This week for Southern Living I profiled Beefy King, a one-of-a-kind Orlando restaurant that has been serving steamed roast beef sandwiches since 1971. It wasn’t originally one of a kind, though, for as I note in the story, the Beefy King restaurant on North Bumby Avenue was originally part of a fast-growing chain with bold national ambitions.
I’ve long been fascinated by the wave of franchise restaurant chains that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, most of which are long gone today. I’ve written before about the short lived Little Pigs of America barbecue chain, which was founded in Memphis in 1962, grew to some 200 restaurants, and went bankrupt before the end of the decade. I didn’t know that Beefy King had originally been a franchise until I interviewed third-generation owner Shannon Woodrow for the Southern Living piece.
There wasn’t room in that article to dig into the details of the now-defunct franchisor, but it’s a pretty beefy tale. So, with apologies to Paul Harvey, here’s the rest of the story.
Beefy Beginnings
On August 30, 1967, Tom Veigle of Beefy King, Inc. was granted a permit to build a restaurant at 424 North Bumby Avenue, about two miles northeast of downtown Orlando. The lot was directly across the street from the Rocking Chair Theater at Colonial Plaza, the largest retail development in the state of Florida at the time.
When the plaza opened a decade earlier, it had been an outdoor shopping center anchored by two supermarkets and a Belk’s department store. In 1962, a portion of the shopping center was enclosed to create an indoor mall with 40 new stores connected to a new four-story Jordan Marsh department store, a transition that made Colonial Plaza the first air-conditioned mall in Florida.
November 16, 1967, was marked the official Grand Opening of the first Beefy King restaurant. Across the street at the Rocking Chair Theatre, Paul Newman was starring in Cool Hand Luke. A few days later, the “Good Evening” column in the Orlando Evening Star commented that, “Young Tom Veigle, owner of the Tom’s Pizza eateries, looks as if he’s come up with a new winner.” The menu was limited — just roast beef and ham sandwiches — “but both are great and the décor is bright and pleasant.”
As the Evening Star column notes, it was not Veigel’s first foray into the restaurant business. A native of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, as a young man he launched a small fleet of four ice-cream trucks in his hometown before selling the business and moving south in 1957. Soon after arriving in Orlando, he opened a restaurant called Tom’s Pizza and grew it to a 21-location chain by 1967, with more locations in the works.
That year, Veigle visited New York City and ate at a roast beef sandwich restaurant and immediately had the inspiration for Beefy King. “He thought roast beef sandwiches were the next big thing,” his brother, Jim, told the Orlando Sentinel in a retrospective after Tom Veigle passed away in 2017.
The entrepreneur’s plans were far more ambitious than running a single sandwich shop, though. Out of the gate he advertised the North Bumby location as the model restaurant and started signing up franchisees.
In January, Veigle and two partners — brother Jim and local attorney David Kerbin — chartered a new corporation with the rather aspirational name Beefy King International, Inc. The same month, the company began running ads in newspapers throughout the South — including in Richmond, Nashville, Montgomery, Baltimore, and Columbia — declaring, “America’s hottest, high-profit-proved Roast Beef restaurant franchise is Beefy King!” The second Beefy King location (and first franchisee) opened in February in the Orange Blossom Center in south Orlando, some six miles from the Bumby Avenue restaurant.
The following month, the Orlando Evening Sun reported that Beefy King Inc. had retained the Neals & Hickok agency for a nationwide advertising campaign. Three additional Orlando locations were already in the works, and “expansion plans call for rapid entry into other Central Florida cities, including Cocoa, Melbourne, Daytona Beach, Merritt Island, Sanford, Lakeland, Ocala and Gainesville.” That summer, a group of investors in Charlotte, North Carolina, formed the “Monarchs of Carolina Inc.” to own, operate, and sub-franchise Beefy King sandwich shops throughout the Carolinas.
Beefy King was on the rise.
Franchise Fever
Veigle may have been convinced that the roast beef sandwiches were the next big thing, but in the late 1960s there were plenty of other entrepreneurs chasing the next big thing, too. McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken had proven the low-cost, quick service franchise model in the 1950s, and in the decade that followed a parade of innovators and hustlers tried to follow the same playbook with something other than burgers and chicken.
