Southeast Corner

The Carney Kids

Daniel Carney was born in 1931, the second of seven children born to Michael and Mary Frances Carney. Frank Carney was the sixth child, born in 1938. The Carneys lived in the College Hill neighborhood of east Wichita. The Carney kids attended Cathedral High School downtown and attended morning mass at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church a few blocks from their house on Roosevelt Street.

The family was hardworking and devout. When Dan and Frank came of age they began work at C&M Market (later Carney’s Market), a grocery store their father had opened a few years earlier. After Mike passed away in 1948 at age forty-six, seventeen-year-old Dan took on extra responsibilities at the market, taking orders, running deliveries, and managing pickups from customers around the neighborhood. Dan continued to work at Carney’s Market through high school and his years as an undergraduate at Wichita University (now Wichita State University).

Life moved quickly for Dan after graduating from Wichita University with a degree in business administration. In 1954 he married fellow WU grad Beverly Singleton. They started their family while Dan served two years in the Air Force in Albany, Georgia.

Dan and his family returned to Wichita in 1956. Dan began the Master’s program in the business school at WU and returned to work part-time at Carney’s Market and full-time for Boeing. “[Boeing] wasn’t something I wanted to do,” Dan said. “I didn’t want to work for a big company.” Dan quit at Boeing and went to work at Carney’s Market full-time with his brother Frank as he puzzled out his next step. In two years, Dan and Frank would start Pizza Hut.

Images: LEFT: A map of the original Pizza Hut, as dictated by younger brother Mike Carney. RIGHT: Stepdad Joe and Mary Carney with Dan (top, far left), Frank (top, third from right), and the rest of the Carney kids. Courtesy of the Carney Collection, Ablah Library Special Collections.

Be in Business for Yourself

When Dan and Frank Carney’s father, Mike, left his position as supervisor at the massive Cudahy Packing Company food supply plant to start his own little grocery on the corner of Bluff and Kellogg, he told his sons, “If you have a choice, be in business for yourself, because you get the satisfaction of knowing that whether you fail or win, it’s yours.”

Dan and Frank learned other vital lessons at Carney’s Market as well. From customer relations to a hard-driving work ethic, as Frank later observed, while working for their dad: “We got an education without realizing we were getting an education.”

Dan and Frank also learned to see the whole business from a elevated vantage point instead of concentrating on only one aspect. “You had to understand every part of the business,” recalled Dan. Perhaps the most valuable lesson Dan and Frank learned at Carney’s Market was how a business owner treats customers, partners, and “the people who worked for you.” These lessons would influence the culture of customer care, trust between employees, and gentle leadership that became the hallmark of the Carney brothers’ time at Pizza Hut.

While Dan and Frank followed in their father’s footsteps in many respects, in others they found themselves more willing to take risks than his other family members. Dan harbored a long-standing fascination with franchising. Citing the recent success of the Dallas-based 7-Eleven chain, Dan encouraged his stepfather to open a convenience store of his own on the corner of Bluff and Kellogg. Joe balked at the idea, saying, “he couldn’t afford to risk it and that there were too many people in the family being supported by the store,” remembered Dan. “He was a different person than I was.”

Image: Mike and Mary Carney with their firstborn son, Dan. Courtesy of the Carney Collection, Ablah Library Special Collections.

Molly Mollohan's Big Idea

In the mid-1950s, Carney’s Market shared the corner of Bluff and Kellogg with two other businesses: Dog ‘n’ Shake (which still operates at several locations across Wichita), and B&B Lunch, a bar that served booze to truckers. Molly Mollohan and Maude Beech owned both the B&B Lunch and Carney’s Market. The two owners had decided not to renew the lease for B&B Lunch, and were in need of a new tenant.

One day Molly Mollohan approached Dan Carney with an idea for a new kind of business to take over the now-vacant building. She opened a recent Saturday Evening Post and showed him an article profiling a new food fad sweeping northeast America: pizza.

Dan Carney had never made pizza in his life, and had no experience running a restaurant. But the entrepreneur in him saw an opportunity, and so he took it.

Case contents: The cover and article, titled “Crazy about Pizza,” from the November 30, 1957, edition of the Saturday Evening Post. Molly Mollohan shared her copy of the magazine with Dan Carney, and a national restaurant chain was born. Dan and Gayla Carney Collection, 2017.7.2 Lowell D. Holmes Museum of Anthropology.