Feature article
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Chipburger lives on at Little Top
By Fred Sauceman
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The Chipburger, created by Sonny Paxton in 1951, survived the demolition of its surroundings and is now served at Greeneville’s Little Top Drive-Thru. (Fred Sauceman photo).
The Little Top Drive-Thru
LOCATION: 507 N. Main St., Greeneville
OPERATING HOURS: Open 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., Monday through Friday; and 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., Saturday; closed Sunday
PHONE: 423-639-9800
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First in a two-part series
Its creator died in 1998, and its original home has been bulldozed away. But the Chipburger still lives.
Factory workers show up at 8 a.m. for the storied sandwiches at The Little Top in Greeneville, Tennessee.
“If people go to work at 6:00 in the morning, then by 8:00, they’re ready to eat,” says owner Keith Paxton. “It’s their lunch time. We get a lot of early lunch orders. We’re about the only people here that sell early lunch.
“You can get the whole menu then. We sell a lot of tea in the morning.”
The Paxton family has always been attuned to the economic vagaries and factory rhythms of the “Jewel Town of the Mountains,” once one of the largest tobacco markets in the world. When Magnavox, producer of radios and televisions, ran upon hard times in the late 1940s, Sonny Paxton, Keith’s father, cleaned out his used car lot on Summer Street and opened up a restaurant.
“Dad was selling 3,500 cars a year, and he had over 300 notes out when Magnavox began laying off employees,” Keith tells me.
Sonny Paxton started out with a no-name restaurant and a no-name sandwich. He solicited ideas for both through a contest in the town’s newspaper, The Greeneville Sun. That contest yielded the names Big Top and Chipburger. Around 1952, he trademarked the name of the one-of-a-kind sliced ham sandwich.
Sonny ordered a lighted top to mount on the restaurant. It took two cranes to get it in place.
“The people who brought it in couldn’t wire it up, so dad had to wire it for them,” says Keith of his ingenious father.
The top is still owned by the Paxtons, but the rooster that greeted customers as they pulled into the lot is in the possession of Jimmy and Annie Cansler of Greeneville.
“My husband grew up in Midway, and he told me the biggest treat in the whole wide world was to come to town for a hamburger and milkshake at The Big Top,” Annie says.
Annie’s father, R.C. “Bobby” Bird, kept the jukebox stocked at The Big Top, so Annie had many meals on the swiveling stools.
“When we were dating, Jimmy told me there was something he would really like to get for me. I thought pearls or diamonds,” Annie remembers.
“Years went by, and a man knocked on the door to deliver this rooster. Jimmy had bought the old Big Top mascot, to go in our yard.”
Made of concrete with a plaster coating, the rooster is “heavy as lead,” Annie says.
Sonny Paxton closed The Big Top in the late 1970s. Other owners tried to keep the short order shrine going, but they lacked Sonny’s business sense.
“I watched it become a junk hole,” laments Dr. Don Paxton, senior pastor at Rosedale Baptist Church in Abingdon, Virginia. Several of Sonny’s children, including Don, worked at The Big Top, a place Don describes as “like Arnold’s on ‘Happy Days.’”
There was a Chipburger famine for awhile in Greeneville, before Keith Paxton opened a scaled down rendition of his father’s popular restaurant in 1986, across town on North Main Street.
Broasted chicken went by the wayside, as did baskets of shrimp and oysters. But the Chipburger persisted at The Little Top.
“Now, chipped ham sandwiches are everywhere, says another of Sonny’s boys, Ron Paxton, of Bristol, Tennessee. All the Paxton children agree that their father had a special talent for slicing ham.
“Every time you slice it, it creates more flavor buds, so much more flavor than a thick piece of ham,” claims Don.
His father once built a flywheel and attached it to a washing machine motor, mounted the device in a closet in his office, and screwed it to the arm of his meat slicer so that, to the amazement of his staff, he could flip a switch under the counter and slice ham automatically.
“The process dad created to slice the meat gave it a unique flavor,” adds Keith. “He’d take the slicing machine apart and grind the parts down to get a paper-thin closeness.”
Don accurately describes the resulting taste as “sweet,” and a Rube Goldberg-style slicer still makes it that way at The Little Top, primarily a drive-around business, except for six seats inside and picnic tables outside, to “take care of customers who walk home from work,” as Keith says.
For me, in the back of the family’s 1964 Chevrolet Bel Air station wagon, a trip to The Big Top was big time entertainment. Police officers were posted at the entrance and exit, to make sure no one held up traffic flow. And cars circled the lot constantly, their drivers waiting for a coveted open space and the chance to order a Chipburger, on a telephone.
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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