Danny Evins, Founder of Cracker Barrel Restaurants and Homophobe, has Died
Lest we forget his blatancy...I hope he evolved from that time...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/business/danny-evins-restaurant-founder-and-focus-of-controversy-dies-at-76.html
Danny Evins, who created Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, a restaurant heavy on grits and nostalgia, expanded it into a $2 billion chain and then fought a losing battle to discriminate against gay employees, died on Saturday in Lebanon, Tenn. He was 76.
The cause was bladder cancer, his former wife Donna S. Evins said.
In 1969, Mr. Evins was an oil jobber, as the middlemen between gasoline refiners and retailers are known, when he was hit by an idea that was to change his life and the American highway: a down-home restaurant with rocking chairs on the front porch, a potbellied stove and fireplace inside, and a checkerboard on every table. The food — including catfish, biscuits and gravy and pineapple upside-down cake — would be ample, reasonably priced and swiftly delivered.
The concept was carried out by more than 600 company-owned restaurants in 42 states, with annual sales of more than $2.4 billion. Cracker Barrel year after year won polls for excellence as a family restaurant in magazines like Nation’s Restaurant News and Destinations. After going public in 1981 so it could expand beyond the Southeast, it was a stock market darling.
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