Snappy's
There is, at 701 Broadway in Little Rock, Arkansas, a McDonald’s Restaurant. It seems ordinary enough. It’s a nice, modern restaurant, two stories tall, with a large, ample parking lot. Popular with the downtown lunch crowd and the weekend denizens, it does a brisk business. Bill Clinton, as Governor of Arkansas, used to stop at this McDonald’s on his morning jogs around the city, and regulars sometimes stopped for a chat and a cup of coffee with the governor. Some folks of our generation may have taken their kids, or grandkids, or great-grandkids there for a happy meal. For most people it’s just another McDonald’s Restaurant. But the bustling serving lines, drive-in window, and busy parking lot occupy a concrete corner that for some -- I confess I am one of them -- was once hallowed ground.
Snappy Service System drive-in, affectionately called just Snappy’s, was THE place to hang out in Little Rock all though the 1950s and well into the 1960s. From the time we were first entrusted with the family car on a weekend night we were indoctrinated into the Snappy’s culture. We drove though at least once every Friday or Saturday night. We went there to see and be seen, took our dates there, proposed to our future life-mates or accepted their proposals there, and celebrated every imaginable event there. When we got our own car our first visit was probably to Snappy’s. Guys in jeans or black slacks or tuxedos and girls in pedal pushers or poodle skirts or formal gowns all intermingled and none were ever out of place.
A parking spot -- any parking spot -- was a lucky dog find, and once parked we could have sat for hours. But Snappy’s didn’t make money on parkers, so a resident police officer watched you drive in and if you stopped to talk to someone he made you keep the line moving. Once parked, you ordered over an intercom -- one of the first anywhere -- and a carhop brought your food and attached a tray to your window. And if you parked and didn’t order something within a reasonable time the resident officer threw you out, and someone else had themselves a lucky dog parking spot, and when you got your order he watched you eat it and when you finished, if you didn’t leave within a reasonable time, he threw you out and someone else had themselves a lucky dog parking spot.
Before you drove into Snappy’s you stopped a couple blocks away and detached the vacuum line to your carburetor. Then your engine would lope as you drove through. All the parking was covered and the cover acted like a megaphone so a loping engine echoed and shook the ground. I say "you" because I had a 1954 Chevrolet, and If I detached my vacuum line my car would die.
There were three parking rows. One was east-west along the north wall of the Little Rock Laundry and Cleaners building next door and then a double row running north-south perpendicular to that one. You backed in -- to see and be seen. Any car that pulled into a parking spot front-first most certainly had out-of-state license tags and was just some hungry family passing through on Highway 67 who were oblivious to the fact that they were out of place and in the way.
The Saturday-night waiting line to get into Snappy’s was probably responsible for more million-milliliters of hydrocarbons being spewed into the atmosphere than any other single factor in the state of Arkansas for two decades. Once in, you scoped out parking spots. If there were none then you tried to prolong the drive through as long as possible to see as many people as possible. The most treasured parking spots were on the back row, facing the alley, because if you only got to drive through once, you drove along that row. When you were finally forced to exit on Seventh Street, you made a U-turn to the right, drove south down the alley along the 24-inch high concrete wall that separated Snappy’s parking lot from the alley -- a wall that’s still there and the only remaining evidence of those days. At the end of the alley you turned right onto Eighth Street, then turned right again at Broadway, then waited in line to enter Snappy’s for another round. If you don't understand all of that, then you weren't there and it doesn't matter, anyway.
McDonald's at 701 Broadway today
Looking South from the alleyway across Seventh Street. Coming at you out of the parking lot, south to north, this was the main exit onto Seventh Street. The wall along the alley is the only thing remaining from the Snappy's era -- Snappy's parking lot went all the way up to that wall (there was no greenery). The exit you see, with the greenbelt to the left, is new; the old one was further to the left, about where the greenbelt is now. I don't think the storm drain was there -- it was probably added with the McDonald's construction. In the background, where the Taco Bell property is now, there was a red-brick building the length of the entire half block that housed Little Rock Laundry and Cleaners. One row of Snappy's parking backed up to that building. Look closely at the one-way sign at the end of the alley indicating that the alley is one way coming at you (south to north). This was a later traffic ordinance to prevent drivers from making a U-turn to the right upon exiting Snappy's and going up the alley for a quick return. Instead, we had to go around an entire block -- like that was a problem. This is an example of a city ordinance that persists today, no longer has any relevance, and nobody remembers why it was enacted in the first place. |
Snappy’s was unique, and today, our memories of the place are missing two things: a picture and a history. Sorry, I don’t have a picture. In 50 years, none has ever turned up. Not in any newspaper archive, not in any vintage yearbook, and not in any 50th reunion candids. Our generation experienced life but seldom photographed it because the process was a thousand times more complicated and expensive than today. And get this: of the thousands of people who pulled through Snappy’s thousands of times, not one can describe the building. Don’t tell me you can because you’ll be lying and you’ll get it wrong. And while we know what other Snappy Service restaurants around the country looked like, as you will see we don’t know if they were kin to ours so we can’t extrapolate to “it may have looked like this one”.
