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Founder of Wendy's — formed in the Fort Wayne restaurant trade
On the record
R. David Thomas was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on July 2, 1932. When he was fifteen his family moved to Fort Wayne, and in 1947 he went to work as a busboy at the Hobby House restaurant; he quit school after the tenth grade to work full time. After serving as an Army cook during the Korean War era, he returned to the Hobby House in 1953 as a cook. The restaurant's owner, Phil Clauss, brought Colonel Harland Sanders's Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise into the business, and Thomas became a KFC operator himself: between 1962 and 1968 he turned around four failing KFC stores in Columbus, Ohio, and sold his interest back to Sanders for more than a million and a half dollars. On November 15, 1969, he opened the first Wendy's in Columbus, naming the chain for his daughter Melinda, nicknamed Wendy; from 1989 he was also the chain's familiar television spokesman. Thomas died in 2002. His Fort Wayne tie is exact: it is where he arrived as a teenager and where he learned the restaurant business.
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- § 06 — people of the record · famous-people supplement
Sources: Encyclopedia.com (International Directory of Company Histories); FundingUniverse (Wendy's International company history).