When Seattleites want to give out-of-town visitors an insider’s tour of their hometown, they’ll often take them to a Dick’s Drive-In restaurant. The very first Dick’s was launched in the Wallingford neighborhood in 1954, the same year Elvis Presley’s recording career began. By 2023 there were nine Dick's scattered around the city and its suburbs, but its menu of burgers, fries, and shakes, the design of its restaurants, and the way it does business hadn't changed much in seven decades.
Founding Father
Dick’s got its name from founder Richard "Dick" Jack Spady, who was born in Portland, Oregon on October 15, 1923. When his parents divorced, he went to live with his grandmother on a farm near Tigard, Oregon. In 1928, his mother remarried and he rejoined her back in Portland. Spady grew up and went to school in the city’s Beaumont neighborhood, as did best-selling children’s author Beverley Cleary. Her novels featuring grade school baby boomers Henry Huggins and Beezus and Ramona Quimby were set in the same neighborhood, and are still in print after more than 70 years. Spady would go on to make his fortune selling burgers and fries to the same boomer generation when they were old enough to drive.
Spady began his working life at 9 years old, regularly sweeping out a grocery store for a dime. He saved half of it and would spend the remaining nickel on a movie. In elementary school he delivered newspapers, and during high school he had a job cleaning his old grammar school, played sports, and also studied Morse code. After graduation he worked as telegraph operator for the Union Pacific Railroad. During World War II, he served in the Navy in the Pacific, later attending Oregon State University on the G.I. Bill, where he got good grades, earned a business degree, and joined ROTC. After graduation, as a reserve officer during the Korean war, he learned how to run a restaurant in occupied Japan as a commissary officer, retiring as a colonel.
Field Research
When Spady was 29, he decided he wanted to start a restaurant in Seattle, which he considered a more innovative city than Portland. He didn’t have a lot of money and reached out to an old army buddy, Warren Ghormley, to join the effort. Ghormley suggested the two of them approach his wife’s boss, Dr. B. O. A. "Tom" Thomas, a professor of dentistry at the University of Washington, who signed on as the third partner.
The trio did some research, including a visit to a California restaurant named McDonalds. The McDonald brothers, a couple of New Englanders, had been operating a barbecue restaurant in San Bernardino, just off Route 66. After they noticed most customers were buying hamburgers instead of the labor-intensive barbecue dishes they were spending hours preparing, they decided to change course. They fired the 20 female carhops who had been carrying food to customers in cars, replaced china and silverware with wrapping paper, trimmed the menu to just nine items, and closed down the operation for three months while developing a hamburger production and delivery process they called the Speedee Service System.
They also rebranded their operation with a pudgy Pillsbury Doughboy-style mascot named Speedee. (The arches would come later, after the brothers cashed out to Ray Kroc in 1961.) At first, some of the fired carhops took to heckling customers from the parking lot, but soon the brothers had doubled their profits and were franchising their concept in California and Arizona.
When Spady and his partners showed up in the 1950s to check out the Speedee Service System, they offered the brothers $50 if they could work for them for free, making burgers and presumably picking up ideas. According to Spady’s granddaughter Jasmine Donovan, the brothers quickly escorted the visitors off the premises. But the McDonald brothers' success had already spawned some imitators, and the persistent trio from Seattle were able to do field research at copycat restaurants who were happy to make a quick fifty bucks.
The threesome was now full of operating strategy but short on cash. They each invested $5,000 to launch their restaurant. Spady was hard-pressed to come up with his share. When the partners approached Seattle bankers for a loan, they were asked how they were expected to make money selling burgers for 19 cents apiece when restaurants around town were going broke selling them for 30 cents. Finally, they found a contractor who, against the advice of his banker, insurance agent, and attorney, was willing to build the new restaurant in return for a portion of the profits for five years. It turned out to be an excellent investment.
Wallingford Hot Spot
Teenagers had been sitting on drugstore stools in front of counters since the early 1920s, and there were lots of restaurants with street parking, tables, waitstaff, and menus serving burgers, fries, and shakes, but this was something else. A Seattle Times story explained that Dick’s was a "novel … new-type drive-in restaurant" where "customers may select packaged, cooked food items to take home or arrange trayed car luncheons," and "special kitchen equipment will enable high-volume production of a limited menu (Clement).
