Feature article
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Mid-century Big Top was a fast-food innovator
By Fred Sauceman
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Although The Little Top is a greatly scaled down version of its ancestor, The Big Top, the Chipburger remains unchanged. (Fred Sauceman photo).
The Little Top Drive-Thru
LOCATION: 507 North Main Street, Greeneville, Tennessee
PHONE: (423) 639-9800
HOURS: Open 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., Monday through Friday; and 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., Saturdays; closed Sundays |
Second in a two-part series
“My dad was ahead of his time, selling chipped ham sandwiches,” says Ron Paxton, whose father, Sonny, ran The Big Top in Greeneville, Tennessee, from 1949 to the late 1970s.
“Dad was a jack of all trades but yet a master of anything he put his hands to,” adds Ron’s brother Don, now pastor of Rosedale Baptist Church in Abingdon, Virginia. “He had the vision to see value in things others couldn’t.”
At mid-century, when tobacco money talked, Greeneville was fairly well saturated with hamburger options. Litton’s Café downtown, Ham’s Drive-In on West Main, the Blue Circle on Summer stayed full. As did sit-down restaurants like the S & S, the Greene Villa and the Star that lined state highways, their burger options partnered with plates of parsley-garnished chuckwagon steak.
Sonny Paxton sold plenty of hamburgers, too, but he bolstered his sandwich line with what came to be called the Chipburger, a pile of thinly sliced ham on a bun, dressed with tomato, lettuce, mayonnaise and pickle. Cheese made it a Cheese Chipper.
By 1962, Sonny was still unconvinced that his trademarked sandwich had caught on. It lacked what we’d call today “name recognition.” So he set out to raise the profile of his Chipburger by running a special, 10 cents each.
“Someone phoned in early and ordered 50, plain,” Don recalls. “Dad guessed they were going to take them home and freeze them, and he hadn’t thought about that. He should have specified no carry-out.”
By 10 a.m. that day, Sonny had called in all the help and dispatched a bread truck from Knoxville to deliver more buns. A meat truck followed.
“Dad thought it would be a $500 to $600 investment, but that promotion cost him $5,000,” says Don. “He stayed by his offer, and it eventually paid for itself in time.”
Don believes Sonny was one of the first East Tennessee restaurant owners to offer peanut butter milkshakes, and they became The Big Top’s fourth best sellers, behind the conventional flavors of chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. A sign the size of a billboard advertised 64 flavors of ice cream.
“Dad created a drink called Orange Slush,” remembers Ron. “It was made of orange juice and slushy ice, a pretty healthy drink for its day.”
That drink wasn’t revived when Sonny’s son Keith opened The Little Top in 1986, but the Chipburger is true to its original prototype. The Little Top’s 25-year-old meat slicing machine achieves the thinness for which the sandwich is known.
Sonny probably thought nothing of fat grams in the 1950s, whereas today’s market dictates that Keith keep track of such statistics. Today’s Chipburger sports four fat grams.
“We special order the bun,” Keith says. “Most buns are three inches or five. These are four. We shred the lettuce so older people can digest it more easily. The vinegary pickle is a natural digestive aid, and you’re getting your protein from the pork.”
In the summertime, tomatoes on Chipburgers are likely to be homegrown. Keith and his daughter Tylan visit area farms and pick the tomatoes themselves, 25 bushels at a time.
Keith has done it all in the restaurant business, beginning with curb sweeping and trash can painting at his father’s restaurant, where he eventually progressed to manipulating the switchboard. The Big Top was equipped with a switchboard that Don believes was once used in a hotel in Kingsport. Charlotte Crouch, Sonny’s widow, told me the telephone company in Greeneville used to maintain it.
“You had a headset, like on ‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ and you could talk to two or three customers at a time and even ring the phones next to their cars,” Keith says.
Transactions at The Big Top’s descendant, The Little Top, are done through a window. Keith’s proud of the fact that The Little Top had a two-window ordering and pickup system before some of the fast food big boys. When the line gets a little long, employees like Sandra Helton emerge from the blue building and take orders outside.
Keith misses the feel of his father’s old place, a gathering spot for the city’s luminaries and loafers.
“Here, it’s just hit and run, three minutes and they’re gone,” Keith says. “While it’s fast-paced and quick, we still serve high-grade food.”
And Greenevillians are grateful that an edible part of the community’s history, the Chipburger, survives.
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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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