Never will no one be standing outside the window waiting at Fife’s Pick Quick Drive In.

It’s that popular – except when the place closes for maintenance over two months each winter, and even then, people drive up and ask if the grill is lit.

Or else they worry that Pick Quick has closed forever.

But it opens again, and inside a building barely the size of a pickup truck, upwards of eight workers begin again frying the fries and building the burgers, making the shakes and dealing with hungry customers.

So it’s been since 1949, back when Pacific Highway East was called Highway 99, back before Fife became a city, before businesses replaced the berry fields and car dealers replaced the truck farms.

“My wife worked here when she was in high school, back in ’52, ’53 and ’54,” said Joe Burgi Jr., 74, a Fife native who purchased Pick Quick in 1980. “She ran it for Mrs. Boitano. There’s nothing like the smell of a Pick Quick girl.”

With the first burger sold 60 years ago, the originating Olsen family later begat the Boitano family as owners, and the Boitanos begat the Schorno and Marty families who later begat the Burgis and the Imhofs. The Burgis became sole owners in 1998.

The drive-in and the land it occupies is owned today by a Burgi family trust – to ensure a future for an institution that is little changed from those early years.

The ice cream is no longer hand-dipped, and the pop no longer comes in bottles – but the potatoes used for the fries are still fresh, as is the fruit used to flavor the shakes.

And the customers still line up, every hour of the business day.

SUCCESS

Members of a small flock of resident starlings fly down from the poplars behind the drive-in and they nibble at some fries tossed their way by amused customers.

This is an oasis of sorts on a late-summer afternoon – with picnic tables set upon the green grass, with beds of colorful flowers and a tall maple tree standing as if in a village square.

“We have people who come just for the flowers,” Burgi said. “One lady, she asked why there were no begonias. She loves the flowers. She said, ‘The food’s OK.’”

He guesses the first question.

“You’re going to ask why we’re a success,” he said.

He’s got an answer: “If you do your job right, you don’t have to worry.”

For Burgi, doing the job right means coming in seven days a week. He cuts the potatoes. He cleans the picnic tables and grooms the flowers. When customers arrive, he makes conversation.

Son Gary, 37, mows the lawn every Friday.

“The food is the best quality we can purchase,” Joe said.

“The potatoes – the chemistry is always changing,” Gary said. “You try to be consistent.”

“There are days,” Joe said, “when we sell a milkshake every minute-and-a-half, every two minutes, 250, 300 milkshakes a day. We can do 300-plus pounds of potatoes, and a hundred pounds of meat a day.”

He says there’s no secret to success, and that success comes from the details.

Take the medium in which the fries are fried.

“We use a fresh product, good oil,” Joe said. “We use canola and cottonseed oil. It’s not cheap, it’s quality.”

The menu is nearly unchanged from the early days. There’s a chicken sandwich and a garden burger – they’re relatively new – but Joe has resisted the temptation to offer such items as onion rings and fish.

It’s about available space, and the way these foods would alter the character of the cooking oil.

He seems most proud of the grounds, which resemble a small, well-kept park. It’s a place, he says, where families come to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, and where car clubs come to meet.

Some people take the space for the park it appears to be. It has happened, Joe says, that he’ll see a car drive up, and a family get out, and someone then unloads a barbecue. They’ve come for a picnic.

He gently reminds them that Pick Quick is not a municipal service.

FIFE AND FAME

“I was in the dairy business. We served all the restaurants,” Joe said.

Now they’re almost all gone. He recites the list. The Red Pig, White Spot, Green Parrot. The Dairy Freeze and Burger Box. The Poodle Dog is still there, down the street, and the Monte Carlo has moved to a new location.

“People said we were done for when McDonald’s, and when Burger King came in, and Wendy’s. If anything,” Joe said, “it brought us more business. Why do people stop? Because there’s a line outside.”

“It’s our own little oasis, with trees and flowers,” said P.K. Mac-Lean, executive director of the Fife Regional Chamber of Commerce. “I think every neighborhood, every community, has their own local icon that is a destination.”

Visitors come to the chamber asking for directions, she says. “‘Hey,’ they say, ‘I’ve heard about this place that has awesome burgers and milkshakes.’”

“For the community,” MacLean said, “it’s part of our history, just as much as the pieces in the Fife Historical Museum. It’s part of our history. It’s one of those places that should be on the National Register of Historic Places.”

“It’s a significant icon for our community. It helps define who we are” Fife city manager Steve Worthington said. “It has also brought us national recognition.”

That would be when ber-anchor Stephen Colbert of Comedy Network’s semi-quasi-news show “The Colbert Report” mentioned Pick Quick during an interview with Congressman Adam Smith, within whose district the drive-in resides.

“It caught us totally off guard,” Greg said. “A lot of people saw it. That’s how we heard about it.”

THE PEOPLE SPEAK

“We’ve known each other since we were little kids,” Jack Schlumpf, a long-time Fife resident, said about his friend Joe Burgi. “Pick Quick is an institution. It was there before Fife, and it will probably be there after Fife. It’s always been there, and it’s always been a part of my life and my kids’ life. That place has put a lot of kids through college.”

Becky Olson, a former Fife High School homecoming queen, has worked for the Burgi family for three years and now serves as a shift manager.

“I love this place,” she said. “I couldn’t work for other bosses. They do a lot of the work themselves. They’re here every day.”

She remembers Pick Quick in the days she was a regular customer.

“I came for the same reason people do now,” she said. “The environment is low key. It’s welcoming. (The owners) personalize it with their heart and soul. I think people feel that. It’s peaceful, and it’s clean. It’s pretty.”

It’s a good place to work, she says. There’s a bonus at Christmas and there are those two months every winter when Pick Quick closes and employees can apply for unemployment compensation.

And where a Tacoma burger institution, Frisko Freeze, employs mostly young men, Pick Quick employs mostly young women.

“We’ve had some boys work here,” Joe said.

Said Greg, “You are always bumping into each other – it could cause an issue.”

Joe says he typically hires students who attend school at Fife, Sumner and Bellarmine. “You can’t hire them all from the same school because of the prom.”

“A lot of places say, ‘Here’s your schedule.’ We work with them,” Greg said.

“They bend over backwards to accommodate you,” Patty Rutt of Edgewood, a three-year veteran, said. “They’re just good people. It’s not a numbers thing here – it’s a people thing.”

Susan Sader, 60 from Auburn, visited Pick Quick one recent sunny day.

“We haven’t been here for a while,” she said. “We came because the food’s good.”

“That’s for sure,” said her mother, Ruby Sader, 83.

Joe Burgi sits at a picnic table near the shade of the maple tree. A soft breeze teases the leaves of the nearly poplars. Just across the asphalt, water trickles through Wapato Creek.

Burgi says he often hears interest from people who want to buy the drive-in.

“We get offers on this place every week,” he said. “I tell everybody, ‘You’re Number 53 on the list.’”

C.R. Roberts: 253-597-8535

c.r.roberts@thenewstribune.com