So I don’t have a picture, but I can give you the history, and here it is.
Before we look at Snappy’s, let’s understand its inspiration.
The White Castle Hamburgers restaurant chain, founded in 1921 in Wichita, Kansas, was the first successful burger chain in the US. (A&W Root Beer started in 1919, but they emphasized the drink, not the food.) White Castle introduced America to the five-cent hamburger.
In the 1920s and 1930s businesses apparently did not, or perhaps had no legal recourse to, defend their names like they do today, and so White Castle spawned many competitors and some of those were blatant copycats like White Tower and Royal Castle, both of which cashed in on the success of the White Castle name. Others, like Krystal and Hill’s Snappy Service, copied the business model but not the name. If someone was successful, somebody else rode their coat-tails in some way, and may the best business win.
Paul Clarence Hill once watched a steady stream of customers carry sacks full of hamburgers out of a White Castle restaurant and he wanted a piece of that. Born in 1889 in Morrill, Kansas, just north of Topeka, he married Bessie Brown in 1912 and in March of 1925 they were in Jackson, Kansas, where Paul Hill was a clerk. But later that year they made their way to Trenton, Missouri, and there Paul Hill started Hill’s Snappy Service Restaurants to compete with, and cash in on the success of, the White Castle Hamburger chain. In 1929, Hill opened a second restaurant in Terre Haute, Indiana. In the 1930’s, Hill continued to expand by adding Hill’s Snappy Service Restaurants in Anderson (located on 11th Street), Indianapolis, Kokomo (North Buckeye Street), and Evansville (near the River and on 2nd Street), to name just a few.
The word “snappy” was in common use in the 1920s and 1930s. A “snappy jacket” was “chic”, a “snappy tune” was “lively”, a “snappy pace” was “brisk”, and “make it snappy” admonished one to “hurry”. “Snappy service” was a term that symbolized quick service or “fast food”. The term is still used today, most notably by Outback Steak House.
Hill’s Snappy Service was never as big as White Castle, and according to his grandson, Paul Hill himself was mostly responsible for stifling the company’s potential:
“...they did not survive because of the Jehovah’s Witness belief that we are living in the end times,
and when the economy takes a dive or there is war, the congregations think "this must be it", and
with that mentality, my granddad spent more time preaching and less time keeping up with the times.
He also did not add drive thru windows and at the time all the new fast food burger food chains had them.”
According to the book “Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age” Hill's Snappy Service chain closed in 1983, but the Hill family puts the date twenty years earlier, about 1963. Paul Hill died December 8, 1962 in Mission, Texas, just across the border from Mexico, and the company was dissolved with the settlement of his estate.
According to Paul Hill’s Grandson:
”Dad (Donald Earl, Paul’s son) managed the four Evansville (Indiana) restaurants (Hill's Snappy Service)
from about the time he married my mother (1940) until they left town about 1963. The restaurants were
sold as part of the settling of Paul Hill's estate...”
NOTE: parentheses are mine.
With the demise of Hill’s empire, Krystal took over as White Castle’s biggest competitor. Today the two companies are still strong and have pretty much divided up the country into the Midwest (White castle) and the southeast (Krystal).
Hill’s Snappy Service was one of the most successful of the White Castle competitors, so it follows that it would generate its own copycats. Ferrell’s Snappy Service in Kentucky was started in 1930 by six Ferrell brothers. Joseph Schlosser of Joe’s Snappy Service, AKA “Snappy Joe’s”, now defunct, had several locations in Michigan as early as 1934. William Brown returned from a trip to Kansas in 1937 and opened Brown’s Snappy Service at 124 North Main in Canton, Illinois. Also, before you ask, Snappy Service restaurant in Camden, Arkansas, was established in 1993 is not related to any of these Snappy chains.
