Food on the Fly

Aboard an airliner winging its bumpy way over Texas one day in 1941, the pale-faced little stewardess felt too sick to serve dinner. Hustling, bustling Passenger James Kirby Dobbs, then joint owner of 46 food shops scattered through twelve states and an old hand at doing things for himself, quickly volunteered to serve. But one look at the unpalatable food made Dobbs queasy himself. Then & there he decided that he could put up better meals to serve aloft than the airlines.

To prove his point, Dobbs bought an airport restaurant back home in Memphis. Before long, his reputation for tasty, packaged plane meals enabled him to branch out to airports in 21 other cities, begin catering to 16 U.S. airlines. In San Antonio this week, he opens his newest airport restaurant, serving such Dobbs delicacies as rainbow trout cooked in almond sauce, and baked potatoes kept hot in metal foil. This year Jimmy Dobbs, 55, expects his airport restaurant gross to exceed $5,000,000, net $300,000.

Down to the Bone. In & out of the food business since he was twelve (when he sold peanuts & popcorn), Jimmy Dobbs had long considered it something of a sideline. His big business has been selling cars. A crack salesman at 26, when he made $13,000 a year, he borrowed $20,000 from his boss and teamed up with a hard-headed engineer, Horace H. Hull, to form a Memphis Ford agency.

By cutting costs to the bone and cutting employees in on profits, Dobbs and Hull made their Ford agency the world's largest (they branched out to eight other cities) and made themselves millionaires. Says Dobbs: "It's all profit sharing. The more your employees make, the more you make yourself." Each month, as soon as enough cash had been taken in to cover overhead, Dobbs told his salesmen to cut profits to $1 a car, if necessary to get sales, because the $1 was all profit.

Bums for Lunch. By 1934, things were going so well that Partners Dobbs and Hull ventured into the food business. But not long after they bought into the Toddle Houses food shops, a Southern restaurant chain, they got in a fight with other directors who opposed their system of employee profit sharing. So Hull and Dobbs set up Toddle-like restaurants in non-Toddle cities.

When Toddle Houses located competing restaurants near Dobbs Houses and started a price war, Jimmy Dobbs hammered back. He rounded up the smelliest bums he could find and sent them to Toddle Houses to eat during rush hours. By 1941, Toddle Houses had enough. It bought the 46 Dobbs Houses for $500,000. Hull decided to concentrate on car selling (the company will gross more than $50 million this year, net $2,500,000), and Dobbs moved into the airports.

Over a Barrel. Jimmy Dobbs knew he could not depend on air traffic alone to support his restaurants. So he tricked them out in local color (his Atlanta restaurant is decorated with Uncle Remus murals and has a Negro "Uncle Remus" doorman perched on a cotton bale outside) and collected recipes from famed U.S. restaurants to lure non-travelers to his tables.

Scornful of high-priced chefs ("they'll get you over a barrel for money and when they leave they take their recipes with them"), Dobbs turns out cooking instructions which are so detailed that almost anyone, including himself, can make his dishes.

Though many airports are still clamoring for his service, Jimmy Dobbs has bigger & better plans--to supply meals to railroads, which usually lose money on dining cars. He is closing a deal with one road to supply its meals much as he does the airlines' and he is dickering with several others. Dobbs figures that he will be able to serve better food than railroad passengers now get, and at the same time cut diner losses at least in half.

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