When 2,600 shouting delegates and alternates demonstrated their approval of Republican candidates in San Francisco last week, a flurry of blue-lettered "I Like Ike" paper caps danced before the television cameras. The man behind the caps is not a politician, but a hamburger king—Edgar Waldo ("Billy") Ingram of the White Castle System (1955 gross: $17,138,261).
A flourishing sideline in paper caps has grown out of Ingram's obsession for cleanliness. When he borrowed $700 to build the first turreted White Castle hamburger stand at Wichita, Kans. in the '20s. he decided to give the customer 5¢ hamburger, a shiny counter and immaculate countermen. He got his shiny counters, but his hound's-tooth countermen were hard to come by. After a couple of trips to the laundry, their 35¢ white linen caps looked like old socks—shrunken, grey and frayed. Said Ingram: Why not paper caps?
In 2½ years, Ingram developed a machine that gobbled up rolls of paper and spewed out 1,000 paper overseas caps an hour. In ten days, the machine made a year's supply of hats for every White Castle in the U.S. With plenty of caps and too few White Castle heads, Ingram set up a cap division (Paperlynen) in 1932, and sent out salesmen to coffee companies, butchers, bakeries, ice-cream vendors, insurance firms, food and drink packers.
Ingram's salesmen sold caps with more than 25,000 different inscriptions; production rose from 240,000 caps in 1932 to more than 42 million in 1955. Caps with Arabic lettering went to a milk company in Beirut, Lebanon. Caps with "Pida Pepsi'' and "Quaker Oats, Mucha Nutricion a Poco Costo" went to Mexico. Caps went to fruit peddlers in Vicenza, Italy, to soft-drink vendors in Caracas, Venezuela, to pickle packers in Pittsburgh.
Last week, with his "I Like Ike" model in the national eye (more than 125,000 have been sold), Ingram knew that he had at least one political party under his cap in 1956. This, combined with his newest creation, a visored French Foreign Legion type, scheduled to make its debut at fall football games, prompts Ingram to predict that his sideline will sell 50 million caps, gross $1,250,000 in 1956.