100% Beef: Dick’s Drive-In Stand the Test of Time

Darn. I got preoccupied and missed the news that Dick’s, the city’s oldest continuously
operating fast-food restaurants, had once again celebrated its end-of-January
anniversary by offering 19-cent hamburgers, the same price they sold for on opening
day, Jan. 28, 1954.

It’s truly amazing that Dick’s has remained Seattle’s favorite for seven decades. Starting
out with a single outlet in Wallingford, the business grew strategically. Dick’s added
Capitol Hill Dick’s in 1955, Holman Road in 1960, Lake City in 1963 and Lower Queen
Anne (the only one with seating) in 1974. After that there was a slowdown, but there are
now nine Dick’s with a tenth coming to Everett this year.

Through the years, Dick’s menu has stayed steady. Founder Dick Spady believed in
keeping it simple. While other hamburger outlets added variations like bacon burgers, fishwiches and chicken burgers, Dick’s stuck to classic hamburger and cheeseburgers before adding Dick’s Deluxe with double hamburger patties in 1971. The menu still extends only to burgers, hand-cut French fries, malts, coffee, soda and ice cream. It was the 1970s before Dick’s dropped orange soda and added Diet Coke.

Credit cards weren’t honored there until 2016. Before that, the local question was:
Why do Seattleites always carry cash? The answer: To eat at Dick’s.

Namesake and driving force behind the drive-in, Richard Jack (Dick) Spady, was born in Portland in 1923, served in the Navy during World War II and attended Oregon State on the GI Bill. During the Korean War, he served again, this time as a commissary officer, learning a lot about restaurants.

After leaving the military, Spady reached out to his old army buddy Warren Ghormley
with the idea of opening a fast-food restaurant. The pair enlisted a third partner:
Warren’s wife’s employer, Dr. “Tom” Thomas who taught dentistry at the University of
Washington.

Spady picked Seattle for the fledgling enterprise rather than his native Portland,
believing this city had more potential. To get hands-on experience, the trio located a
successful fast-food restaurant in L.A. and paid the owners $50 to spend a day working
there. Then it was back to Seattle to arrange for a bank loan. But the banks all turned
them down, convinced that selling 19-cent hamburgers wouldn’t work — not when others
were losing money charging 30 cents. Rather than give up on their dream, the partners
put up $5,000 each and found a contractor willing to construct a building in return for a
portion of the receipts for the first five years.

Spady had wanted three things: a place where you could park easily, get quality food in
a hurry and pay reasonable prices. From the beginning, he offered employees top
hourly wages, 100 percent health care, and benefits including access to a college
scholarship. Because Spady believed steer meat was best, his meat supplier gifted him
a portrait of a hefty-looking steer in the 1960s. That painting still hangs in the back of
the Wallingford drive-in and has even been made into a jig-saw puzzle.

Dick’s drive-ins have long been Seattle’s great unifier: every demographic, rich and poor, working stiffs and multi-millionaires. You can easily be standing in line behind
Microsoft’s Bill Gates, former Gov. Gary Locke, Sir Mix-a-Lot, Macklemore (all known Dick’s addicts) or former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan (who celebrated her 2017 win by
buying her family a bagful of Dick’s burgers).

Whenever there’s a local poll of city favorites, Dick’s Drive-in is certain to score top
marks. More surprising still, in 2012 Dick’s came in first in the nation, winning 56 percent
of the votes in Esquire magazine’s “Most Life-Changing Burger in America.”

Today the Spady family is the sole owner of Dick’s Drive-Ins, having bought out the
other two partners. Founder Dick Spady passed away at 92 in 2016, leaving his son Jim
as president. It’s Jim’s daughter, Jasmine Donovan, who now heads the organization.
But what remains the same are the identity touches. Take the familiar orange, white and
black Dick’s sign that was designed so many years ago by Bev Haverfield, Seattle’s
“Queen of Neon.”

Then there’s the familiar logo on Dick’s take-out sacks: a cartoony line drawing that shows the drive-in surrounded by three 1950s-model cars. The drawing was done by a new graduate of Seattle’s Burnley School of Art. That young commercial artist, Bob Godden, had started out freelancing, working from the basement of University Printing Company in the U District. He had just proposed marriage to the University District Herald’s young news editor, me. Small wonder then that my family grew up — as Seattleites have, then and now — with Dick’s burgers part of their DNA.