The location in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood was chosen for its proximity to both Lincoln and Roosevelt high schools – both full of hungry teens who could eat, meet, and mingle among their cars until well into the night. It was also near the University of Washington, full of hungry young people on a budget. Before the Catholic church changed its practice of abstaining from meat on Fridays, kids from parochial schools who might already have dined on fish at home would come to Dick’s and wait until a few minutes after midnight to enjoy a Saturday burger.
A tall, brightly lit sign with a bold Dick’s orange, yellow, and black logo, designed by Seattle’s "Queen of Neon" Bea Haverfield, loomed over the parking lot. The sign summed up the concept in very few words: "Hamburgers. Instant Service. 19¢. TAKE EM HOME. Open 11AM – 2AM." Besides hamburgers, they also sold cheeseburgers, fries, Coca Cola, and orange soda, as well as milkshakes and ice cream offerings.
Initially, customers were faced with a simple decision: hamburger or cheeseburger. But in 1971, two new options made their debut: the Dick’s Special with a single 1/8-pound grilled patty with lettuce, mayonnaise, and pickle relish, and the Dick’s Deluxe with two 1/8 pound grilled patties, melted cheese, lettuce, mayonnaise, and pickle relish. The original Dick’s 1/8 of a pound hamburgers and cheeseburgers remained available in two styles – with ketchup and mustard or without.
Dick’s didn’t offer variety, but it emphasized quality. Locally made buns were delivered daily. Milkshakes were handmade, the old-fashioned way. Fries were made on the premises from whole potatoes cut by a mechanical device called a spud cutter (but sometimes called the spud machine.) And the burgers were made from 100 percent real beef, delivered fresh and never frozen. Dick Spady maintained that meat from male steers was vastly superior to beef from female cows.
Back in the early 1960s, a local meat distributor gave Spady a painting of a hefty steer standing in front of a dazzling blue sky. It was placed facing the window so customers could see the steer as they ordered their burger. The animal had a serious, no nonsense look about him, and he went on to grace all subsequent Dick’s locations, and later its food trucks. He also became available as a jigsaw puzzle. Dick’s publicity called it "a company icon representing the tireless efforts Dick’s and its faithful crew have for keeping quality first."
Business boomed. More eye-catching orange Dick’s signs sprouted in other King County neighborhoods. After Wallingford came Broadway (1955), Holman Road (1960), Lake City (1963), and Queen Anne (1974) – the only location with indoor seating. A location in Bellevue opened in 1965 but closed, only to be reborn decades later at Crossroads in 2014. By 2023 there would also be Dick’s restaurants in Edmonds (2011), Kent (2018), and Federal Way (2013), with another opening scheduled for Everett in 2025. The Crossroads location served as the base for a fleet of roving Dick's food trucks, launched during the Covid-19 pandemic, when people weren’t standing close to each other in lines. Afterwards, the trucks remained in service, and customers could find out online where they were operating that day.
While there is a Dick’s Drive-In in Spokane, it’s never been part of the Seattle-based Dick’s company. Like the west-of-the-mountains Dick’s, it was founded in 1954, but under the name Kirk’s. In the 1960s it was renamed Panda Self Service Drive-In Restaurant. Its tall neon sign in the parking lot still features a cartoon panda holding a plated burger which is being pecked at by a chicken. The restaurant was rechristened Dick’s in 1967, but the retro panda-and-chicken sign remains.
The Spady Way
Dick Spady always said he didn’t want to go national because he was a family man and wanted the business to stay in the Seattle area. He and his wife, the former Ina Lou Arnold, a naval officer from Georgia, had five children – four boys and a girl – whom they raised in a house on the shores of Lake Sammamish in Bellevue. The children spent a lot of time outdoors in the woods and in the lake, where a saltwater seal of mysterious origin then lived.
Spady was a prominent lay leader in the Methodist church, and an active citizen, supporting many civic and charitable endeavors. After the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he was moved to come up with a way to facilitate interracial dialogue in his community. He founded the 400 member Eastside Inter-racial Clearing House, pairing small groups of white and Black families, including their children, to share opinions and develop ways to talk about race.
