We have been an entrepreneurial city right from the outset, and that story permeates the Wichita identity.

That sort of frontier, individualistic spirit is the sort of spirit that says, I can do something as opposed to why I can't do something.

And that's crucial.

It kind of was amazing on the basis of everybody just had a feeling to do whatever your man and that you think you can do.

And everybody was ready to try something.

The courage to try with the brains and talent to go big.

Entrepreneurs from one Midwestern city stand out from the crowd.

This has been ground zero for some revolutionary ideas that have spread from coast to coast and beyond.

These are brand names that everybody knows that inspire, passion and a sense of well-being.

Born of the creative and innovative minds that sprung from an unassuming city on the plains.

Air capital of the world?

You bet.

Wichita is well known as the hub of the American aircraft industry.

Home of Cessna, Beechcraft and Learjet.

But this is also the birthplace of some other big name products that have helped shape everyday American life.

Who doesn't love pizza?

The Italians may have invented it, but it was two brothers from Wichita who helped make this one of America's favorite foods.

Let yourself go to a Pizza Hut and let yourself go to Pizza Hut.

Pizza Hut is the world's number one pizza company with nearly 15,000 restaurants in 90 countries.

To Pizza Hut There were mom and pop pizza shops that were family recipes.

You know, it's a straight from Naples type of thing.

And they brought it to the masses.

It all started with Dan and Frank Carney, who jumped in on a craze that was just taking off.

This food that was traditionally eaten by Italians had become trendy among celebrities in the 1950s.

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, thats amore.

Americans were hungry to try it.

And when they did, they liked it.

It was a brand new product.

It was really good.

And it was something new and different.

It was 1958.

The Carneys, both students at Wichita State University, had read about the rising popularity of pizza and were intrigued.

They'd been wanting to start their own business, inspired by their dad, who ran a grocery store.

What he instilled in my brother.

And I was, Look, get in business for yourself because you're the boss and you can plot your own success.

You dont need to depend on somebody you're working for.

With a $600 loan from their mother, the Carneys rented a tiny diner next to their dad's store at Bluff & Kellogg.

And the first Pizza Hut was born.

Dan Carney says it was an instant hit.

We're kind of overrun because it a very small deal and we had very little experience.

And so yeah, we just for a period of time we were just pulled under where you couldn't we couldn't handle some.

Some nights it was like a big fraternity party, I think, just to work at Pizza Hut.

John Bender was the Carneys partner in the early days.

I would say as much as anything those first few years we just had a lot of fun.

Bender was the only one with restaurant experience and he came up with the recipes.

They really had to do as much as anything with the sauce and the sauce and several secret ingredients.

By December of 58, the tiny pizzeria was raking in more than $1,000 a week and had more customers than it could handle.

Well, in the beginning, there was a high school because it was new in college.

And then later on we got the parents to come in.

It wasn't too much longer after that that we had it.

We put in another store.

We were so busy.

You run out of space.

That meant one thing.

Pizza Hut had to expand.

The Carneys decided to try selling franchises, which was a new idea in the 1950s.

KFC and McDonald's were just kicking off around the West Coast and then in Louisville, Kentucky Fried.

So I kind of studied them and saw how fast they were moving, and I plagiarized quite a bit of.

Other people would finance, build and operate the new Pizza Hut and the Carneys would get a piece of the pie, so to.

Speak.

The world was ready for franchising.

The world is ready for fast food.

And so we're at the right time, right place.

Part of that good fortune luck is a walk on.

In less than five years, there were 42 Pizza Hut across Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas.

With the number growing by the day.

They catered to the audience of their day, which were the baby boomer generation looking for a place to gather around a meal inexpensively.

That was tasty.

They solved that problem with a centuries old recipe and catered it to the palates of American youth of their day.

It was a virtual food revolution that proved unstoppable.

I'd never heard of the word pizza, and I had to presume most of the people in Wichita hadnt heard the word pizza.

That's that time when they started out.

There were some skeptics, including Bob Walterscheid.

You'd think that pizza, pizza, pie.

Well, you know, your concept of pies, crust and fruit latticework on top.

And here it is, open and there's meat showing and whatnot.

And I did think it would go.

But Walter side says he came to love Pizza Hut pizza.