John William Dunlap was a stonemason from Kentucky who first appeared in Kansas in the town of Marion in 1900. By 1920 he was in Wichita. He and his wife May had at least 14 children and it was the Dunlap kids who would spread the name Snappy Service to Little Rock.
The origin of the Snappy Service Lunch chain (note the word "Lunch") is not known. In fact, it isn’t even known that it was a chain or that it had any kind of organization. It wasn’t a franchise or a known corporation and appears to be just a bunch of separate independent restaurants in several states that happen to have the same name. There were three restaurants in 1929 in Eugene, Oregon, at least one in 1929 in Long Beach, California, and Seattle, Washington, and restaurants as early as 1924 in Salt Lake City and in Ogden, Utah (where it has had a recent resurgence).
But in 1924, some unknown inspiration moved Glenn Wilmer Dunlap to relocate from Wichita to Kansas City, Missouri and open his own Snappy Service Lunch restaurants at 1008 Troost and 4709 Troost, constructing buildings that look suspiciously like White Castle hamburger stands.
Snappy Service Lunch, 1008 Troost, Kansas City, Missouri
National Historic Register. Demolished, however, in 1982
Glenn Dunlap was eventually joined by his brothers Clyde, Earl, Fred, and Alfred, and they ran a chain of as many as 12 restaurants.
While his brothers ran the Kansas City Chain, Glenn moved on to St. Louis with Frank P. Davis, who worked for him as a clerk in Kansas City and was quite possibly his brother-in-law -- Frank’s wife, Frances, was from Wichita, and Glenn had a sister named Frances. In 1929 Glenn and Frank founded the first Snappy Service System -- note the the word “System”. Almost everyone assumes Snappy Service System was a part of Hill’s Snappy Service restaurant chain, but it wasn’t. It was an extension of Glenn Dunlap’s Kansas City chain, which had nothing to do with Hill.
Snappy Service System in St. Louis operated four restaurants.
No. 1 at 562 DeBalavier Avenue,
No. 2 at 5316 Easton Avenue,
No. 3 at 5893 Delmar Boulevard, and
No. 4 at 3131 North Grand Boulevard.
The chain did not last and all the restaurants were closed by 1938, and all of the buildings are gone today.
Leaving Frank Davis to run the St. Louis chain, Glen moved west to Tacoma, Washington. In 1930 he opened two Snappy Service System restaurants, at 2315 Pacific and 5621 Union Avenue. No one knows the answer to, “why Tacoma?”, but Tacoma agreed with Glenn and he stayed on. In 1953 he was still running a single restaurant at 2301 Pacific. By 1954 it was closed but he remained in Tacoma until his death in 1960.
While his brothers were busy in Kansas City and St. Louis, James W. Dunlap, also in 1929, took Glenn’s Snappy Service System to Birmingham, Alabama, where he operated six restaurants:
No. 1 at 514 South 20th,
No. 2 at 5507 1st Avenue,
No. 3 at 2218 4th Avenue,
No. 4 at 516 North 18th,
No. 5 at 1205 Tuscaloosa Avenue, and
No. 6 at 3109 12th Avenue.
The company was incorporated by James, his wife Nina Priest Dunlap, and Claude L. Murphree (relationship unknown).
Claude Murphree left in 1933 and went to Jacksonville, Florida where he opened the Midget Cafe.
James stayed, however, and in 1937 he was still running six restaurants. He was down to one in 1940 at 612 North 19th Street,
and it, too, was gone by 1942, and so were James and Nina. We don’t yet know their movements after that,
but they were in Faulkner County, Arkansas, when James died in 1957 and Nina in 1983, and they are both buried in
Sixteenth Section Cemetery in Austin, Arkansas, between Cabot and Beebe.
There was also a Snappy Service System in Dallas and another in Chicago, but these appear, so far, to be yet another chain. They were started by the Pierce brothers and no connection has been found to the Dunlaps or Hill or any other entity. The trail starts with a statement from the daughter of one of the owners, who tells us,
“Alphonse (Alphonse Pierce, her father’s brother) lived in Dallas most of his later life and owned a
a diner called Snappy Service System. Tom (Her father, Thomas Lester Pierce) took the name and
started a chain in Chicago, Illinois.”
