There was a time when you could trace a trip from Lander to Cody by the familiar orange and brown signs dotting each community you passed on the way north. Aside from the one in Greybull, they’re all just memories, but once they were the top fast food franchise on the planet.
The A&W on West Main in Riverton was one of those iconic fast food joints, complete with car hops, weekly specials, and root beer that was the best anyone ever tasted.
Legendary Riverton businessman Karl Sejkora made the A&W “the place to be” on Friday and Saturday nights in the 1970s, with a healthy crowd on Tuesday nights for Coney Dog Day.
Three A&W restaurants remain in Wyoming, the one in Greybull, another in Casper and a third just off Interstate 25 in Wheatland.
In 1974, there were 2,400 A&Ws nationwide. They outnumbered McDonald’s at the time. Today, only 506 remain with California boasting 54 and Wisconsin a surprising 50.
Sacramento is the leading city in America with five, and if you look closely (or check Google Maps,) you’ll find four still in operation in metropolitan Denver. Add in 10 foreign countries that still sell Mama, Teen, Baby, and Papa burgers, along with that legendary root beer and you still have a substantial force in the fast-food market.
Sejkora was a successful Safeway manager in Denver before he moved his family to Riverton in 1969. Sejkora was a natural businessman, successful in every venture he tried. A Czechoslovakian immigrant, he was tortured by the Nazis during World War II, having all his teeth pulled out as a punishment at the hands of the SS.
Karl and his wife Gloria had three daughters, Cynthia, Tammy, and Karla. The A&W became the family business, though Karl had two other profitable businesses in Tweed’s Wholesale and the American Dry Cleaners.
A&W was different than other franchises such as McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Burger King. They only franchised root beer originally, the rest of the menu was set by the local restaurant. In the south you could find catfish and pork chops on the menu, in a few venues in the Great Lakes you could order fried cheese curds, and in Riverton, the Cony Dog and the Wagon Wheel.
Later the wrappers for Papa, Mama, Teen and Baby Burgers were franchised, but the beef, buns, lettuce, tomatoes and onions were all sourced locally.
The first A&W opened in Sacramento, California in 1923. The brainchild of Roy Allen (the A) and Frank Wright (the W) came after Allen sold root beer to troops returning from World War I on a highway stop in Lodi, California. Wright was his employee. The root beer recipe was so well received, the two men joined together to create a franchise based on their root beer recipe.
It was an amazing success that transcended the dark economic days of the Great Depression.
A major part of their success came in their marketing of A&W as an “All American Restaurant.” The other selling point was their frosted mugs, stored in a freezer, then filled with foamy root beer. Refrigeration was in its infancy when Allen and Wright began business, and getting your hands on a frosty, frozen mug of root beer in the summer heat was an unheard of treat for millions of Americans. The idea stuck, and A&W became an iconic place to get a burger, fries, onion rings, and root beer in thousands of locales.
Cyndi, as the eldest of the three daughters had fond memories of the business that last for a decade from 1969 to its closing in 1979.
“It was a lot fun, it was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun,” Cyndi said. “Dad was an icon in Riverton, he started soccer, taught people to play and coach.”
A few teenage detractors that the hard but fair businessman encountered referred to him as “Communist Karl” in relation to his growing up in Czechoslovakia.
“We were living in Denver,” Cyndi said. “My grandpa owned an A&W in Garnet, Kansas, and he asked mom and dad if they wanted in with him.”
Riverton had a successful franchise that was up for sale and the family moved to Fremont County.
“The selling point for mom was that Riverton was building a college,” Cyndi said. “We moved up to Riverton in 1969. We owned it for 10 years then closed.”
“It was a different time then,” Tammy Schuster said.
Businesses in the 1960s and 70s were dependent on each other. Stores purchased milk and meat from local producers and restaurants did the same.
“We bought our meat and produce from Clark’s Meat House,” Cyndi said. “Jim Giddings delivered Sweetheart Bread to us, and we bought milk from Morning Star.”
