Why Burger King Got Banned from One Small Illinois Town

You've probably heard of Burger King with over 7,000 locations and one of the most recognizable brands in America. You likely don't know about the Burger King, singular. not plural. Here to tell the story of a war between two hamburger joints with the same name is Chris Serdik. Town historian of Mattoon, Illinois.

When I was a teenager, I started working at the Burger King in 1965, and I worked there until 1970. So I always tell people here at our History Center that the Burger King put me through college. So, I have a real close personal connection with the owners, and I was there during the time period when the famous Burger King versus Burger King legal action was going on.

It was the soft serve ice cream stand. In nineteen fifty two Gene Houtts bought it, And continued to operate it. And the ice cream stand, it was called the Frigid Queen. Directly across the street from what became the Burger King and the Frigid Queen's stand was the local telephone company operator station.

So, in the course of the day, all the ladies primarily that worked in the operator building would come across the street to get an ice cream cone, and they started asking him, Hey, There's no place near here for lunch. Have you ever thought about serving lunch? So Gene originally put just a single grill and one deep fat fryer in the back of the ice cream stand and started serving hamburgers.

And so that was basically the birth of the Burger King. At that time, he was unaware that. The chain of Burger King started down around Tampa, Florida. Have it your way. Have it our way at Burger King.

Well, Gene, when he opened it as the Burger King, he had the foresight to register the Burger King name in the state of Illinois. But several years later, the Burger King chain opened a store up in Champaign, which is where the University of Illinois is.

So, at that time, Gene decided that that was getting too close for comfort. So, when they opened the store in Champaign, Gene Hoots filed suit against the Burger King chain in state court. The national chain had not registered their name, so they kind of tried to pull a sleight of hand.

They registered their name nationally and then sued him in federal court, saying we've registered the name nationally. And that lawsuit went on for several years and was finally adjudicated, I believe, in 1968 in the district federal court in Danville, Illinois.

They ruled that even though he was copyrighted in the state, his copyright was superseded by the national copyright of the Burger King chain. But the settlement decreed that the Burger King chain could not locate within a 25-mile radius of Mattoon.

And that ruling still holds today. Well, a lot of people here knew about it, and of course, everybody in Mattoon was really pulling for the Hootses to prevail because by that time it was really the restaurant was kind of a local icon, and of course it was the story of Goliath and the giant.

Uh, Well, like I said, so I worked there for five years, and when I was going to college, By that time, I was the night closer. And during that time, I just developed a very intimate friendship with both of them.

They were just tremendous people. They gave a jump start to a lot of high school kids. You know, a lot of us, it was our first job. To this day, and I've had a 47-year career in business, and I still would look back and say several of the key moments I learned in business I learned working with Gene and Betty Hoots.

One of the things that I always remember about working for them, and especially when I was the night manager, is they were hands-on. I mean, they worked in the restaurant every day. Every day at noon, Betty came in and worked on the dressing table, and at any given time in the evening, Gene might walk in the back door to see how things were going.

And one of the things I learned from him and remembered for my whole business career is one of his sayings was. The shadow of the boss is worth three employees. Putting in that context, you never knew when he was going to walk in the back door, and so you conducted yourself accordingly.

Yeah. And in our high school years, when it came time for the junior, senior prom or something, they would come in and work in the evening so that what they called their kids could go to the high school functions.

I never missed a function because I had to go to work, as long as I cleared it with them first. And they always called us their kids. It'd be interesting to know how many kids actually got. their working start working for the Mattoon Burger King.

To this day, the thing that you hear, and of course, I'm here at our history center at the library, and we get a lot of visitors here that are returning to Mattoon and come back to kind of see some of the old day stuff.

And it is just, again, it's kind of one of those standing legacies in Mattoon. That the people that have moved away, when they come back to Mattoon, the first thing they want to do is go to the Burger King because it is really, it is a touchstone to all of our teenage years going all the way back, you know, to the 1950s and the 1960s through the 70s and through today.