An Interpretation

"Hop" to It
by Lawrence Herzog

In these days of drive through fast food, it's perhaps a little difficult to imagine driving up to a restaurant, being served right in your car and dining off the dashboard. But that's how thousands of Edmontonians ate meals in the 1950s through 1970s - the halcyon days of the drive-in restaurant in our city.

The drive-in restaurant came to Edmonton in the late 1940s, imported by Jim Rae and Bill Jarvis, who went on to fame as local purveyors of Kentucky Fried Chicken and operators of a little local food chain they called Burger King. The story goes that Jarvis was on holiday in Great Falls, Montana in 1947 and he stayed next to a Dairy Queen - the first drive-in he had ever seen.

"I figured this was something that would really go and so I got in touch with the Dairy Queen people and asked about a location for Edmonton," the enterprising and entrepreneurial Jarvis recalls. "Well, they told me I couldn't sell ice cream to Eskimos."

Undaunted, Bill and Jim pooled their resources and opened a location at 8705 118 Avenue, leasing the site from a church. Thus the "Dairy Drive-In" was born. Bill recalls that the little outlet was busy right away. When the two year lease expired, the church wanted the property back and so the partners found another site on 112th Avenue just west of 82nd Street and hauled their building over there.

They were onto something big. In 1957, a company operated by Earl "Buzz" Fuller opened a drive-in hamburger joint on 112th Avenue at 72nd Street, and the teenagers flocked to it like a bear to honey. The first A & W was a huge hit, and it sparked an expansion which saw the chain open more than a dozen more such drive-ins in Edmonton over the next 20 years.

The one I remember best was a location on 118th Avenue and 123rd Street, but perhaps the most visible was the one on 109th Street and 102nd Avenue. With its grand neon sign that poured root beer from a spigot into a mug, it was a downtown landmark for more than a quarter century.

I can still hear the jingle that seemed to be playing everywhere on radio and television in the late 1960s: "Let's all go to A & W. Food's more fun at A & W. We'll have a mug of root beer, or maybe two or three . . . Hop in the car, come as you are, to A & W."

Like the drive-in theatre, these drive-in restaurants offered convenience and played up the car culture that was to be such a dominant force in the 1950s and 1960s. They really were the right idea at the right time.