Everything the restaurant used was supplied locally aside from paper products that had the A&W logo and the root beer syrup.
“Mom made the hats and aprons. She cooked and prepared everything. On Cony Dog Tuesday she started early in the morning, making hundreds of Cony Dogs,” Cyndi said.
“They didn’t renew their lease because it was so much work.”
The Cony Dogs were so popular that Karl approached the A&W Corporation in an attempt to franchise the tasty treat nationwide.
The Riverton A&W was famous for its onion rings, shrimp baskets and wagon wheels, a deep fried hamburger similar to the cheese wheels still offered at the Dairyland Drive In in Lander.
“There was a lot of work. We still have a lot of good friends from that time,” Cyndi said. “Certain people were just a riot, Tammy Raymond, there was never a dull moment when she was around.”
Most of the workers were high school girls, with a handful of boys, Phillip Aspinwall, Dave Rangitsch, and Tony Genoff. “Dad liked the girls better, we were better workers,” Cyndi said.
So did the teenage boys of Fremont County.
Karl was a businessman, he knew what would attract certain clientele, and hiring Riverton High School girls as carhops and kitchen staff brought in a lot of boys from around the county to his restaurant.
“I remember all of the guys hanging out on the patio,” Cyndi said. “When the guys won a football game, he would give them each a hamburger, a drink, and an order of fries.”
There were successful A&W franchises just down the road in Lander, Shoshoni and Thermopolis, but their menus were different, each one was unique.
“My folks knew the people who owned the A&W in Lander and Thermopolis,” Cyndi said.
Karl used a huge holding tank to mix root beer each day, and he sold it by the gallon. Anyone bringing a gallon jug to the A&W could get it filled for 75 cents.
“Dad was a real fanatic about cleaning,” Cyndi said. “We mopped with Ajax and ammonia.”
Other businesses had regular hours, not the A&W with Karl Sejkora in command.
“We didn’t close until all the customers were gone. We didn’t have a set closing time,” Cyndi said. “Dad loved people. Sometimes we’d stay open past midnight to one in the morning.”
Workers ending the night shift at the non-defunct Louisiana Pacific Mill on the south side of Riverton, were sometimes surprised to find the A&W open when their nine-hour shift ended at 1 am and eagerly placed orders with Karl in the wee hours of the morning.
Sejkora had a family workforce in his wife Gloria, and daughters Cyndi, Tammy and Karla who graduated from Riverton High School in 1976, 77 and 83’ respectively.
Karl had a safe set into the concrete on the floor of the business, a business that relied heavily on small bills and change to operate.
“We rolled a lot of change at home before taking it the bank,” Cyndi said. “It was a cash business.”
Riverton’s A&W had all the amenities of its fellow franchises across the United States. The mugs were frozen, there was a marquee style menu on each bay that cars parked in. Customers ordered by pushing the speaker button and a few minutes later, carhops brought out the order and made change.
Riverton’s A&W didn’t have an inside area like the one in Thermopolis had, but you could walk up to the counter and order through the window.
“We closed for three months during the winter because business was so slow,” Cyndi said. “It was too hard, and too cold. Mom and Dad went to Europe several times when we were older.”
Many of the mugs “walked off” the premises.
“Mom would get upset, we had to buy mugs quite often because people walked off with them,” Cyndi said.
Karl knew how to market his business even when he wasn’t at the restaurant. He drove an orange Volkswagen van around Riverton with metallic A&W signs on the side.
In 1979, Karl and Gloria decided to close the business. It was just too much work, especially for Gloria.
After closing for good, the building sat empty for a long time, then was briefly a used car lot before it was torn down and became a realty office.
“It was all about community back then, the towns were more community-focused than they are now,” Cyndi said.
For an entire generation, the A&W was a place for family and friends to meet and enjoy great quality food, and even better root beer.
It started as a small child accompanying your parents, and by the time you could drive, it was a great place to meet boys and girls before dragging Main or heading off to the West or the Knight Drive In.
It represented a place in time, in small town America that will never return.