Every other name on this roster was a showman. Donn Beach invented a persona, Vic Bergeron invented a voice, Skipper Kent actually sailed for his décor. James K. Dobbs did none of that. He was a Memphis businessman who fed airplanes — and he is on this roster because he is the one who took the Polynesian restaurant, a form invented by eccentrics for their own amusement, and ran it as a logistics problem.
Dobbs Houses was an airline-catering company with a sideline in the places travellers ate: terminal restaurants, snack counters, highway diners. Dobbs had also made a great deal of money selling cars, which is its own kind of American story. Around 1959 he bought the Luau, the showpiece Polynesian restaurant the Dinkler hotel family had opened in Atlanta, and rather than treat it as a trophy he treated it as a format. His own Memphis steakhouse on Poplar Avenue became the Dobbs House Luau that same year. Then the format went where his company already held the concessions — which is why the first Luau his people built from scratch opened not on a boulevard but inside the terminal at Dallas Love Field, in November 1958, and why Louisville's sat above the Delta counter at Standiford Field. Long before anyone thought of an airport as somewhere you might want to be, Dobbs was selling departing passengers a rum drink with an orchid in it.
He did not live to see most of it. Sent to Dallas for asthma treatment after a second heart attack, he died there in September 1960, aged sixty-six, with about a hundred and twenty-five restaurants to his name. The Luaus kept opening after him — Lexington, Birmingham, Charlotte, Miami — and by 1963 Dobbs Houses was the sixth largest restaurant company in the United States, running twenty-three airline kitchens, three hundred and forty-nine airport snack stands, and eight Polynesian rooms. It is a strange kind of legacy: the tiki bar as infrastructure, delivered by the same trucks that loaded the meal carts. The Memphis flagship outlasted nearly all of it, closing in 1982.
Research further: every mention of Dobbs across the chart →