Immigrant Built Fortune on Better Burger

Before Henry Meyer became Hamburger Henry, he grew up in Germany, the son of a Jewish merchant who thought Adolf Hitler was a fad.

“I remember distinctly the day Hitler came to power,� the 60-year-old Meyer recalled recently. “I came home with a bloody nose from school, and I asked my father, ‘What is this all about?’ �

“He said, ‘Don’t worry, it won’t last.’ �

By the time Meyer arrived in this country 14 years later, in 1947, he had fled from Germany to China with his family and survived three years of wartime internment in a crowded, Japanese-run camp near Shanghai.

“I had $10 in my pocket when I got to San Francisco,� said Meyer, who, as the eldest son, was chosen to emigrate to America--and to succeed.

“I’d worked for some very fine Swiss hotel managers in the Orient, so I applied for a job in a hotel� at age 22, he said.

By 1951, four years after entering the country, he was manager of the fashionable Biltmore Hotel in Santa Barbara.

In 1965, after a partnership in a Santa Monica restaurant and a five-year stint as manager of the Elks Lodge in Long Beach, he opened his first Hamburger Henry, a fancy Belmont Shore hamburger stand with which he built a fortune.

“I asked a kid on the street, ‘What food would you want if you could have anything?’ The kid said, ‘A hamburger, Coke and french fries.’

“So I figured, if I could build a better hamburger, there would be good business. And I wanted to be different, so I took all the gourmet items I’d learned about and incorporated them into my menu. It was kind of like taking Gucci to Sears Roebuck, and it has done very well.�

Still lean and aggressive, Meyer often works 12-hour days. The extra effort has made Meyer a multimillionaire.

He now owns two Hamburger Henrys, a fast-food chicken restaurant, a bakery, various parcels of real estate, and is a major stockholder and board chairman of International City Bank in Long Beach.

Meyer said he tells his employees: “If you don’t want to work, check out and go home.�

“I believe,� Meyer added, “if you work 9 to 5 with an hour for lunch, you’re never going to get ahead.