He also sponsored a 2007 initiative that led to his founding and funding of the Community Forums Network, a program to help regular citizens get involved in public-policy decisions. He established and helped manage other charitable endeavors locally, nationally, and even internationally, winning an award from the Russian government after he provided leadership supporting its liberalization during the period of Glasnost in the 1990s.
In 1990, when Spady turned 67, he approached his son Jim, who had been an attorney at the Seattle firm of Bogle and Gates, and had subsequently started his own practice. Would Jim consider taking over leadership of Dick’s for a while, allowing his father to devote more of his time to his philanthropic work? Dick also wanted Jim’s help on another matter. For some time now, the other two partners had wanted Spady to buy them out. Because the business was so successful and now worth millions, Spady would have to go broke to afford the buyout. He had been stalling, but the partners kept pressing him.
Jim Spady was surprised. He had never had any interest in becoming part of the family business, but said he’d take a leave from his firm and help his dad run Dick’s and negotiate the million-dollar-plus buyout. The Spadys took out a big loan to make it happen. Expansion would be put on hold until the loan was paid off. Times were tight for a while, but the 1991 parting with the other investors was amicable.
Down Memory Lane
In 1991, Dick's published a heavily illustrated paperback coffee table book, Dicks: Forty Years of Memories. Customers were invited to join a contest sharing their memories of Dick’s over the years. Entries were published in categories such as Photo Memories, Oldest Memories, Car Memories, Just Plain Good Memories, Funniest Memories, Romantic Memories, Employee Memories, and Special Memories. Dick’s parking lot had generated a vast number of romantic memories, including meeting a future spouse, a first kisses, marriage proposals, and couples showing up in wedding gowns and tuxedos for Dick’s burgers and fries right after exchanging vows.
Childhood memories featured the excitement brought on by trips to Dick’s in the backseat of the family car. There was also one from a woman who as a 7-year old woke up one night, and unbeknownst by her parents, walked by herself to Dick’s in her nightgown with her penny collection, bought a chocolate ice cream cone and walked back home. Dick’s (operating in an era when children had more free range) gave her an extra scoop for free.
The Grand Prize winner of the memory contest was Joan Swanson Hoagland. At the Dick’s groundbreaking in 1953, the Swansons had been living next door to an empty Wallingford lot for 21 years. As a child, Joan watched the first Dick’s restaurant being built there, and became a loyal fan of the cuisine at the grand opening. The patriarch of the family, her dad Charles Swanson, had been selling Christmas trees from the empty lot for years, and the two working partners, Spady and Ghormley, said he could continue to sell his trees from the premises, which he duly did. They also hired Swanson to do maintenance and carpentry around the place.
Joan Hoagland wrote that her dad treated Spady and Ghormley like his own sons, and was proud of their success. She appreciated their respect for her dad. No one else was allowed to clean the grease chute, even after Charles turned 80. Over the years, Swansons from four generations of the family became Dick’s employees, and family members and employees used the gate in the Swanson’s backyard wooden fence to visit back and forth.
Dick’s came out with another historical overview, 50 years of Memories, in 2003. It included an entry from a second-generation employee and the son of a mother who was on the job at Dick’s and had eaten three helpings of fries on her break, just before going into labor and giving birth to him soon after. Another memory came from the daughter of a man who had suffered a heart attack that had left him in a coma. After he regained consciousness, surrounded by concerned family members and a doctor, he startled them all by immediately asking for a Dick’s Deluxe and a chocolate shake.
Local celebrities were spotted at various Dick’s restaurants over the years, waiting patiently in line. They included Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, a regular who often appeared on Sundays; Seattle Seahawks defensive star Richard Sherman; entertainers Sir Mix-a-Lot and Macklemore; and serving governor of Washington Gary Locke. SuperSonics basketball star Xavier McDaniel, known as The X-Man, was spotted post-game at the Queen Anne location, enjoying his burger with a beer he'd brought in in a paper bag.
Buyout and Expansion
By 2010, after Dick’s had navigated through some lean times and paid off the loan to buy out the other two partners, the Spadys were ready to build another Dick’s Drive-In. Jim Spady’s wife Fawn came up with a promotional idea: Let the public vote on the new location for the first new Dick’s in decades. The public was invited to vote online for either a north of Seattle or a south of Seattle location.
