Many fast-food fans grow up knowing Wendy's as the place with square burgers, Frosty cups and the red-haired girl smiling from every signboard. But behind that famous face is a real person, Wendy Thomas Morse, who never expected a quiet childhood to turn into a lifetime of being recognised – even when she did not want to be. And what is even more surprising is that her father, Wendy's founder Dave Thomas, later wished he had chosen a different name for his restaurant.
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For Wendy Thomas Morse, having her name and face attached to a global burger brand was never something she bragged about. In fact, she mostly hid it. “I mean, there were times I didn't want people to know because I didn't want them to have assumptions,” she told People Magazine. “I guess my assumption was that they wouldn't think I was cool or hip or whatever at the time.”
She was only eight when Dave Thomas decided his new burger place needed a friendly, memorable mascot. That is when everything changed. “He wanted a character, because he worked (previously) for the Colonel at Kentucky Fried Chicken and knew how much that persona mattered,” she said, as reported byFood & Wine. “He said, ‘Wendy, pull your hair up in pigtails.' So, I did. He got his camera and took pictures of my sister and me and said, ‘Yep, it's going to be Wendy's Old-Fashioned Hamburgers.'”
Wendy's opened in 1969 in Columbus, Ohio. It took off fast. By 1978, the chain already had 1,000 outlets – quicker than any competitor at the time. Everywhere the brand went, Morse's smiling face went too. Her red pigtails, freckles and wide grin became part of the company's identity.
But for Morse, being the “Wendy” in Wendy's was not as easy as it looked. She loved what her father built, but she did not always love the attention that came with her name. “I would never, if I met a lot of new people, I would never tell them who I was,” she said. “It's usually someone else who says it. And then it gets awkward, and then it gets all better.”
Interestingly, her father sensed the weight of all that attention too – and long before he passed away in 2002, he apologised for it. “Probably 10 years before my dad passed, we talked about my name and namesake, and he just goes, ‘I'm really sorry I did that to you,'” she recalled. “To hear your father say, ‘Probably should've just named it Dave's and that would have been a lot easier,' was a lot.”
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For Morse, it was comforting to know he understood the pressure she had carried all her life. The constant expectation. The feeling of being connected to a brand bigger than anything she ever imagined. She said it was nice hearing her father acknowledge “the pressure and the responsibility of being the namesake of a restaurant.”
Today, Morse sees the Wendy's sign differently. Not as a burden, but as a tribute to her dad's dream. “He always just wanted to serve quality hamburgers — fresh, never frozen beef — and just really good products and have customer service be friendly and have a clean restaurant,” she said. “So now when I see the sign, I just think of my dad a lot because he's there in spirit.”