BRANSON MO NEWS:
EL DORADO — When it comes to the history of Arkansas-based fast food, Linda McGoogan is king of the grill, owner of the last Minute Man standing.
May 26 marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Minute Man chain by Wesley T. “Wes” Hall of Little Rock. McGoogan has been around for many of those years, either as an employee or owner of Minute Man No. 14, in downtown El Dorado.
When Jim Hansen closed the doors to the Minute Man at Fourth Street and Broadway in downtown Little Rock on May 31, 2002, that left only Minute Man No. 14. Hall himself had died just days before, on May 8, at 87.
McGoogan started at Minute Man No. 14, one of two in El Dorado at the time, as an employee sometime in the 1970s and bought the restaurant in 1984.
Declining to give her age, she shows no signs of slowing.
“Minute Man, hold,” McGoogan spoke into the telephone, then turned to pass a bag of burgers out the drive-thru window before returning to the call-in order.
Several feet away on a recent afternoon, after the lunch-crowd rush had thinned, Len Walden of El Dorado was enjoying the No. 6 “salad burger” — a charbroiled beef patty topped with shredded lettuce, tomato and relish sauce — fries and an order of cheese dip.
Walden, 59, said he doesn’t eat very often at Minute Man but enjoys it when he does. “It’s good to have places like this, and you need to visit them before it’s too late,” he said.
Hansen, up in Little Rock, could relate.
His final two days of business — announced a few days earlier — brought in the biggest crowd of customers in the 15 years he’d owned the Minute Man on Broadway and another on Asher Avenue that was closed years earlier. “I …
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