Dave Thomas (1932-2002)

Dave Thomas was the founder of Wendy's. He was adopted when he was 6 months old, and when he was 5 his adoptive mother passed away. by the time he was a 15, he already had a full-time job, had quit school, and was living on his own. At 18, he joined the army and went to cooking school, yet failed. He was married within a year of meeting his wife, and had 4 children in 6 years. It was hard for him to get by at first, because he was only making $125 a week. He was a veteran of the food business at the age of 20, and he was helped to make signs and buckets for KFC. The problem was that he wasn't having fun because he believed, since childhood, that work would solve all of his problems. The first Wendy's opened in the November of 1969. He earned his GED in 1993 at Coconut Creek High School. In 2002 he died from liver cancer, and had more than 6,000 Wendy's restaurants operating in North America.