Flashback Friday: Pizza Peddler was on a Pizza Hut trajectory for a brief time in the ’70s
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 burned bright then burned out in the late 1970s.
In March of 1978, Wichita was buzzing about Pizza Hut, famously started by local brothers Dan and Frank Carney. Only 20 years after opening their first restaurant at Bluff and Kellogg, the brothers had grown Pizza Hut into the largest pizza chain in the world and had just sold it to PepsiCo. for $300 million.
Into this environment stepped Joe Fairchild and Deb Luffman, two young pizza entrepreneurs who had dropped out of the University of Kansas to follow their dream of opening their own restaurant, having decided they could do it as well as the owners of the pizza place where they’d both worked in Lawrence.
Though they had an amazing recipe for whole wheat pizza dough, they didn’t have any money. Their initial plan of building their pizza empire in Colorado failed because they couldn’t find a bank that would give them a loan. They moved back to Kansas — Fairchild had grown up in Mulvane — with plans to try again.
That’s where they met well-known Wichita broker Lindy Andeel, who had lots of money and lots of real estate. He told the duo that if they’d agree to start their business in a building he had at 15th and Hillside — about three blocks from Wichita State University’s campus — he’d loan them the money to buy some pizza ovens. They could use the tables and chairs that had been left behind by the previous restaurant tenant.
It wasn’t long before word started to spread that Pizza Peddler — the name Fairchild and Luffman gave their restaurant — made some pretty good deep-dish pies. The braided whole wheat crust was made with molasses, which gave it a lovely brown hue, said Fairchild, who was 23 when the first Pizza Peddler opened. Today, he’s 70. He lives in Salina and works as the vice president of sales for key accounts at Standard Beverage Corp. in Wichita.
“It was pretty tasty,” Fairchild said of the pizza he peddled. “What set us apart was that we used a lot of fresh ingredients. At the time, people weren’t really doing that.”
Customers also liked that they could see the pizza being made in the restaurant’s display kitchen. The workers, including Fairchild, were famous for throwing the dough up into the air as they stretched it. And customers were also crazy about Pizza Peddler’s fresh salad bar.
Lines started to form as people waited to place their Pizza Peddler orders. Suddenly, everyone wanted to be a part of the young upstarts’ business.
“Pizza Hut was still really on fire, and we got a lot of interest,” Fairchild said. “And a lot of people wanted to give us money. A lot of people wanted to get involved. They thought we’d be the next Pizza Hut, and if we would have had better guidance, we probably could have.”
The first Pizza Peddler was doing so well that the owners quickly added a second. It opened in November of 1978 at 6505 E. Central, near Central and Woodlawn in the space now occupied by Schlotzsky’s.
Then, in 1979, Pizza Peddler added a third restaurant, and it was extra nice, Fairchild remembers. The owners were able to buy the former Beachcomber restaurant at 5215 E. Kellogg, which had been destroyed by fire, and remodel it into the largest Pizza Peddler yet. The building, which no longer exists, had seating for 200 and space for outdoor dining.
“It was a really, really nice restaurant,” Fairchild remembers. “We did a ton of business there.”
Pizza Peddler kept growing — and quickly — adding restaurants at 2790 S. Seneca (where a Fantastic Sams operates today) and at 8710 W. Central (home today to another Schlotzsky’s.)
In early 1980, just two years after the first Pizza Peddler opened, the owners started to franchise the concept, and restaurants opened in cities like Goddard, El Dorado, Park City and Liberal as well as in Joplin and Nevada, Missouri.
In retrospect, Fairchild said, the concept grew too quickly.
“We were young and dumb,” he said. “We knew how to make good pizza, but that little key of making money — we didn’t have that part figured out.”
In July of 1980, Pizza Peddler’s owners sold their restaurants on South Seneca and West Central to local insurance agent and nightclub owner Wendell Martens. They also granted him large-scale development rights.
They sold the restaurant at 6505 E. Central to real estate broker George Ablah, who wanted his children to run it. Fairchild was to remain in charge of the original restaurant on North Hillside and of the one on East Kellogg. The plan was that those two would serve as model stores for additional franchises.
Luffman, meanwhile, worked to open restaurants in Colorado.
But soon, “it just kind of all fell apart,” Fairchild said.
Though some of the franchised restaurants kept going, by 1982 Pizza Peddler was out of business. Farris Farha, a former Pizza Hut vice president, purchased four of the Wichita restaurants and renamed them Valentine’s Pizza. By 1983, he had six Wichita restaurants, and they were known for delivering pizzas in trucks marked with the Valentine’s name.
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But that concept didn’t last, either. There’s no mention of Valentine’s Pizza in the Wichita Eagle’s archives past 1983. By 1984, Knolla’s had taken over the Valentine’s restaurant at 5215 E. Kellogg and leased five of its trucks. Valentine’s other local addresses were almost all filled with different restaurant concepts by 1985. (Farha went on to open Farris Wheel candy store in 2006. He died last year.)
Despite losing his once-promising pizza business, Fairchild went on to have a rather illustrious career in the food and beverage industry.
He became acquainted with Wichita entrepreneur Lesile Rudd when he worked at Rudd’s Standard Beverage Company, and in 1998, Rudd tapped Fairchild to move to Napa Valley and run the specialty grocery chain Dean & Deluca, which Rudd had purchased in 1995.
Fairchild had that job until 2004, and he also helped Rudd develop the concept for Press, a Napa Valley restaurant that’s still operating. He helped open another wine country restaurant, Napa’s Boon Fly Cafe, and worked for a variety of liquor distributors, luxury resorts and distilleries in California before deciding to return to Kansas — and Standard Beverage — 10 years ago.
When he looks back on his days with Pizza Peddler, Fairchild said, he mostly remembers the people who worked with him. Several of his employees went on to build big careers of their own in Wichita, and many of them eventually got back in touch to express their gratitude.
“They’d call me and say, ‘We just wanted to thank you for what you did at Pizza Peddler. If we worked hard, we could make things happen,’” Fairchild said. “At the end of the day, I get most excited if I can make peoples’ lives better, have some influence on them and teach them something. And that’s what I did at Pizza Peddler.”
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