Skipping across the internet, you’ll find The Restaurant Ware Collectors Network. It’s a webpage that catalogs branded dishes, mugs, menus and what not from eating establishments, mostly of the long-gone variety. Here you can find a couple of mugs from the Blue Circle (see story here).
But you can also find the very natty looking mugs and plates from the Jiffy Drive-In. White with hunter green accents, the mugs and plates featured an image of the restaurant and the company’s signature motto, “Good Food in a Jiffy.”
Like the Blue Circle, Jiffy was a Knoxville original. Its founder, Clarence Weaver, worked in Chattanooga for Krystal’s in the 1940s. So, he had a solid foundation in drive-in eats. And when he opened his first Jiffy on Central Avenue in 1954, there was something a bit familiar about his hamburgers: square with onions, pickles and mustard, steamed in the bun. His sister-in-law came up with the name and the motto. You know, good food served fast. The initial location, however, first opened as a soft-serve ice cream stand. Soon burgers and fries were added, pies and milk shakes, as well as some breakfast items. The opening price of a hamburger was 12 cents.
Soon there were Jiffy’s around Knox County: Kingston Pike, Broadway, Magnolia Avenue, Chapman Highway, Oak Ridge Highway. Though I grew up in Fountain City, the one I have a vague memory of was the one on Clinton Highway. Jiffy expanded to Johnson City and Marietta, Georgia. The one in Oak Ridge was called DA WABBIT, because apparently Oak Ridge had a thing against franchise restaurants at the time.
Jiffy Drive-In coffee mug from The Restaurant Ware Collectors Network
And franchise the company eventually did. By 1962, they were available at $22,500 a pop. Included with the purchase were construction plans for the standardized “show room” building that could supposedly be up and running in 90 days. The fee also included two weeks of training. Eventually 57 franchises were sold, mostly across the South, but not all of them were built.
Weaver owned a 1930 Ford Model A, painted in the company’s colors of green and yellow with the Jiffy logo, which he used to advertise his business. “I may be old-fashioned but we serve good food in a jiffy” was emblazoned on the spare tire.
Weaver sold out 1969, and by 1971 the chain was in bankruptcy. A Jiffy Drive-in opened once again in Knoxville in 1984, but it didn’t make it two years. There is a Jiffy Burger in Manchester, TN unrelated to the Jiffy franchise. Weaver passed away in 2004.
Sources: The Restaurant Ware Collectors Network, The Knoxville Journal digital archives.
Beth Kinnane writes a history feature for KnoxTNToday.com. It’s published each Tuesday and is one of our best-read features.
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