing to his early days working various refreshment and game stalls at the Venice pleasure piers, Harry Snyder shrewdly decided not to be a mere investor but to supply the food at the racing track as well. There were two concession stands; one on the north side where the starting line, staging area, and spectator stands existed, and the other on the south side where the pit and finish line stood. The stands sold In-N-Out burgers—but they weren’t officially part of the growing chain. They were simple wooden shacks at the Dale with the words “Snack Stand” painted in black across them.

  The racers and fans who frequented the Dale fondly recalled that the burgers and fries were almost as much of a draw as the races themselves. “I’m not sure if it was the atmosphere or what, but they tasted better there than anywhere,” recalled Valerie Althouse, who raced at the Dale between 1969 and 1971. “I think people loved to come to Irwindale for the food. One of the reasons that the track had such a great reputation was basically [that] the snack stands were In-N-Out even though they didn’t say so.”

  On any given race day, the Dale’s grounds were swarming with cars and people. Young kids used to sneak into the track through the gravel pit that stood outside the staging lanes. In those early days—in the mid-1960s—the track operated races that ran all weekends from noon until ten at night as well as on Wednesday evenings. It was still the early days of drag racing, before the big money races, when the dragsters paid to get into money brackets—with winners taking home a whopping one hundred dollars and, of course, gleaming trophies. The Dale was so frequently packed and noisy that at one point residents in neighboring Azusa complained, asking the raceway to research noise control.

  The rowdy races helped In-N-Out Burger earn a reputation outside of Southern California. Racers who had been to Irwindale began spreading the word about its burgers. As part of the NHRA, people from all over the country began descending upon the Dale and its legendary snack stands. Soon enough, going to an In-N-Out Burger became part of the racing circuit experience.

  One of the first female dragsters, Eileen Daniels (who began racing in 1955), can still remember her first In-N-Out experience. It was 1957, and Daniels (along with her husband, Bob) was running the raceway in Indianapolis for the NHRA. On a trip to Southern California, “some guys from the NHRA told me I just had to try an In-N-Out Burger,” she recalled. “I got the cheeseburger and the french fries. Just outstanding, great flavor.” That was it. Going to In-N-Out Burger became a ritual. Actually, more than a ritual—it grew into a fifty-year habit. Daniels explained, “I make it my very first meal when I come to California.”

  During his years at the Dale, Harry Snyder opened a handful of new In-N-Out Burgers. Between 1966 and 1972, he unveiled new stores in Azusa, La Puente, Pomona, and even ventured outside of the chain’s home turf, launching new shops in North Hollywood and Panorama City in the San Fernando Valley (for comparison, by 1968* there were one thousand McDonald’s across the country).

  Harry often conducted business meetings for the Dale and In-N-Out from his San Dimas living room. Esther left Harry to be the public face of their ventures. She took care of the bills and handled the paperwork of both businesses—but while she preferred to remain behind the scenes, nothing escaped her knowledge. “She was a great lady, just incredible,” remembered Steve Gibbs, whose childhood relationship to In-N-Out Burger came full circle when he was tapped by Harry to manage the track in 1966. A veteran of the San Gabriel drag racing circuit, Gibbs grew up in
Baldwin Park and courted his wife during high school in large part at In-N-Out Burger.

  Gibbs was just twenty-six when Harry offered him the top position at the track. He had been working part-time initially, just on the weekends, and after Harry noticed Gibbs and his hard work, Snyder increasingly gave him more to do before making him manager. “Harry had strong opinions on a lot of things but he wasn’t hard to work for—you knew where he was coming from. He was clear.” Gibbs, who would later become the vice president of competition for the NHRA, also remembered Harry’s fiery temper and his ability to cool down and let bygones be bygones, “he could blow up, then say his piece over it and he’d be laughing later on,” he said. “If he was upset, he’d tell you why. He was probably right, but if you had a good answer, he’d accept it.”

  While they were still just in junior high school, Guy and Rich Snyder went to work at the track, too. They did odd jobs like running the elapsed time slips to the racers or cleaning up trash around the track. “They weren’t spoiled little kids running around like you’d expect, being the owner’s sons,” Gibbs recalled. “They were good kids. I never had to get too hard on them. They did their work. That’s the way I remember them. The Snyders had a strong work ethic and I think they wanted that for their boys too.”

  Intense, dogmatic, and hardworking—this is how Harry Snyder is invariably described. At the same time, he displayed an unwavering sense of decency. “When we had a good race he’d give us bonuses,” recalled Gibbs. “He was very conscientious about being fair to customers. You saw that at In-N-Out, and at the track, too. I remember one time we put on this big event that was above and beyond the weekly races, and it was costly. We had to raise ticket prices. Harry agonized over this. At the time, tickets cost $2 for a Saturday night, and he had to go up to $2.50 or $3. It sounds like peanuts now, but then it was a big decision. Harry settled on $2.50. He didn’t want to be too hard on the weekly regular customers, and he felt that $3 was too big a jump. Besides, we were already making good money.” Gibbs added, “I really respected him. He was a good, solid businessman, and he treated people well and tried to do the right thing.”