Note: Parentheses are mine.
Note: She calls her uncle “Alphonse”. However, the
name on all of the records of the Dallas Snappy Service System was
Albert Leon Pierce, and he had a brother named Thomas L. Pierce.
Her story is credible. In 2013, Chicago taco chain Picante Taqueria decided to expand and open another location in a tiny building at 1141 North Ashland Avenue that had housed the La Pasadita restaurant for more than 35 years. During the remodeling, owners were stunned when the yellow paint was removed from the building’s exterior revealing a glistening white ceramic tile façade with the logo “Snappy Service System” and the proclamation “Hamburgers 5c”. Further research reveals that this location was one of as many as ten restaurants.
Snappy Service System first appeared in Dallas in 1948 on Greenville Avenue and Abrams Road, both owned by Albert L. Pierce. By 1950 a third was opened at 3410 Junius. Circa 1951, a high school yearbook advertised the 1801 Abrams Road location (next to the Lakewood Theater), and another advertised the Snappy Service System, "Hamburger Haven" at 3522 Greenville Next to the Granada Theater.
Then, an advertisement placed in the suburban newspaper “Grand Prairie Daily News” April 15, 1954, stated, “Dallas, Texas, Now Open for Business Under New Ownership, Snappy Service System No. 5, 250 West Commerce Street, PR-0837”. The new owner was William S. Doyle, who had been a bartender at the Manhattan Cafe -- owned by Albert L. Pierce. Doyle operated at least 10 restaurants in the Dallas chain at one time. By 1960, two remained: No. 10 on South Lamar and No. 5 on West Commerce Street.
Which brings us to Little Rock, Arkansas.
William Parker Royse (with an “s”, often incorrectly spelled “Royce”, with a “c”) was born in Kansas about 1881 and appeared for the first time on record in Wichita in the 1914 Wichita City Directory. He was a driver for Peerless Steam Laundry and he lived with his wife Bessie, 1-year-old daughter Evelyn, and 3-year-old son Ralph Parker Royse. Bessie’s maiden name was Dunlap and she was the older sister of Glenn, Earl, Fred, Alfred, Clyde and James Dunlap.
In 1929 and 1930, the Royses were still in Wichita. Evelyn worked at Rorabaugh Dry Goods Company and Ralph was a college student, but William was by then the owner of three restaurants, one on North Hillside Avenue, one on East William, and the last on North Lawrence, all of which bore his name. All indications are that William was a successful restaurateur and the family was doing well, but sometime later in 1930, they left Wichita.
There is no witness or document to tell us why the William P. Royse family moved to Little Rock. But he was a businessman and it is reasonable to assume it was because his brothers-in-law in Kansas City, St. Louis and Birmingham were having initial successes with their Snappy Service System chains and that was more exciting than what he had going. Wichita was already saturated with White Castle restaurants, so William Royse looked around for a suitable venue for a new business and Little Rock spoke “location, location, location.”
In the 1920s and 1930s the great migrations were still underway and Little Rock was on a par with St. Louis, one of the major cities and way points on the routes south and west. Travelers from the Midwest headed to the gulf coast or southwest via Highway 67 and travelers from the east headed west on Highway 64 might all make a stop in Little Rock. The Broadway and Main Street bridges, completed in the early 1920s, funneled traffic crossing the Arkansas River through Little Rock. The hotels Marion and McGeHee on Markham Street overlooking the Arkansas River, the Lafayette on Louisiana, the Freiderica on Capitol (Later renamed Sam Peck) and the Albert Pike on Scott Street were second to none and generally filled to capacity. There was gambling in Hot Springs, but to get there one had to travel through Little Rock.
Little Rock was a bustling metropolis. It had almost everything: hotels, a thriving main street shopping center, bridges, Arkansas River traffic to and from New Orleans, a modern transportation system, restaurants, and schools.
What Little Rock did not have was a five-cent hamburger.
So in late 1930 William P. Royse set up temporarily in the YMCA at 524 Broadway. Later that year he was joined by Bessie and Evelyn, and Evelyn entered Little Rock Central High School (from which she would graduate in 1933).
