Overview

Two brothers. Six hundred borrowed dollars. A sign that could only hold eight letters. In the spring of 1958, Dan and Frank Carney - two Wichita State students with no restaurant experience and no particular plan - borrowed six hundred dollars from their mother and converted a small beer tavern on the corner of Bluff and Kellogg into a pizzeria. The sign on the building could only hold eight letters. A family member said the place looked like a hut. The name stuck. What grew out of that small brick box would become, over the next sixty-eight years, one of the most familiar institutions of American life - and the warm, lamplit room in which three generations of American families would gather to share a meal. Under the Red Roof tells the full story: the Wichita beginning, the franchise era that put the red roof on every American highway, the PepsiCo years and the global push into ninety countries, the cultural peak when Book It! and the lunch buffet and the stained-glass lamps defined an entire childhood. It tells the harder story of the long drift - the dining rooms going dark, one by one, in towns across the country - and the unexpected return now underway, as franchisees from Kansas to Georgia restore the booths and the buffets and the red plastic cups, and bring back, for a generation that grew up under them, the warm circle of light at the center of the table. A warm narrative history of an American chain that has meant more to more people than its strip-mall ubiquity ever quite explained. It is, in the end, a book about a country, told through the small accumulated decisions of two brothers, a sign, six hundred dollars, and the red roof that came to mean home.

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