30 Vintage Snapshots of Dairy Queen Restaurants From Between the 1940s and 1960s

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Dairy Queen is an American multinational fast food chain founded in 1940 and currently headquartered in Bloomington, Minnesota. The first Dairy Queen was owned and operated by Sherb Noble and first opened on June 22, 1940, in Joliet, Illinois. It serves a variety of hot and fried food, as well as original frozen dairy products that vary from location to location.

The soft-serve formula was first developed in 1938 by John Fremont “J.F.” McCullough and his son Alex. They convinced friend and loyal customer Sherb Noble to offer the product in his ice cream store in Kankakee, Illinois. On the first day of sales, Noble sold more than 1,600 servings of the new dessert within two hours. Noble and the McCulloughs went on to open the first Dairy Queen store in 1940 in Joliet, Illinois. It closed in the 1950s, but the 501 N Chicago Street building is a city-designated landmark.
Since 1940, the chain has used a franchise system to expand its operations globally. The first ten stores in 1941 grew to 100 by 1947, 1,446 in 1950, and 2,600 in 1955. The first store in Canada opened in Estevan, Saskatchewan, in 1953.
The company became International Dairy Queen, Inc. (IDQ) in 1962. In 1987, IDQ bought the Orange Julius chain. IDQ was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway in 1998. In the 1990s, investors bought Dairy Queen stores that were individually owned, intending to increase profitability through economies of scale. Vasari, LLC became the second-largest Dairy Queen operator in the country and operated 70 Dairy Queens across Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. When stores were not profitable, the firm closed them. On October 30, 2017, Vasari LLC filed for bankruptcy and announced it was closing 29 DQ stores, including ten in the Texas Panhandle.
In the U.S, the state with the most Dairy Queen restaurants is Texas. Using the 2010 census, the state with the most Dairy Queen restaurants per person is Minnesota. At the end of fiscal year 2014, Dairy Queen reported over 6,400 stores in more than 25 countries; about 4,500 of them (approximately 70%) were in the United States.
Dairy Queens were a fixture of social life in small Midwestern and Southern United States towns during the 1950s and 1960s. They have often been reflected in stories and memoirs of small-town America, as in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond by Larry McMurtry, Dairy Queen Days by Robert Inman, Chevrolet Summers, Dairy Queen Nights by Bob Greene, and The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton including the film adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola.

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