(Click on image to read Pal's first menu)

1957: Pal's Grand Opening! Self Service!

No Hot Dogs or Sweet Tea on the Menu!

When Fred Barger and his son Fred Jr. – nicknamed Pal - opened Pal’s on Revere Street in downtown Kingsport on February 13, 1957, it wasn’t that different from the dozen or so drive-in restaurants all over town. It opened in the shadow of the Texas Steer, easily Kingsport’s most famous drive-in in the fifties, which was barely a block away. Not much farther down Center was the Beacon, another teenager hangout. The Bargers owned another drive-in, Skoby’s, on Konnarock Drive, near Eastman. (Skoby’s was a drive-in in the fifties.)

At the time there was even a drive in with a similar sounding name: Paul’s Drive-In!

But Pal’s had a difference. It was self-service. No car hop to take your order. You got out of the car and walked up to a window to place your order.

That concept presaged the McDonald’s that also featured walk-up service and would eventually arrive on Ft. Henry Drive five years later.

That first Pal’s was a far cry from the modern business miracle.

For one thing there was no hot dog on the menu.

The restaurant that is famous for its buildings with the wiener on top didn’t serve wieners originally. And it didn’t serve sweet tea, or any tea.

Those would become its signature menu items.

But that is one of the secrets to Pal’s success: adaptation.

And creativity.

And Sharon.

Pal’s really took off after he married Sharon and they became a team, in business and in life.

She smoothed his rough edges without trying to tame his fun side.

Pal and his friends were famous in town for the pranks they pulled on each other. In 1966 Pal was arrested and hauled away in a police cruiser, set up by his pal Harold Curtis.

Pal got his revenge by taking Curtis to the Moose Lodge one night while Pal’s accomplices repainted Curtis’ white frame house in the Pal’s restaurant signature red and white stripes.

Curtis got back by hiring a crane to hoist Pal’s car inside the wall that surrounded Pal’s residence.

And so it went. For years.

Pal carried that fun side into his restaurant design, installing a giant hot dog atop his drive-thru stores.

It got attention. And business. And made Pal’s, the little self-service place that didn’t serve hot dogs or sweet tea, a Kingsport institution and business success, a textbook for great management, winner of the prestigious Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award for performance excellence and subject of a fawning profile in the prestigious “Harvard Business Review.”

In fact it is a textbook. At the Pal’s Business Excellence Institute, business owners from all over the country come to learn Pal’s secret. And it’s not the sauce. It’s the practice.

In the twenty-first century if you ask a former Kingsport resident – any former Kingsport resident – what they miss most about Kingsport, you’ll hear the same answer, over and over: Pal’s.