Power Of The Pig Stand

Although drive-in restaurants proliferated in the Los Angeles of the mid-1930s, this city was by no means their birthplace, as you state in the 1935 entry of your special picture issue “Seeing the Century” (December 1999).

As the author of The American Drive-In, Drive-In Deluxe , and The American Diner , I am confident in the fact that the drive-in restaurant was born more than a decade earlier, in 1921.

It was along the Dallas-Fort Worth Highway in north-central Texas that Jessie G. Kirby and R. W. Jackson opened the nation’s first restaurant with drive-in car service. They called it the Texas Pig Stand. In those days, order-takers jumped up onto the running boards of cars before they came to a stop, inspiring the term carhop .

It was from the beginnings of the Pig Stand that the drive-in restaurant sallied forth to conquer the rest of the nation. Restaurateurs in California merely took the concept, copied it, improved on the showmanship aspect of service, and gained fame for the grander architecture of the drive-ins they built.