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closures. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories. Have you ever wondered where the bell comes from in Taco Bell? Here to tell the story is Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister, the Brain Food Show podcast. Also contributing to this story is Gustavo Arellano.
He is the author of Ask a Mexican and Taco USA, How Mexican Food Conquered America. Let's take a listen. In 1946, Glenn Bell left the Marine Corps at the age of 23. Like many of his comrades, he was looking forward to post-war activities and settling into a career when he returned home. Lucky for him, the fast food business was booming and Bell had an idea, a hot dog stand.
It was called Bell's Drive-In and it was set up in San Bernardino, an agricultural town in California. Bell didn't know the first thing about running a hot dog stand, but that didn't matter. He learned as he went along. The first stand did well, and when Bell sold it in 1952, he was able to go on to make a bigger, better stand that sold both hot dogs and hamburgers. At this point, Bell wasn't exactly thinking outside of the bun.
He did manage to start his second stand before the McDonald's brothers announced their fast food venture, also in San Bernardino. You can probably guess how it went, since McDonald's is still selling burgers and Bell's business isn't. It was likely that because of the increased competition, Bell decided to explore other menu options. Feeling the pressure to Stand out from the crowd, Bell did start thinking outside the bun and landed on Mexican food. Americans wanted Mexican food, Americans wanted authentic Mexican food.
A big fan of Mexican takeout himself, he thought that Mexican food lovers needed a fast food option as people often had to wait a while to get a good taco on the go.
So Bell began scheming, in his own words. My plan for experimenting with tacos was to obtain a location in a Mexican neighborhood. That way, if tacos were successful, potential competitors would write it off to the location and assume that the idea wouldn't sell anywhere else. With his new location secured, Bell began with what he knew. Hot dogs, both regular hot dogs and chili dogs were on the menu, and the chili dogs had a secret sauce on them that would later become the basis for the taco sauce we know today.
How did Taco Bell sauce packets get so saucy? While those were selling, Bell was researching tacos and coming up with ways to produce them quickly. Many Mexican food restaurants stuffed the shells, then fried them, which was partially why it took so long. Bell decided he would fry the shells and then stuff them, meaning he could have fried shells ready to go before the customers lined up. It took a while to work out all the kinks, but Bell soon hit upon a deep fryab that suited his needs.
At the taco's debut, they cost 19 cents each, about $1.61 today. According to Bell, I'll never forget the first Taco customer because, naturally, I was really concerned about his reaction. He was dressed in a suit, and as he bit into the taco, the juice ran down his sleeve and dripped onto his tie. I thought, we've lost this one. But he came back, amazingly enough, and said, that was good.
I'll take another one.
So, I bought the biography of the man who invented Taco Bell. His name was Glenn Bell.
So, I'm reading in his biography, and he admits that he got the idea for Taco Bell from a restaurant across the street from his hamburger and hot dog stand off Route 66 in San Bernardino. It was a Mexican restaurant, and he would just see lines of people for these tacos. And so, every night after he'd closed shop, he'd go across the street, order some tacos, take them back to his place, and try to decipher how those tacos were made.
So, he admits to all of this.
So, Glenn Bell opens up his taco stand now right across the street from Mila Cafe, then opens two other chains before creating Taco Bell in 1964 in the city of Downey. It's a suburb of Los Angeles.
So, I go to Irene and I say, Is all of this true? She's like, Yeah, we remember him. We would always see this white man coming in every night, and we could tell he's trying to rip off our recipe.
So, eventually, my father-in-law goes up to him and says, Look, If you're gonna rip me off, at least rip me off right.
So he invited him into his kitchen to teach him how to make tacos properly. And so I asked Irena, well, does it bother your family that Glenn Bell created a multi-billion dollar empire off of your family's heritage? And she's like, eh, good for him. You know, he's been around, they've been around for like 60 some years, we've been around for 80 years, but besides, our tacos are way better than his. Business was booming.