He produced the first national TV commercial for Pizza Hut while working for KAKE TV in 1965.

But Goofy, you know.

It was totally out of what normal people did on television commercials at the time.

Walterscheid says he and his crew dreamed up the concept and shot the spot over three days on the streets of Wichita.

The guy calls in and orders a pizza and he comes out, gets in his little car, backs out and hits the guy, fixes a tire on a VW bus, which was mine at the time, hits him in the hind end and knocks him against the car, the guy starts chasing him, and then as he does, he does various things.

Other people get into the chase, the old silent movie Chase routine.

He gets his pizzas in a sack, of course.

Meantime, the jingles playing, Putt putt to the Pizza Hut.

Putt putt to the Pizza Hut.

Putt putt to the Pizza Hut Gets in the car, drives home.

Everybody runs in, eats his pizza and he has to order another one.

Is Walterscheid.

His daughter and a neighbor were among the cast.

It was entertaining and entertaining.

And yet it told the story like a silent movie did.

And it pitched the product.

What more could you ask for a commercial?

You know.

The commercial was only intended to air on Wichita stations.

But Walterscheid says right after it aired the first time, local Pizza Hut stores set new sales records.

The company decided to show the commercial across the country and for eight years, Americans watched this spot on TV and in movie theaters from coast to coast.

But these people say that was clever, that was funny, you know, but they remembered that.

That's the amazing part about it.

Even today, people remember that commercial.

Putt putt, to the Pizza Hut.

Pizza Hut became a publicly traded company in the 1970s and merged with PepsiCo in 1977.

That was 19 years after it all started with this tiny restaurant that still stands.

It was moved here to the Wichita State campus in the 1980s.

No longer a functioning restaurant, it serves as a tribute to those two brothers who started a worldwide pizza empire right here in Wichita.

But even before Pizza Hut, Wichita gave birth to another mega restaurant chain, which became one of the world's very first fast food giants.

Are you hungry?

Then come to White Castle and try our slider special.

White Castle did for hamburgers?

What Pizza Hut did for pizza?

Imagine all those burgers in your stomach right now.

And White Castle emerges at the beginning of the creation of what they think of as lunch.

Oh, boy.

Ham.

In the rural areas, the main meals are breakfast, dinner and supper.

The main meal is in the middle of the day.

That shifts with the industrial revolution as people are working and they don't have a long time to eat a big, extensive midday dinner.

So dinner gets pushed up to an evening meal and now we have lunch where you go in, you grab something and you go on.

Wichitans Walt Anderson and Billy Ingram jumped on this cultural trend in 1921 when they opened the first White Castle at the corner of First and Main.

And Kansans ate up the five cent burgers like crazy.

It was taking Henry Ford's idea and putting it in a restaurant.

Let's make this as fast as possible.

Make good food, quick, feed people, and they'll be on their way.

The partners quickly opened up several more locations in Wichita, and within a year were expanding outside the city into El Dorado and beyond.

What White Castle does is it moves in to a market saying we have standardized products, it's clean.

You know what you're getting?

It's affordable.

And that customer service then really marks what White Castle is about.

Now, 94 years later, the White Castle chain has grown to 400 restaurants.

But if you live in Kansas, you may be asking.

What happened to White Castle?

Please tell me there's another White Castle in town.

No.

Ingram bought out Anderson in 1933 and moved the company headquarters to Columbus, Ohio.

Within five years, the company had closed all its Wichita restaurants, focusing its business on larger cities further east.

What are we going to do?

I don't know, man.

Now, the only way you can enjoy White Castle burgers in Kansas is to buy them frozen at the grocery store.

Local foodie Charles Catlett says that's better than nothing.

I thought it would be not as good as in the restaurant, but still pretty good.

Though Catlett would like to see what chickens once again be able to step up to a white Castle counter, order some sliders and fries and go nuts.

I honestly never even heard of White Castle until the movie Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.

And then I found out that it actually started here in Wichita and basically the Forefathers for American Fast Food.

And I thought that was really cool.

And I was like, Where is a White Castle?

Because I don't I've never seen them in Kansas City or any of the other surrounding cities around here.

Catlett says he first aimed White Castle while on vacation in Tennessee and was hooked.

Mainly, I like the onions because I really like onions.

