Dave’s True Passion

January 13, 2001

by John F. Schmidt

To say "Dave Thomas" is to say "hamburger," but that is not where his chief passion lay.

Dave Thomas, the inimitable Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburger founder, passed away Tuesday in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. His passing took me by surprise, since I was not aware of any illness, or old age, and was certainly not aware that he was almost a neighbor - if you can call a person a neighbor who lives in the next county. Although he had undergone quadruple-bypass heart surgery in 1996, and kidney dialysis last year, he succumbed to liver cancer at age 66. I will miss the man.

Like most Americans, I have eaten Wendy’s hamburgers for years, and liked them. I patronize Wendy’s both for the merits of the burgers, but also for the likableness of "Dave" himself in his countless commercials. He was corny and not ’with it,’ but he projected something genuinely impossible to reproduce with the glitzy ads used by some larger burger chains. Dave sold himself first: the burgers were good because Dave Thomas was Dave Thomas.There was nothing fake about him or his advertising campaign. What it lacked in glitz was more than made up in sincerity and transparent honesty.

Not all advertising was centered on Dave, though. Who can forget the Wendy’s ads built around the famous, "Where’s the Beef?" It was eagerly folded into our culture, even being co-opted by a Democratic presidential candidate in the 1984 campaign. (He lost). The little old lady and the cantankerous question are part of Americana, and we have Dave Thomas to thank for that.

But if Dave is remembered only for his hamburgers, then America will be the poorer for it. To learn a little bit about him is to find a man who was a genuine American success story. He was born in Atlantic City, N.J. on July 2, 1932, to an unwed mother, and adopted when he was six weeks old by Rex and Auleve Thomas. His adoptive mother died when he was five, and the young Dave Thomas traveled with his father, who was a laborer, and a sometime alcoholic. Dave had three other stepmothers during this time. Not exactly the sort of early life that would settle a youngster on a strong upward track.

But someone intervened and changed his life. His adoptive mother’s mother, "Grandma Minnie Sinclair" took him in and, in his thirteenth year, adopted him permanently. She provided the stability and love that Dave had missed, and also provided him a framework of life principles that became the foundation of his later success. "Don’t cut corners or lose quality," she warned the boy. "If you lose quality, you lose everything else."

His career covers a wide range of activities, including an army stint while he was still underage but game enough to lie his way in to the service. Talent for management seems to have surfaced even before his eighteenth birthday in the armed services, as he managed an enlisted men’s club and served 2,000 meals a day.

What grandma Minnie did in investing her life in him must have stuck with him. In the years following his business and financial success in the restaurant business, his zeal was to invest his life in others - especially children needing adoption.

He did not reveal his adopted status publicly until the late 1980s, nearly 20 years after he opened the first Wendy’s restaurants, but by 1990 he was heading "Adoption Works ... for Everybody," a presidential initiative.

That same year, Mr. Thomas urged states to establish adoption benefits for state workers while addressing the National Governor’s Conference. Two years later, he founded the nonprofit Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, to which he donated all speaking fees and profits from his two books, Dave’s Way and Well Done!!

His activities made a significant impact on such practical problems as the waiting time to adopt children in foster care. In my own experience in a northeastern state several years ago, it was so difficult to adopt a child out of foster care that many otherwise adoptable children simply spent their youth being shuttled from one ’home’ to another while waiting for interminable regulatory stipulations to be met. Dave Thomas helped to change much of that red tape.

Dave Thomas’ contributions made a real difference in people’s lives. Not just by feeding mouths with burgers, but by filling lives with hope and an opportunity to become someone "special" in another’s life. He got something special from "Grandma Minnie," and so he passed it on. Life is an awful, deep, lonely pit when no one loves you or cares for your soul.

To the end, close friends said that he always insisted that he was just a hamburger cook.

We know better, Dave. Your passion far exceeded the realm of fast food hamburgers. Your delight was to be a friend to kids who are bounced around like you were in your youth, with no place to call home; and no welcome in any heart. God knows, people who even say they care are rare enough, but we found in you a gem: somebody who did something tangible with his dreams, and kept at it until there was a difference. You didn’t forget what it was like to suffer, and what it was like to be loved by - a stranger.

Perhaps that is why I so admire Dave Thomas. He emulated someone else who helped strangers, and was no stranger himself to rejection and homelessness. (Luke 9:58) That "someone" did more to introduce hope into the human race than any person who ever lived. In his own way, so did Dave. May your tribe increase!

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This essay was based on an article by Ron Hayes, titled "Wendy’s founder adoption advocate." It was published in the Palm Beach Post of January 9, 2002.

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John F. Schmidt has written numerous articles over the last decade. Politically, he is an Alan Keyes-type Republican. Along with his wife, he has organized voter drives in Pennsylvania, and been active politically since the 1990 elections. His livelihood, until recently, was spent in automation engineering for a large global equipment manufacturing company, specializing in coal mining. WANB in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania hosted Schmidt's weekly talk radio program "Issues and Answers." His writing is intended to relate the headlines of today to the foundation of eternal truth - the Scriptures. He currently resides in Palm Beach County, Florida. Visit his website at: Inalienable-Rights.org

Send the author an E mail at Schmidt@ConservativeTruth.org.

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