Dave Thomas (businessman)

Rex David Thomas (July 2, 1932 – January 8, 2002) was an American businessman, philanthropist, and fast-food tycoon.

Thomas was the founder and chief executive officer of Wendy's, a fast-food restaurant chain specializing in hamburgers.

Rex David Thomas was born July 2, 1932, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

His biological father's name was Sam and his biological mother's name was Molly.

Thomas was adopted between six weeks and six months later by Rex and Auleva Thomas, and as an adult became a well-known advocate for adoption, founding the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption.

After his adoptive mother's death when he was five, his father moved around the country seeking work.

Thomas spent some of his early childhood near Kalamazoo, Michigan, with his grandmother, Minnie Sinclair, whom he credited with teaching him the importance of service and treating others well and with respect, lessons that helped him in his future business life.

At age 12, Thomas had his first job at Regas Restaurant, a fine dining restaurant in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, then lost it in a dispute with his boss.

He vowed never to lose another job.

At the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, rather than waiting for the draft, he volunteered for the U.S. Army at age 18 to have some choice in assignments.

Having food production and service experience, Thomas requested the Cook's and Baker's School at Fort Benning, Georgia.

He was sent to West Germany as a mess sergeant and was responsible for the daily meals of 2,000 soldiers, rising to the rank of staff sergeant.

In the mid-1950s, Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Col. Harland Sanders came to Fort Wayne, hoping to find restaurateurs with established businesses to whom he could try to sell KFC franchises.

At first, Thomas – who was the head cook at a restaurant – and the Clauss family declined Sanders' offer, but Sanders persisted, and the Clauss family franchised their restaurant with KFC; they also later owned many other KFC franchises in the Midwest.

During this time, Thomas worked with Sanders on many projects to make KFC more profitable and give it brand recognition.

Among other ideas for improvements, Thomas suggested that KFC reduce the number of items on its menu and instead focus on a signature dish; he also proposed that KFC make commercials in which Sanders would personally appear.

After his discharge in 1953, Thomas returned to Fort Wayne and the Hobby House.

Thomas was sent by the Clauss family in the mid-1960s to help turn around four of their failing KFC stores in Columbus, Ohio.

By 1968, Thomas had increased sales in the four fried chicken restaurants so much that he sold his share in them back to Sanders for more than $1.5 million.

This experience would prove invaluable to Thomas when he began Wendy's about a year later.

After serving as a regional director for Kentucky Fried Chicken, Thomas became part of the investor group which founded Arthur Treacher's.

His involvement with the new restaurant lasted less than a year before he went on to found Wendy's.

Thomas opened his first Wendy's in Columbus, Ohio, November 15, 1969.

In 1982, Thomas resigned from his day-to-day operations at Wendy's. However, by 1985, several company business decisions, including an awkward new breakfast menu and loss in brand awareness due to fizzled marketing efforts, led the company's new president to urge Thomas back into a more active role with Wendy's. Thomas began to visit franchises and espouse his hardworking, so-called "mop-bucket attitude".

Consumer brand awareness of Wendy's eventually regained levels it had not achieved since octogenarian Clara Peller's highly popular "Where's the beef?" campaign of 1984.

With his natural self-effacing style and his relaxed manner, Thomas quickly became a household name.

In this role, Thomas appeared in more than 800 commercial advertisements for the chain from 1989 to 2002, more than any other company founder in television history.

In 1989, he took on a significant role as the TV spokesperson in a series of commercials for the brand.

Thomas was not a natural actor, and initially, his performances were criticized as stiff and ineffective by advertising critics.

By 1990, after efforts by Wendy's advertising agency, Backer Spielvolgel Bates, to get humor into the campaign, a decision was made to portray Thomas in a more self-deprecating and folksy manner, which proved much more popular with test audiences.

A company survey during the 1990s, a decade during which Thomas starred in every Wendy's commercial that aired, found that 90% of Americans knew who Thomas was.

Thomas, who considered ending his schooling the greatest mistake of his life, did not graduate from high school until 1993, when he obtained a GED.

He subsequently became an education advocate and founded the Dave Thomas Education Center in Coconut Creek, Florida, which offers GED classes to young adults.

Before his death in 2002, Thomas admitted regret for naming the franchise after his daughter, saying "I should've just named it after myself, because it put a lot of pressure on [her]."

This original restaurant remained operational until March 2, 2007, when it was closed due to lagging sales.

Thomas named the restaurant after his eight-year-old daughter Melinda Lou, whose nickname was "Wendy", stemming from the child's inability to say her own name at a young age.

According to Bio TV, Dave claims that people nicknamed his daughter "Wenda. Not Wendy, but Wenda. 'I'm going to call it Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers'."

Decades later, Regas Restaurant installed a large autographed poster of Thomas Just inside their entrance, which remained until the business closed in 2010.

By 15, he was moving with his father and working at the Hobby House Restaurant in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

When his father prepared to move again, Thomas decided to stay in Fort Wayne, dropping out of high school to work full-time at the restaurant.