For every Taco Bell (founded 1962) and Subway Sandwiches (1965) there were hundreds of other would-be competitors that never reached escape velocity. On April 14, 1968, the “Business Opportunities” classified ad page in the Miami Herald included one of Veigel’s many advertisements for his “high profit, low investment” Beefy King franchises. On the same page were ads for a dozen other franchise opportunities, including one for “Rib-I-Roast Beef,” which offered licensees a chance to “get in on the ground floor of the new concept of serving sandwiches, fast and simple operation.”
Another aspiring roast beef sandwich chain had recently been founded in Boardman, Ohio, and it licensed its first franchise in Akron in 1965. It was called Arby’s and featured a distinctive brown sign with a big cowboy hat. By the time Beefy King Inc. was launched in 1967, Arby’s had sold more than 330 franchises throughout the country, including 12 in Florida. The field, you might say, was somewhat crowded.
For his part, Veigel touted as the benefits of the Beefy King model a low upfront investment of “as little as $19,500”, compared to the typical $35,000 to $50,000 for other fast-food concepts. The menu, furthermore, was “matched to American appetites,” and the operation required few employees and no previous food management experience on the part of the owner. Beefy King Inc. promised to provide “complete management and operating personnel training” as well as “ongoing management support” as part of the franchise package.
The rise of franchised fast food restaurants was a nationwide phenomenon, but for me there’s something distinctively Florida about the whole enterprise. In those post-War and pre-Mouse decades (Disney World opened in 1971), thousands of families were picking up roots from northern states and moving south to Florida, chasing the dream of a better life. They were lured in part by the promise of eternal sunshine and no more shoveling snow but also by financial opportunity. Among them were Freeman and Peggie Smith, who moved to Orlando from Detroit and signed a franchise agreement to take over the model Beefy King restaurant on Bumby Avenue in 1968.
The Bubble Bursts
Things worked out pretty well for the Smith family, as I discuss in the Southern Living piece, but success was more elusive for their fellow franchisees. The exact details of what happened to Beefy King International, Inc. aren’t clear, but here’s what I know for sure. Tom Veigel grew the chain rapidly through its initial stages, signing up dozens of franchisees and raising more than $1 million in capital when he took the company public on the over-the-counter market in 1969. Then he cashed out.
In February 1970, International Electronic Associates, Inc., an electronics distributor headquartered in Palm Beach, bought a controlling 64.4% stake in Beefy King International, a move it claimed would “diversify its interests.” Why an electronics company thought a chain of roast beef sandwich joints was a good match may seem baffling today, but this was the era of corporate conglomerates like Litton Industries and Gulf & Western. The mantra was to diversify, diversify, diversify, under the theory that scientific management could be applied across any number of dissimilar industries, and having tentacles in multiple industries would insulate a corporation from risk in the case of a downturn in a particular market. (Spoiler alert: it didn’t.)
The links in the Beefy King chain soon began to break, but the cracks were forming even before International Electronics acquired the company. In November 1969, the Tampa Bay Times, reported that the franchisee of two Beefy King restaurants in St. Petersburg had recently switched to a new name, Holiday Fare. “The Beefy King venture was a mistake,” the owner told the Times, noting difficulties with the franchisor and customers’ dissatisfaction with the limited menu. His new Holiday Fare restaurants kept the roast beef sandwiches but added cheeseburgers, fish sandwiches, and hot dogs to the menu.
In December of 1970, James M. Bessinger, the franchisee of Beefy King’s second Orlando restaurant on Orange Blossom Trail, sued the parent company for $60,000 for antitrust and franchise irregularities. He claimed Beefy King International had forced him to pay above-market rates for kitchen equipment and never provided the promised “expert help” nor any significant advertising support after the franchise fees had been paid.
Beefy King International declared bankruptcy sometime around 1972. One by one the remaining Beefy King franchises changed to different names and formats or closed their doors altogether, but Freeman and Peggie Smith stuck with it, making the Bumby Avenue original — the model for a would-be national chain — a singular Florida icon.
As for Tom Veigle, he put the proceeds from the Beefy King sale to good use. In 1974 he opened The Booby Trap, a topless bar in Winter Park, and followed that with a sister nightclub called Mr. Big Stuff’s Bedroom. “I was trying to put class to the topless business,” Veigel told Anthony DiLorenzo of WFTV9 News in 2015.
There seems to be something distinctively Florida about that, too.
Interesting that they advertised the ham as smoked. What do you make of that?