The $600 Loan: How Pizza Hut Actually Started

We like our founding stories to feature visionaries who saw the future whole. The real story of Pizza Hut is humbler, funnier, and far more useful.

In 1958, in Wichita, Kansas, the Carney family owned a small grocery store. Next door sat an empty space, and the landlady — who had read a magazine article about a curious new food called pizza pie — suggested the family's college-age sons give it a try.

Neither of them had made a pizza Dan Carney was a student. His brother Frank was studying physics. Most Americans in 1958 had never even eaten pizza; it was still an exotic, big-city, ethnic curiosity. The brothers borrowed $600 from their mother, rented the little space, bought some secondhand equipment, and found someone to teach them how it was done.

Then they needed a name. The building was tiny, and the sign out front had room for only about nine characters. They wanted the word "hut," because the little building sort of looked like one. Pizza Hut fit the sign. That's the whole story of the name.

There was no grand vision. There was curiosity, a small loan from a mother who believed in her sons, and the willingness to try.

Timing beats genius What the Carneys had wasn't foresight — it was timing. Postwar America was primed for cheap, casual, shareable food, and pizza was about to explode. They caught a wave at the exact instant it began to break, and then were smart enough to build a system on top of it.

Twenty-four months later and 700 miles away, a very different pair of brothers would start a very different kind of pizza company — and set up a fifty-year war. That collision is the story of The Clash: Pizza Hut vs Domino's. Read a free sample.