Bell ended up opening another stand in Barstow that sold tacos and shakes, and a few years later, he opened three stands dedicated to tacos, which he called Taco Tia. Obviously, it didn't end there. Bell became more and more ambitious. Even when the three stores started raking in $50,000 a year each, he was happy to give them up for the chance to expand into Los Angeles. The move was risky.
Bell bought two lots to build restaurants on, but in doing so, he became strapped for cash. To solve the problem, he ended up partnering with a few of the LA Rams footballers who were training near a Taco Tia and loved the food. Together, they were able to build several stores and make a profit in their first year, quite the accomplishment for a single restaurant, let alone a few, in their debut. The restaurants were called El Tacos.
However, Bell wanted a business that he solely owned, so he built essentially the exact same restaurant but rebranded it as Taco Bell in 1962 in Downey. He followed it up with eight other small Taco Bells on Long Beach. He then set about franchising the restaurant with the first Taco Bell franchise purchased in 1964. This first franchise, run by an old LA policeman, did unbelievably well, and the owner was reportedly bringing in around $10,000 per month, which is around $74,000 today, almost right away. After that raging success, it's no wonder that people were clamoring to own a Taco Bell.
A mere three years later, in 1967, they opened their 100th restaurant in Anaheim. Just three years after that, the company went public with 325 restaurants in 1970. What had once been a tiny hot dog stand had evolved into A huge Mexican fast food company in just a little over a decade. It's very easy to make fun of, you know, non-Mexicans and their relationship with Mexican food. I'm sure you've seen recently that poll showed that Taco Bell was the best Mexican restaurant in the United States.
And people are crying, oh my God, Americans are so dumb with their Mexican food. No, no, no, no. You are discrediting Americans. The main movers in making Mexican food more quote unquote authentic have always been Americans. They have always been pushing for the next great, quote-unquote, authentic thing.
And by the way, for the people who say hard shell tacos is not real Mexican food, the recipe has not changed since 1938. And it came with the founders of Meat Laf from where they came from, the state of Jalisco in Mexico.
So it's a hard shell taco with ground beef, green cabbage, red tomatoes, and then the blizzard of yellow cheese. And then you ask them, well, you know, you don't have yellow cheese in Mexico. Yeah, in the 1930s, there was no Mexican cheese up in Mexico.
So you had to make the With what you have. And then you bite it, it's like eating, living, breathing, tasty history. It's amazing. Taco Bell celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2012, two years after the death of its founder. It now boasts some 5,600 restaurants, 350 franchisees, and over 150,000 employees.
People love to trash Taco Bell. I will defend it only in the sense that I really view it as an ambassador for Mexican food.
So it opened up in places that no Mexicans were. It whetted people's appetite for something that they knew was going to be better that was following on their paths. Bonus facts. Taco Bell almost started out as a mini golf course. Thinking about what people might want to invest in after the war, Bell thought they might want to return to fun pre-war activities like mini golf.
However, B didn't have quite enough money to run a golf course, so he opted for the hot dog stand instead. And incidentally, a man named Ed Hackbath was employed to run the second Taco and Shake stand in Barstow. He went on to found Dell Taco. The popular Taco Bell Chihuahua was featured in many. Many Taco Bell ads from 1997.
Her name was Gidget, and she became so popular that they started making toys in her likeness. When they stopped using the dog in 2000, revenue dropped by 6%, the largest decrease in Taco Bell history. It's thought that they stopped using Gidget because she was portrayed as a stereotype. Didget was euthanized at the age of 15 after a stroke in 2009. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler.
And what a story you heard. My goodness, it all started with Glenn Bell.
Now we know where the word Bell comes from. He couldn't do the old putt-putt thing, so he decided to do food stands instead. And sooner or later, he had this insight that he wanted to start doing Mexican fast food because he'd been such a fan of Mexican takeout. The story of the Marine who turned his hot dog stand into America's largest Mexican food chain. Here on our American stories.
Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage.
Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with F-glist. a once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema.
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