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ANAHEIM, CALIF. - Foodservice pioneer Carl N. Karcher is being remembered as the burly, genial, gravel-voiced entrepreneur and community benefactor who parlayed a single hot dog pushcart into the 3,000-plus-branch CKE Restaurants system.
Karcher, considered one of the last of the fast-food industry's founding fathers and one of the few whose own name came to symbolize a far-flung restaurant empire, died Jan. 11, six days short of his 91st birthday, at the St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, Calif., from complications of pneumonia and Parkinson's disease.
In 1937, at age 20, the one-time Ohio farm boy moved to then-rural Anaheim to work in his uncle's feed store. He later would launch his Carl's Jr. chain and Carl Karcher Enterprises in Anaheim, where CKE offices still stand on the former site of his father-in-law's orange groves, just blocks from where Karcher would raise a large family and live the rest of his life as an Orange County icon.
He also is remembered for the way his seemingly tireless work ethic, outgoing nature and uncanny memory for facts and figures helped him build a company that would become the industry's seventh-largest fast feeder. He liked to tell people that his parents had taught him "the harder you work, the luckier you may become."
Though he gained public renown for a time as Carl's Jr.'s TV-ad pitchman, Karcher also came to be seen in his later years as a survivor who surmounted legal challenges, his ouster as corporate chairman in a rancorous boardroom battle and near bankruptcy before he was restored as chairman emeritus in a subsequent regime change he saw as a...