In-N-Out Burger by Stacy Perman

Author:Stacy Perman [Perman, Stacy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-06-17T04:00:00+00:00

The new decade was off to a splendid start. For Rich, it appeared that his business success was now matched by success in his personal life. Two months before his fortieth birthday, the timid bachelor married for the first time on May 2, 1992. A friend had introduced Rich to his new bride, a twenty-six-year-old sales associate at a Newport Beach equipment leasing company. Sloe-eyed and willowy with chestnut hair, Christina Bradley had a young daughter named Siobhan. The new couple shared a strong Christian faith and a commitment to helping disadvantaged and abused children. “He was just larger than life,” was how his new wife later described him. “He had a magnetism that just drew you to him.”

The couple was married in a small green church in Maui. Their fun-filled, 1950s-themed reception was held at the Grand Wailea resort. Although it was small, no expense was spared. Rich paid to fly eighty-two of the couple’s friends and family to Hawaii (Guy and his wife, Lynda, were conspicuously absent from the wedding party). He also had his classic 1957 white Cadillac convertible shipped across the Pacific for the occasion. Rich’s friend and spiritual adviser, Pastor Chuck Smith Jr. of the Cavalry Chapel (son of the church’s founder), presided over the ceremony.

In June, just weeks after the Snyders’ Hawaiian nuptials, the newlyweds received an engraved invitation from President George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, to join them at a state dinner at the White House in honor of Russian president Boris Yeltsin. Although Rich had attended Bush’s inaugural festivities in 1989, he could barely contain his joy. In the final months of the Bush administration, Rich was finally able to check off the two-year goal that he had first set for himself twelve years earlier in 1980—he had received a White House invitation.

Arriving at the White House, Rich and Christina Snyder found themselves in the company of such notables as Kenneth T. Derr, the chairman and CEO of Chevron Corp.; Louis V. Gerstner, then the chairman and CEO of RJR Nabisco, and his wife, Robin; Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan; and a Stanford University professor of political science named Condoleezza Rice. After dining on a menu of caviar, roast loin of veal, and caramel mousse in the elegant State Dining Room, the Snyders (along with the president’s other guests) moved to the East Room to listen to soprano Carol Vaness.

It was the best party that Rich Snyder had ever attended. As he excitedly told Karen De Witt, a New York Times reporter who covered the evening, “I love history, I love our country, and it was all there. The classiest thing I’ve ever been to. And it wasn’t stuffy, either.” This time it was Rich Snyder who felt as if he had won the golden ticket to enter Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. In-N-Out’s president spent the entire evening slack-jawed, pinching himself, overcome by the opportunity to chat up Defense Secretary Richard Cheney, General Colin Powell, and Vice President Dan Quayle, who a year earlier made a well-publicized stop at the Kearny Mesa In-N-Out.

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