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By Root 1290 0

Carl was outraged that his motives were being questioned and that his business was being run into the ground. CKE now felt like a much different company than the one he’d founded. The new management team had ended the longtime practice of starting every executive meeting with the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi and the pledge of allegiance to the flag. Carl insisted that the Green Burrito plan would work and demanded that the board of directors vote on it. When the board rejected the plan, Carl tried to oust its members. Instead, they ousted him. On March 1, 1993, CKE’s board voted five to two to fire Carl N. Karcher. Only Carl and his son Carl Leo opposed the dismissal. Carl felt deeply betrayed. He had known many of the board members for years; they were old friends; he had made them rich. In a statement released after the firing, Carl described the CKE board as “a bunch of turncoats” and called it “one of the saddest days” of his life. At the age of seventy-six, more than five decades after starting the business, Carl N. Karcher was prevented from entering his own office, and new locks were put on the doors.

The headquarters of CKE is still located on the property where the Heinz family once grew oranges. Today there’s no smell of citrus in the air, no orange groves in sight. In a town that once had endless rows of orange and lemon trees, stretching far as the eye could see, there’s not an acre of them left, not a single acre devoted to commercial citrus growing. Anaheim’s population is now about three hundred thousand, roughly thirty times what it was when Carl first arrived. On the corner where Carl’s Drive-In Barbeque once stood, there’s a strip mall. Near the CKE headquarters on Harbor Boulevard, there’s an Exxon station, a discount mattress store, a Shoe City, a Las Vegas Auto Sales store, and an off-ramp of the Riverside Freeway. The CKE building has a modern, Spanish design, with white columns, red brick arches, and dark plate-glass windows. When I visited recently, it was cool and quiet inside. After passing a life-size wooden statue of St. Francis of Assisi on a stairway landing, I was greeted at the top of the stairs by Carl N. Karcher.

Carl looked like a stylish figure from the big-band era, wearing a brown checked jacket, a white shirt, a brown tie, and jaunty two-tone shoes. He was tall and strong, and seemed in remarkably good shape. The walls of his office were covered with plaques and mementos, with photographs of Carl beside presidents, famous ballplayers, former employees, grandchildren, priests, cardinals, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Pope. Carl proudly removed a framed object from the wall and handed it to me. It was the original receipt for $326, confirming the purchase of his first hot dog cart.

Eight weeks after being locked out of his office in 1993, Carl engineered a takeover of the company. Through a complex series of transactions, a partnership headed by financier William P. Foley II assumed some of Carl’s debts, received much of his stock in return, and took control of CKE. Foley became the new chairman of the board. Carl was named chairman emeritus and got his old office back. Almost all of the executives and directors who had opposed him subsequently left the company. The Green Burrito plan was adopted and proved a success. The new management at CKE seemed to have turned the company around, raising the value of its stock. In July of 1997, CKE purchased Hardee’s for $327 million, thereby becoming the fourth-largest hamburger chain in the United States, joining McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s at the top. And signs bearing the Carl’s Jr. smiling little star started going up across the United States.

Carl seemed amazed by his own life story as he told it. He’d been married to Margaret for sixty years. He’d lived in the same Anaheim house for almost fifty years. He had twenty granddaughters and twenty grandsons. For a man of eighty, he had an impressive memory, quickly rattling off names, dates, and addresses from half a century ago. He exuded the genial optimism and good humor of his old friend