His regional hot dog and hamburger empire turns 65 this year.
Fred Sauceman
The hamburgers, hot dogs, fries and shakes that adorn the Pal’s drive-around locations are made by a boat manufacturer in Elizabethton, Tennessee.
The first restaurant company in America to win the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award isn’t located in New York or Los Angeles or Atlanta. Pal’s World Headquarters sits just off Konnarock Road in Kingsport, Tennessee.
The year 2021 marks the 20th anniversary of the announcement of that award, earned by a business called Pal’s Sudden Service. In 2002, company founder Frederick “Pal” Barger and CEO Thom Crosby traveled to Washington, D.C., to receive the award from President George W. Bush. Pal’s was the second Kings- port company to win a Baldrige—Eastman Chemical Company being the first, in 1993, for its quality management practices.
For Pal’s the award brought responsibility: A mission to share the knowledge that catapulted this regional chain of hamburger and hot dog joints to national prominence.
In one sense, the Pal’s “world” encompasses a 120-mile stretch from Norton, Virginia, southwest to Jefferson City, Tennessee. But the company’s influence is literally global. The Baldrige award was the genesis of the Pal’s Business Excellence Institute, drawing professionals from all over the world to Kingsport, eager to apply the Pal’s philosophy to their businesses. In January of 2020, it became an independent company, the McClaskey Excellence Institute, named for David McClaskey, who was the consultant for Pal’s when the company won the Baldrige.
The institute teaches principles of operations excellence for clients in education, health care, manufacturing, the non-profit sector, small businesses and corporations.
It all started with hamburgers, hot dogs and milkshakes, and a fresh-out-of-college Kingsport native who grew up curb-hopping barbecue for his parents’ business, Skoby’s.
Pal Barger reached his 90th birthday in August of 2020. He would live for a couple more months. Even with his advanced age, his death shocked the region. His name was arguably the most recognized in the restaurant history of East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. But the notoriety never changed him.
“Want to see how quickly I can get this Tesla up to 80?” he asked us during our very last visit with him. “Sure,” we replied, and he proceeded to hit the mark in a handful of seconds, just a few days shy of his 86th birthday.
Pal Barger found humor and joy all around him, all the time. His vanity license plate didn’t tout his restaurant business. Instead, it read, “CAR TAG.” Every time Pal saw us he would say, “There are the people I named the Sauceburger for.” Not true, but endearing.
Fred Sauceman
Pal Barger always insisted that food should be fun.
Pal’s name became a synonym for quality. The restaurant chain that he has left behind is a regional treasure.
The original Pal’s opened in 1956 at a cost of $20,000 and still occupies its original spot, on Revere Street in Kingsport. That location is now joined by 29 other restaurants in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia.
The success story started with Pal’s parents, Fred and Helen Barger, known as Big Skoby and Little Skoby, owners of a post-World War II barbecue, hamburger and beer joint in a 20-foot by 40-foot building in Kingsport. “I hopped curb for them when I was in high school,” recalled Pal.
When his father died in 1971, Pal retooled the business, converting Skoby’s into the region’s premiere fine dining establishment at the time. “We did prime steak, dry-aged. You couldn’t get a better one,” said Pal.
That early experience as a car hop while he was a student at Dobyns-Bennett High School convinced Pal that the restaurant business was his future. After service in the Air Force, he entered East Tennessee State College. Although he jokes that he majored in business and minored in Saturday night, he had very little free time. He had a wife and child by then, and with the help of his parents, he leased and ran a restaurant in Marion, Virginia, called The Virginia House.
“I’d hate to try to do without a college education,” Pal told us. “I almost had a double major in accounting and economics.” He finished his bachelor’s degree in 1955, took $10,000 he had saved from The Virginia House, borrowed another $10,000, and opened that first Pal’s in Kingsport, 65 years ago.
Always an innovative thinker, Pal dared to challenge the traditional notion of the American hamburger.
“You take a hot bun and you take a hot piece of meat and you put cold pickles and cold ketchup and cold mustard on it, and that’s three different processes,” Pal said. “Why not mix all that together and heat it so you’ve got a hot product going on a hot product? You don’t have something cooling it down, and you’ve got one step instead of three or four.”
That avant-garde approach resulted in the mega-condiment combination of ketchup, mustard, pickle relish, and spices that seasons what is known today as the Sauceburger.
Pal often said that he was in the manufacturing business. “Just like GM takes metal and rubber and glass and makes cars, we take meat and buns and condiments and make Big Pal hamburgers.”
The company is in the education business, too. Employees are drilled in such vital facts as how much chili goes on a hot dog through the use of flash cards. Employee training programs at Pal’s lead the industry, as do the company’s low turnover, health ratings, speed and accuracy.
In the 1980s, when Pal was considering the design of his drive-through Pal’s restaurants, he turned to old friend Tony Barone. They were dining at Skoby’s when Barone drew a concept, upside down, on a napkin. Pal told him to go no further. The first sketch, he thought, was perfect. The fiberglass hamburgers and hot dogs that adorn the buildings are made by a boat manufacturer in Elizabethton.
Today, Pal’s World Headquarters is located on the old Skoby’s property in Kingsport. In front of the building are metal sculptures of most Pal’s menu items, another Tony Barone creation.
Pal Barger’s connections in Kingsport go back several generations. His grandfather, George Barger, was the city’s first Chief of Police. And Pal has generously supported his hometown. Kingsport’s popular Carousel, the scoreboard and field house at Dobyns-Bennett, and Northeast State Community College’s Pal Barger Regional Center for Automotive Programs are among his philanthropic projects.
As we talked about his life and heritage, we asked Pal how his nickname came to be. “My dad played in a city basketball league in Kingsport, for Kingsport Drug,” Pal remembered. “They made me a uniform, when I was two or three years old, and they would take me out at halftime, put me on their shoulders, and I would shoot the ball. I was their mascot, and they called me their Pal.”
As he sat behind a desk shaped like a hot dog with painted-on mustard, chili, and onions, Pal dispensed what is perhaps his most valuable business advice of all: “You’ve got to have fun with what you do. If you don’t, you’d better find something else to do.”
During that last visit to Pal’s World Headquarters, we asked Pal what he typically ordered when he is a customer at one of his own restaurants.
“Most of the time, I get a small chili burger,” he answered. “For some reason, the small chili burger has a different flavor than the large one, even though it’s the same ingredients on there. I’ll move around to the chicken or chipped ham. And for breakfast, I’ll get a sausage biscuit and cheddar rounds. And then for milkshakes, I like strawberry.”
And, as it turns out, long before we had heard of COVID-19, Pal Barger had created the perfect business model for the pandemic. Almost all of those 30 restaurants are drive-around, with no indoor seating at all. Pal’s employees embraced mask-wearing early on during the pandemic, and they offered to sanitize customers’ credit cards.
Oftentimes, at those restaurants, the person at the pickup window will say, “The car in front of you took care of your order.” We haven’t done any formal research, but we hear these stories so much that we wouldn’t be surprised if Pal’s customers lead the nation in this kind of generosity. It’s yet another way in which Pal Barger’s kind spirit lives on.
The story above first appeared in our July/August 2021 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!