By 1934, William was operating the Snappy Service System in Little Rock and he and Bessie and Evelyn had moved into a large two-story home at 2120 South Main.
An advertisement in a 1934 newspaper for "Royce (note the misspelling) Snappy Service System" lists three locations: 7th at Broadway, 210 East Capitol, and Prospect at Arkansas. The Prospect at Arkansas location was probably on what is now Arkansas Avenue in North Little Rock -- some of which has been renamed Brother Paul Drive -- which runs along the river and which was once a thriving business center and which still accommodates the old trolley tracks down the middle of the street.
Also by 1934, Ralph, along with his new wife Bernice Williams from Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, had joined the family in Little Rock, lived at 2322 Izard, and worked at Snappy’s as a waiter.
Ralph Royse evidently had his father’s appetite for success. By 1936 Ralph was on his own in Oklahoma City where he owned the Snappy Service No. 1 restaurant at 435 Northwest 10th street. He and Bernice lived in at 1219 Northwest 9th street -- at that time an upscale neighborhood. Ralph could presumably walk the .8 mile to work every day, and Bernice was a bookkeeper at International Harvester Company, just over a mile away -- which was exactly what she was doing in 1930 before she married Ralph.
Ralph had plans. Snappy Service -- minus the “System” -- was presumably not just an extension of his father’s company, and “No. 1” indicates he intended to expand.
But it was not going well. The fact that Bernice was working a separate job should be the first clue. In 1936 the country was in the middle of the Great Depression and Oklahoma was the cradle of the dust bowl which compounded that disaster. It would take an exceptional business to be successful in a place and time that even five cents for a hamburger was sometimes too much to bear. Also, Northwest 10th Street seemed to violate the “location, location, location” dictate. It was not a major thoroughfare. It was at least a mile south of the great westward migration on Route 66, which was the Mother Road and could have been, for Ralph, the mother lode had he been on it. Although his restaurant was in Midtown, developed in the 1920s and 1930s with new oil money, that alone was apparently not enough.
So by 1940 Ralph Royse had closed the Oklahoma City Snappy Service and he and Bernice had returned to Little Rock where Ralph ran the Snappy Service System restaurant and his father had opened a second restaurant -- Treet's Sandwich Shop -- at 2700 Kavanaugh Boulevard in Hillcrest. In 1942 Ralph was drafted into the U. S. Army at Camp Joseph T. Robinson in North Little Rock. He listed his occupation as “Restaurant Manager” and in view of his two years of college education was commissioned a warrant officer.
After the war, father and son continued to run Snappy Service System in Little Rock until September 30, 1952, when a tragedy of unknown nature took the lives of both William P. Royse and his wife Bessie.
Ralph carried on. Originally there was only the restaurant at 701 Broadway. If it had remained only that, our hangout would have been somewhere else. But Ralph bought and added the Van White Used Cars lot next door at 711 Broadway, built the covered parking spaces, installed the first known electric intercom ordering system in the south, hired the first female car hops in Arkansas, and suddenly the Snappy’s culture was born.
There was a decade of success, but our Snappy’s was destined to go the way of all the others. Interstate 30 opened around 1961 and Broadway no longer carried the traffic volumes of the past. In the post-war affluence the five-cent hamburger (they were no longer five cents) fell out of favor. McDonald’s had opened on University Avenue and they had a drive-through service window instead of carhops -- a harbinger of things to come. Then, malls, malls and more malls pulled the crowds away from downtown. We high-schoolers on Friday and Saturday nights weren’t enough to keep Snappy’s viable. Business declined and the Snappy Service System closed sometime around 1970. The site was sold to McDonald’s, which opened their restaurant in 1974.
Ralph and Bernice, who by then lived at 7401 H Street, five blocks west of Hall High School, opened Sport Haven Resort and Restaurant on Lake Conway. They operated that business until Ralph died in January, 1990, and Bernice, who had moved to Conway, died in August, 1997.
Little Rock’s Snappy Service System outlasted all the rest of its namesakes because Ralph Royse had the vision to embrace the automobile. There is no evidence that any of the Dunlap or Pierce Snappy Service restaurants had even so much as a drive-through window. But even the automobile couldn't save Snappy's -- it ended because the community moved on and left it surrounded by an economic desert. Had Ralph, in the later years, relocated to a place more accessible from Interstate 30, and had he expanded his menu beyond the hamburger, who knows where it all might have gone.
