REDDING — The tale of one of California’s oldest smashburger joints begins during the Great Depression, with an 18-year-old named Bud Pennington.
In 1938, Pennington pitched a tent outside the hiring hall for workers building the Shasta Dam, set up some tree stumps for seats and started hawking grub.
Twenty-five cents bought a cup of coffee, a piece of pie and one of the thin, crispy hamburgers that would make Pennington a legend in Northern California.
It wasn’t exactly the best time to be starting a business, with 19% of the country’s workforce out of a job. But thousands of men were pouring into Redding to build the dam — a 602-foot concrete behemoth that irrigates millions of acres of Central Valley farmland — and they sure worked up an appetite.
The builders took a liking to the young man and his aptly-named pop-up stand: Damburger.
And for 88 years, Damburger — now operating out of a squat brick-and-mortar restaurant in downtown Redding — has dished out what is, according to its official motto, “the best hamburger by a dam site.”
Only three families have owned the unpretentious diner with its black bar stools, scuffed tile floors and enough nostalgia to fill Shasta Lake.
But the people of Redding nearly had a collective heart attack last August when the restaurant’s longtime owners, sisters Julie Malik and Nell Cox, made a stunning announcement: Damburger is for sale.
The restaurant has been in their family for four decades. Their parents bought it in 1979 — when Malik was 8 and Cox was 6 — and gave it to their daughters in 2005.
Malik and Cox, now in their 50s, said it’s time to pass the baton. The restaurant is listed for $975,000 — the median sale price of a single-family home in Los Angeles.
Customers flipped out when they announced the sale, grilling the sisters — puns intended — about whether the restaurant would close. After assuring them it would not, the owners always heard the same plea: Don’t let anyone change it.
“If you think about it, Damburger’s been through World War II, it’s been through Vietnam, it’s been through all these economic downturns and recessions,” Malik said.
Damburger survived the deadly 2018 Carr fire that took out a swath of west Redding, burning within two miles of the restaurant. And it survived the COVID-19 pandemic, with cooks sweating at the grill behind masks and customers relegated to the patio.
“So much changes in the world that it’s nice to have this place to come back to,” Cox said.
There have been a few people seriously interested in the restaurant but no formal offers yet, the sisters said. They are being discerning, they added, looking for someone who will respect the history and keep the place much the same.
Although smashburgers — ground beef patties squashed on a griddle and cooked until the edges turn crispy — have become trendy in recent years, they were a staple of the 1930s, said George Geary, author of “Made in California: The California-Born Burger Joints, Diners, Fast Food & Restaurants That Changed America.”
During the Depression, he said, restaurateurs “really had to stretch food,” and smashing the meat made it fill out the bun.
“Make the food look bigger, and they felt like they got their money’s worth,” Geary said.
Damburger, he said, is one of the oldest continuously operating smashburger restaurants in California.
Workers prep hundreds of patties each morning, using ice cream scoops to form the ground beef — purchased from a market down the street, with just a pinch of salt added — into meatballs, which are flattened in a tortilla press.
The menu includes “original” burgers (mustard, lettuce, onions), the Hot Dam! (pepper jack cheese, jalapeños, chipotle mayo) and the Dam Thing (two split hot dogs with a ground beef patty on a hamburger bun.)
Kids giggle when they order because it sounds like they’re cussing. Some prudish grown-ups call it “a darnburger.”
Pennington and his wife, Babe — the daughter of his meat supplier — moved Damburger to its current spot behind the Shasta County elections office in 1962 and hired Marge Thayer, a stout woman with a bouffant bob who remembered every regular’s exact order, if not their name.
If she forgot a customer’s name, she’d call them Curly (No one knows why. Thayer just thought it was funny.) Or she’d refer to them by their order.
“She’d say, ‘Oh, here comes The Double With Onions coming across the street,’” Malik said of Thayer, who taught her how to squish patties.
The Penningtons retired in 1977 and sold the restaurant to a married couple, who had it for 18 months before selling to Cox and Malik’s parents, Ron and Kathy Dickey.
As they are today, customers were apprehensive about new ownership, but Thayer spanned the gap and put them at ease. She worked there for 44 years before her death in 2006.
“It’s bittersweet to have a place this long, because you do go through the generations,” Cox said. “You see people pass away. You see the new kids coming, but also their grandparents are getting old.”
One customer loved Damburger so much that his family asked after his death if they could spread some of his ashes in the restaurant’s flower beds.
“I was like, ‘Sure, why not? Feed the flowers,’” Malik said.
Orders used to be handwritten on paper tickets and hung for the cook to grab. Regulars had their usual jotted down in shorthand and kept in a folder to be used as soon as they walked in. Now, orders are taken with a computerized system.
On a recent Wednesday, Malik and Cox pulled out the tag for Jessica Stelter, who was having lunch with her husband, Steve.
Their orders, scrawled in black Sharpie, were: SC Ket/Mayo (single cheeseburger with ketchup and mayonnaise) for her and DPJ W+++ (double burger with pepperjack and “the works” — mustard, lettuce, onions, pickles, ketchup and mayo) for him.
Stelter, 36, earned her tag as a kid, coming with her grandparents. She gets the same burger each time. But her husband mixes it up.
“I told him it was an honor to have a card,” she said. “But he doesn’t keep his order. He changes it. It’s sacrilege.”
Stelter, 36, worked at Damburger for a single day as a teenager. She was nervous, as a Damburger fangirl, and didn’t eat before her shift. She got hot standing at the grill and fainted. Cox and Malik’s dad caught her before she fell.
“I got paid with a cheeseburger and fries,” she said. “It was such a great day.”
Stelter teared up when the owners pulled out her grandparents’ tag. Her grandpa died two years ago, and her grandma now lives out of town.
“There’s Nana,” she said, pointing to the slip of paper, which read: SC hay/may (single cheeseburger with lettuce and mayo). Grandpa was a double burger with extra cheese, “original” style.
“It never changes,” she said of Damburger. “It’s a piece of my childhood that I get to now share with my kids and hopefully someday they’ll share with their kids if they stay in Redding.”
She smiled at Malik (who always orders the single Damburger) and Cox (who prefers the vegan Beyond Burger).
“I’m excited for you guys,” Stelter said. “But you’re going to be missed.”
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