Here is some history of the Ollieburger:

ENTREPRENEURS: John Brown’s Buddy

At a Kentucky Derby breakfast in the Governor’s mansion nine years ago, a young lawyer with a hunger for riches ran into a courtly old gent with a recipe for fried chicken. The rest is history: John Y. Brown Jr. built an $830 million empire around Colonel Harland Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken. Having made his fortune, Brown sold out last year to Heublein Inc., a food and liquor distributor, and went into semi-retirement at age 37. But then he met Ollie Gleichenhaus, who runs a seven-stool hamburger joint in Miami Beach. Now Brown is determined to make him the Colonel Sanders of hamburgers.

Ollie is hardly the patriarchal Kentucky colonel type. A 60-year-old native of Brooklyn, he looks and sounds more like Archie Bunker’s big brother. But his hamburgers are something else: one-third pound of lean meat seasoned with 32 spices and a special sauce. Gleichenhaus, who insults customers and employees with equal abandon, takes his seasoning seriously; he often chastises patrons who unknowingly ask for ketchup or mustard.

Actually, Brown’s discovery of Gleichenhaus was not exactly serendipitous. Brown, the son of a longtime politician, retired from the chicken business in part because he wanted to become the Democratic candidate for Senator from Kentucky this fall, but then former Republican Governor Louie Nunn was nominated for the Senate, and Brown decided that maybe he would wait until 1974. He needed something to do meanwhile, an activity that would still leave him time for political jobs like organizing the telethon that netted more than $2,000,000 for the Democratic National Committee last month. Last August, accordingly, he bought Lum’s, a 340-outlet beer-and-hot-dog chain, for $4,000,000 in cash.

Lum’s franchises lost $150,000 last year—partly, says Brown, because “they did not have very good food. I figured that upgrading it would be my first task.” So Brown recruited a platoon of young executives and told them to scour the country until they found the perfect hamburger.

A month later they returned with Gleichenhaus. “I told John I was happy, I don’t need this,” Ollie recalls. “Then he told me he’d make me famous, bigger than the Colonel. He said my name would be in lights, on T shirts and plates, everywhere. He hit me in a weak spot.”

Lum’s hired Ollie to train its personnel, and it is now testing Ollie-burgers—at a high 95¢ each—in its Ohio outlets. Gleichenhaus is not entirely sure that Lum’s countermen can duplicate his masterpiece: “Those yo-yos are looking for a short way to make my burgers, but there’s no way other than the right way.” Even so, Brown intends to go nationwide with Ollie-burgers within a year, and has prepared 63 television commercials featuring Ollie in “an Archie Bunker kind of approach.”        [1]

The Ollie burger seasoning was sent to the Lums restaurant in a case which contained twenty four one pound bags. The prep personal had to prepare it one day ahead of time.  The Ollie mixture was then painted on the top and bottom of the  burger before it was put on the grill. In the beginning a grill press was used to cook the Ollieburgers (like the george Forman grill of today without ridges) This was to cook the Ollieburgers with the Ollie sauce painted on both sides evenly so the yo-yos at Lums could duplicate Ollie’s masterpiece. Lums also spread the bun with an Ollie dressing  to insure that the Ollieburger had the Ollie taste. The bun dressing was also made from the Ollieburger seasoning. 

The Ollieburger seasoning and the french fry seasoning can be purchased at

dennis@ollieburgerspices.com  or at dennisdb61@aol.com . The cost is $10.95 per pound plus shipping via USPS. 

{1} Time Magazine

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              Hi, Welcome to LUMS

LUMS was a family restaurant chain in the United States. LUMS was founded in 1956 by Stuart and Clifford S. Perlman when they purchased Lum’s hot dog stand in Miami Beach for $10,000. Over the next few years, the Perlman brothers opened three additional Lum’s restaurants, for a total of four by 1961.  Clifford Perlman, who in addition to owning Lum’s, had been serving as the president of Southern Wood Industries, Inc., resigned that position to work full time for Lum’s. Under the brothers, Lum’s began aggressively expanding and franchising. In 1969, Lum’s, Inc. was admitted to the New York Stock Exchange. In 1969, Lum’s, Inc. purchased Caesars Palace, then a 500 room hotel casino on the famous Las Vegas Strip, for $60 million. The food operations of Lum’s, Inc. were sold in 1971 to John Y. Brown, then Chairman of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a group of investors.  At the time of sale, the company owned and franchised 400 stores in the U.S., Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Europe. In 1978, Wienerwald Holdings A.G., a Swiss holding company and parent of the Wienerwald restaurant chain, under the direction of Friedrich Jahn, purchased the 273 restaurant chain from Brown.  However, Wienerwald had overextended itself and was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1982. The original Lum’s location closed in 1983. The last remaining LUMS location, in Davie, Florida, closed on June 28, 2009.[6] For a time, the company’s commercial spokesman was Milton Berle. [1] I was the director of operations for a franchise in Vermont and upstate New York for 12 years from 1980-1992.  I made this website to keep alive the history and taste of some menu items this great American eaterie. I have the original recipes for the ollieburger, wienerwald chicken, hotdogs steamed in beer and the key lime pie.  These items consumed my life for all those years as I opened new LUMS, trained our trainers and managers,visited and inspected for quality, cleanliness, and service for all of the LUMS restaurants six days a week twelve to sixteen hours a day. Terry the owner and I would leave our office in Shelburne,Vermont at eight oclock in the morning and return between midnight and two the next morning. I met many people in New England who have become ljfe long friends. This website/blog is dedicated to all of them.

Purchase the Ollieburger & Ollie french fry spices at    dennisdb61@aol.com

[1]  Wikipedia

Order ollieburger spices. ollie fries spices at        dennisdb61@aol.com