Jim Spady was watching the count online when he realized someone voting "north" had just flooded the count with thousands of ballots. Minutes later, someone from the south did the same thing. One person had voted 30,000 time. Jim Spady had to come up with a quick solution. He laughed about it later. "We went on local television, held a press conference and I said, 'We know who you are. We know your IP address. If you don’t stop this right away, we are going to take away your burger privileges for life'" (Volk). The threat apparently put a halt to the ballot stuffing. Dick Spady, now 87, was on hand for the big announcement. A Dick’s in the city of Edmonds, north of Seattle, opened to much fanfare in 2011. It was the first new Dick’s in nearly four decades.
When Esquire magazine asked readers to vote in a national online poll for the best burger in America in 2012, they expected the winner might be Steak 'n Shake, In-N-Out, or Five Guys. They were startled when Dick’s Drive-In won with a whopping 56 percent of the votes, noting that even "some guy in Florida" voted for Dick’s (Schrodt).
The NBC Today show’s website hired a Seattle writer to educate the rest of the nation about Dick’s burgers. "Many Seattleites can rattle off their Dick’s Drive-In order faster than they can recall their own social security number," she wrote, noting that her own order was always a Deluxe, fries, and a chocolate shake (Stiffler).
In 2013, Macklemore was producing a video for the song “White Walls," referring to a vintage Cadillac with white-wall tires. He wanted to shoot a scene where he would drive past the Dick’s on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. Jim’s son Saul had a better idea. Have Macklemore perform on the Dick’s Drive-in roof. Jim ran the idea past the family, who agreed despite risqué lyrics, which were unintelligible anyway. The shoot drew thousands of fans to the Dick’s on Broadway and lasted well into dawn.
In July 2016, Dick’s took on another technical challenge. For 62 years, the company had only taken payment in cash. It was in tune with Dick’s charmingly traditional style of doing business, and it also made it easy for customers to donate their change to its Change for Charity program, which had collected $1.4 million for homeless charities. Customers were now asking Dick’s to accept debit and credit cards. Jim Spady prepared to make the change, saying, "The only reason people still carry cash in this city is to eat at Dick’s Drive-In" (Volk).
Dick Spady died In January 2016, at the age of 92. He had won the affection of the community not only for his beloved burgers and fries and his community work, but also for treating his employees with respect, paying them the highest wages in the business, and providing many of them with college scholarships as well as subsidizing child care for them.
Jim Spady never did go back to practicing law. He had planned to navigate the buyout and maybe spend 10 years or so as CEO, but he was still at Dick’s 30 years later. After he retired in 2019, he enjoyed spending time in Hawaii, although he missed the availability of Dick’s burgers and even daydreamed about opening a Dick’s there.
Dick’s had always been a family business, and Jim Spady’s successor was his daughter Jasmine Donovan. She had worked at Dick’s during high school and college, learning the business from the bottom up. (It’s a Dick’s tradition. Many Dick’s executives over the years began their careers at Dick’s selling burgers through a glass window.)
After college, she went on to become a naval officer, like her grandmother Spady, and earned an MBA. She joined the family business, learning the ropes from her father, and serving as communications director. She also faced a challenge her grandfather and father hadn’t. In 2021 she said the rise of street crime was affecting business, especially at the Queen Anne and Capitol Hill locations. She said employees were picking up needles in parking lots and restrooms, and that verbal and physical assaults on employees were "frequent enough for us to hire security at multiple locations" (Kipp).
Donovan says that family businesses often falter when a third generation takes over. When she took over from her father on April 1, 2019, she also chose the date on which she would retire. While she won’t reveal the date she’s chosen, she says that it’s a necessity in a family business to plan your retirement for when you expect to be still physically and mentally up to the job, to see the business handed over to her children and their cousins’ generation in good shape.
In 2023, when Donovan was asked about the biggest challenge facing the future of Dick’s, she didn’t hesitate. She said the biggest challenge ahead was maintaining the delicate balance between nostalgia and the needs of today’s customers. The customers included some of the same teens from the 1950s, as well as their children and grandchildren. By the 2020s, the Wallingford location still looked pretty much as it had when it was newly built. Restrooms had been added at one point, and the portrait of the steer still graced the rear interior wall of the flagship location.
