Whataburger, Twenty-Five Cents on Ayers Street

On August eighth, nineteen fifty, a thirty-six-year-old entrepreneur from Oklahoma named Harmon Dobson opened a small roadside stand on Ayers Street in Corpus Christi and sold his first hamburgers. He had a clear idea of what he was after: a burger so large it required two hands to hold, made from a full quarter-pound of beef on a wide bun, with fresh lettuce, three slices of tomato, four dill pickles, and chopped onions. The price was twenty-five cents. On the first day of business, the stand sold fifty dollars' worth of burgers, chips, and drinks.

Dobson had been selling the name before he had finished selling his first burger. He registered the Whataburger trademark in June of that year, two months before the stand opened. The name came from his conception of what a customer's reaction would be: what a burger. That is it. He wanted a reaction, not a brand.

The concept spread. A second location followed in Corpus Christi. Then more in Texas, then across the Gulf South. The distinctive orange-and-white-striped A-frame design came later, making Whataburger locations identifiable from a distance on flat Texas roads. Harmon Dobson died in a plane crash in nineteen sixty-seven, before the chain had reached full scale, but the company he founded continued expanding under his family and later under investment ownership. In the years after, Whataburger kept growing, eventually surpassing nine hundred locations across the American South and Southwest.

The original Ayers Street location is no longer there. But the company still claims Corpus Christi as its home, and Texans who encounter a Whataburger anywhere else in the country tend to feel something that is difficult to describe but unmistakable.