Bob Wian

Like the classic Japanese film "Rashomon," where a site event is recounted through differing points of view, the image of Robert C. "Bob" Wian is often dependent on personal interpretation.

Some saw the founder of the Bob's Big Boy chain as a gifted raconteur imbued with dazzling charisma and movie-star looks, who could effortlessly close business deals over power drinks and endless hands of gin rummy.

Others viewed him as a foodservice "futurist," who predicted coming trends long before his competitors did.

Regardless of individual perception, it's an industrywide consensus that Wan was a point man in the evolution of the family restaurant segment in the 1940s through the mid-'60s and a trailblazer in marketing, employee motivation and customer service.

His distinguished career was marked by a number of "firsts." He was among the first operators to offer such employee benefits as health insurance and profit sharing, the first to offer comic books for his younger guests, the first to use branded condiments to project a quality image and one of the first to require that his short-order cooks don chefs whites to add professionalism to their appearance.

Wian also was an early practitioner of exhibition meat grinding at a time when meat safety and inspection standards were considerably below today's levels and the colloquialism "easy spoon" referred to a restaurant's suspect sanitation practices.

"He was basically a founder of a new way of life for the restaurateur," said Alex Schoenbaum, who was one of Wian's earliest Big Boy franchisees. Years later Schoenbaum would merge his Shoney's Big Boy into the more contemporary Shoney's concept. "He took care of his employees and made sure they took care of their customers."

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Wian

began a lot of programs that are taken for granted today," echoed Alexander Azar, chairman of Azar's Inc. of Fort Wayne, Ind., a B Boy franchisee since 1954. "Even back then his restaurants had very little turnover in a field that was considered a temporary type of job. He cared deeply for his workers, and they returned his loyalty."

Wian however, was somewhat self-deprecating about his accomplishments. "There is nothing fantastic in anything I ever did," he said in a 1979 interview in Nation's Restaurant News. "It was all little things, but it...