In fact, another man did exactly that, and there is no doubt that Troy N. Smith Sr., the founder of Sonic Drive-ins, copied part of Royse's Snappy Service System business model for his new business. He lived in Seminole, Oklahoma, and the story is told on the Sonic website that once on a trip to Louisiana he “saw a drive-in that used speakers for ordering” and he installed a similar system in his restaurant when he returned home. On such a trip he would have driven through Little Rock, down Broadway, and thus the “restaurant that used speakers” could have only been our Snappy Service System.
One last item. All the time you were running around Little Rock, you most likely spent some time at Pla-Mor lanes on Seventh Street and later on Asher Avenue. Remember Ralph’s sister, Evelyn? She married Clark Hill (born in Kentucky, it would be reaching too far to expect him to be related to Paul Hill) and from 1939 to 1967 they owned Pla-Mor Lanes.
That’s what we know. I promised you history. Now we now have history.
We know a lot, but we know nothing.
Epilogue
I'm retired in north Florida. Occasionally my wife and I embark on a road trip and somewhere along the way when the subject of mealtime comes up, she, being younger than I and spoiled on my cooking, always says the same thing, “Not Krystal. I’m not eating at Krystal. Forget it.” So I, being a good husband, forget it.
But as I write this, my wife is preparing for a trip with her sister and I will be home alone for four days. I will take her to the airport Wednesday and I’ll have the house to myself until Sunday.
On the way home from the airport I’ll stop by my local Publix and pick up a couple of packages of small, plain, white-flour Sunbeam brand hamburger buns (gummy buns), a package of American cheese (sliced in the deli - not that individually-wrapped crap), a big white onion, and a pound of ground beef (80/20 was once the norm, but these days we know better so I'll defer to 95/5). Snappy's burgers weren't those little square things like Krystal's and White Castle's, but more like the small McDonald's burger. When I get home I'll divide the ground beef into 10 equal balls and smash each into a patty and pop them into the freezer -- if we got fresh burgers in the 1950s it was only because freezers were not common.
And yes, 10 patties. McDonald's introduced the first quarter-pounder in 1972, and until that time the de facto national standard was the tenth-pounder (a McDonald’s regular hamburger is still 1.6 ounces -- do the math), except White Castle’s and Krystal’s which were -- still are -- 18 burgers per pound.
When it’s time for dinner each night, I’ll take out two burger patties to thaw. Meanwhile, I’ll chop a chunk of onion very fine, squirt a little oil on the griddle, spread the onions on the oil, put the burger patties on the onions, cover the whole thing with a wok dome and let it all steam for a few minutes. I’ll flip the patties, cut a slice of American cheese on the diagonal and put a triangle on each burger, and then put the buns on them inside-out so the buns can soak up some juices and steam. This is my version of the preparation method developed by Walt Anderson and Billy Ingram which led to the success of White Castle Hamburgers, and which was subsequently copied by hundreds of imitators, including the Snappy Service System.
I’ll assemble the burgers with four or five pickle slices per burger -- for fifteen cents you got two pickle slices -- and a healthy squirt of yellow mustard. I don’t need fries or beans or any of that stuff. They detract from the burgers. I’ll sit at my table with the TV off and work my New York Times crossword puzzle and listen to the jillion crickets and frogs outside my window and enjoy my dinner. And I’ll take my time. No off-duty police officer will walk by and tell me to move along.
I didn’t grow up on apple-wood-grilled half-pound ground-rib-eye burgers with kimchi and crumbled blue cheese and alfalfa sprouts with ginger-curry mustard on a grilled jalapeno-asiago-ciabatta roll. This is what I grew up on: a griddled one-tenth pounder with onions and American cheese, hamburger dill slices, and yellow mustard on a steamed gummy bun. It has the right combination of taste and texture. You could get this same burger all over town - at the Little Rock Inn, the Band Box, Perciful’s, Roach’s, The Blue Goose, any lunch counter, and at Snappy’s, where it came with an aura. It’s still my favorite. I have no idea if this is what Snappy's burgers tasted like, but I’ll bet it’s real close.
Thanks for the memories, Ralph Parker Royse.
