Troy Smith and Sonic: A Root Beer Stand, Borrowed Cars and a Penny a Bag

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After World War II, veteran Troy Smith went home to Seminole, Oklahoma and worked as a milkman, then switched to delivering bread because it was lighter. In Shawnee he bought and sold the Cottage Cafe, then opened Troy's Pan Full of Chicken. In 1953 he and a partner bought a five-acre lot holding a log house, which they turned into a steakhouse, and a small walk-up root beer stand called the Top Hat. The stand, selling hot dogs, burgers and sodas in paper, brought in $700 a week and beat the steakhouse, so Smith bought out his partner and focused on it.

Cars parked at random in the gravel lot, so after seeing a Louisiana drive-in with speakers at each stall, Smith borrowed cars from a friend's used car lot to test angled stall layouts. Local teenagers he called the jukebox boys wired an intercom from every stall to the kitchen, carhops ran the food, and sales tripled. In 1956 Charles Woodrow Pappe opened a franchise in Woodward, Oklahoma, followed by Enid and Stillwater by 1958. In 1959 the partners learned Top Hat was already trademarked and renamed the chain Sonic, with the slogan Service with the Speed of Sound; the first Sonic sign went up in Stillwater.

Early franchisees paid no formal royalty; Smith and Pappe charged an extra penny for every Sonic-branded hamburger bag and split the take.
Pappe died in 1967, when Sonic had 41 drive-ins, and the company formalized franchise agreements and set up a supply division.
Sonic grew to 165 locations by 1972 and 1,000 by 1978.
The intercom let cooks start a burger the moment a customer spoke the order.
The chain eventually topped 3,400 U.S. locations and was acquired in 2018 for $2.3 billion.

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