Flashback Friday: WWII vet ran this popular Wichita burger joint for more than 30 years
Welcome to Flashback Friday, a feature that runs Fridays on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants that they once loved but that now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.
This week’s featured restaurant, Bill’s Big 6, was a popular veteran-owned burger restaurant from 1960 until the mid-1990s.
For more than 30 years, one of Wichita’s favorite burgers was made by a hard-working World War II veteran who had once worked for the White Castle founder.
Bill’s Big 6 opened in July 1960 at 400 E. Murdock, right at the corner of Topeka and Murdock. Its owner was Bill Stratton, who’d left his home in Chanute at age 9, during the Great Depression. Stratton would work as a paper boy during the day and stay in the basement of the old Wichita Beacon building at night.
As a preteen, Stratton got jobs cooking in local burger restaurants. His employers included both Anderson, who invented the White Castle burger in 1916, and A.J. “Jimmie” King, the founder of King’s X.
By age 16, Stratton was working for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and he’d been sent to work in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He then joined the U.S. Army and was among those captured when the Philippines fell in 1942. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner and was a survivor of the infamous Bataan Death March.
When Stratton returned from the war, he got a job working for Ralph Baum, owner of the Ralph Baum’s Burger House chain that featured several burger stands around Wichita in the 1930s through the 1960s. In 1960, Baum sold Stratton a tiny restaurant space at the corner of Topeka and Murdock.
Stratton named it Bill’s Big 6, and it quickly became a local favorite. The restaurant was particularly popular with local police officers, so much so that Stratton always had a police scanner running in the restaurant, where he became known for his special creation: a double burger with a slice of ham in the middle, topped with grilled onions.
Stratton was an exacting business owner: In the early days, he didn’t let people linger long in the tiny building because it had only 12 seats. He also didn’t allow smoking: He didn’t smoke and didn’t want his customers doing it in his business.
But Stratton also was known as being exceedingly dedicated to quality and customer service. He made every burger to order, he cut his fries fresh every morning, and he kept his prices low. In 1984, customers could get a chili burger, fries and a drink for $2.
Stratton wasn’t cowed by fast-food competitors, either, In 1989, he shared with The Wichita Eagle the reason he thought he was able to keep his clientele happy.
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“The difference between McDonald’s and my restaurant is... like the difference between building an automobile by hand and churning it down the assembly line,” he was quoted as saying. “They are the assembly line where mine is done for each person. I give them exactly what they want.”
Bill’s Big 6 made many local lists of favorite burger joints for decades. Then, in 1986, St. Francis Regional Medical Center decided it wanted to build a 150-space parking lot on the 800 block of Topeka. Bill’s Big 6 and a historic Midtown home — an 1883 Classic Revival considered the oldest inhabited house in the city — were in the way and had to go.
The house went first. Its demolition started in December 1986. The hospital agreed to let Stratton stay put until May of 1987.
Still, he was not pleased.
“I don’t call it progress when you make something into a parking lot,” he told The Wichita Eagle at the time.
Bill and Mary Stratton weren’t ready to retire, though. They borrowed $135,000 and built a new restaurant building at 424 E. Central. The building was bigger, but many said some of the the Big 6 charm disappeared after the move.
And it wasn’t good for Bill Stratton, either. He told the Wichita Eagle that he had to stop taking vacations, had to work longer hours and had to put off his retirement to recoup his investment.
Four years later, Bill Stratton was forced to step away from the restaurant as his health deteriorated. He was struggling with emphysema and was hospitalized on Christmas Day 1993. He was still so concerned about his business that he asked to have each day’s receipts brought to him at the hospital. But he died on Feb. 9, 1994.
The Eagle published a story about his life, and his customers and employees remembered him as firm but quietly generous, someone who knew his customers so well that he often would start preparing their orders as soon as he saw them drive up to the restaurant. He would often give food away to people who he knew were struggling.
His wife of 18 years, Mary, said he made the most of his difficult upbringing.
“He wasn’t highly educated, he didn’t speak English very well,” she said. “But he had a good heart, and that’s what counts in life.”
Mary Stratton kept Bill’s Big 6 going for a short time after her husband’s death. But by March of 1996, the building had a new tenant — a short-lived restaurant called Paradise Cafe.
In 1996, El Patio Cafe moved from a smaller building at 901 E. Central into the building at 424 E. Central, and it still operates there today. The “6” from the Bill’s Big 6 sign still remains at the base of the El Patio sign that sits near the sidewalk.
This story was originally published December 13, 2024 at 5:03 AM.
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