It's it's different.

It's not many burger places to have burgers like that.

Catlett and his roommate started a Facebook page called Wichita Wants White Castle back more than 450 followers agree.

In fact, the restaurant that's fairly popular that started here in Wichita is no longer here or anywhere near us is just kind of crazy to me.

Catlett says the White Castle company discovered the page and sent him a message.

They said, thanks for the support.

And that's that's about it.

And that is about it.

A White Castle spokesperson didn't respond to our inquiry about any potential plans to reopen in Wichita.

So if you're a White Castle fan in Kansas, you'll just have to keep hoping and dreaming.

This may one day be you.

And that it the spark.

But if you've got a cold or some aches and pains, this may hit the spot.

If you get a lot of colds, get a lot of relief, get Mentholatum deep heating, rub with deep heating action.

Deep heating.

Mentholatum was also invented by a Wichita man whose legacy continues to impact the city more than 100 years later.

Well, Mentholatum comes out of a personal crisis.

The story really is that of A.A. Hyde.. Hyde comes here in the 1870s, at the time of the cattle industry, gets involved in banking and then transitions into real estate development in the late 1880s.

Wichita is the third largest real estate market in the country after New York and Kansas City.

Then there's a depression in the early 1890s.

So all of those investment speculative ventures evaporate, and poor AA Hyde is left to try to make a living with what he can.

With a wife and nine kids to support.

Hyde and some partners started making and selling soap to stay afloat.

But it wasn't long before Hyde had a better idea.

This is his grandson, John Hyde.

Grandfather got interested, as he often did.

He was a he was a fiddler.

He liked to fiddle.

He got interested in menthol, the product itself.

And he decided that this would also be useful if you could make a salve.

So he spent, I think, about nine months using the kitchen stove as his laboratory, trying to melt down menthol.

And finding a formula that would create a salve, a jelly that would would hold its consistency in all weather and in all kinds of climate.

The result was a cooling ointment that soothed congestion and sore muscles.

And Hyde knew just how to sell it.

It was marketed as the little nurse for Little Ills.

And in particular, Hyde was interested in promoting the idea of the sample size, giving these out, distributing them to ministers and others to show what it could do, and that would get people on board with buying this.

Eventually, they're going to shift into using that distinctive light green glass so people can identify it very quickly.

And so the Palladium model becomes a national success and they start buying up other companies.

And because there are lots of little patent medicine types of companies that were producing similar salves and so forth, so Mentholatum buys these buys as the competition.

The original Menthollatum building still stands here at Douglas & Cleveland.

Now it's the spice market where fine coffee and tea are.

So what's very unique?

The building had deteriorated and was being used as a thrift store when Bob Boewe bought it 20 years ago.

He tore out the false ceiling and shag carpeting to restore the place to its 1909 glory.

The floor we're standing on, that's where Mentholatum was, was mixed up and poured into the bottles and labeled and ready to be shipped.

The floor behind us, the main floor was the packing and shipping floor.

And then in the very far background was the office.

Boewe says it was important to preserve this building and keep alive the history of Mentholatum and A.A. Hyde.

And he had experienced all the booms and busts of the city of Wichita and everything and survived.

Supported a family with many, many children in it, had lots of employees, and created a worldwide business organization.

So it's a real example of entrepreneurship and citizenship.

By the 1930s Mentholatum had become a household name with a jar in almost every medicine cabinet across the country.

A.A. Hyde was now a wealthy old man, and the company was about to pull up stakes for Buffalo, New York, for better access to international trade routes.

But it stayed here with the understanding of his sons who ran it, that the company would stay here and have its headquarters here until grandfather died, and then he dies in 1935, at which point my family, after two years closing everything up leaves.

The company ends its presence as a company in Wichita.

While the Mentholatum company left Wichita some 80 years ago, the legacy of its founder lives on now.

But grandfather said if you've got as much money as I'm getting, you've got to give that all away.

And when you die, you, you if you haven't, you died.

A disgraced man.

A devout Christian, Hyde created a charitable foundation to help the poor and improve the quality of life for all Wichitans.

His commitment to the community is still evident to this day.

His name appears in three places, which represent different forms of the legacy.

The elementary school at 1st and Oliver is A.A. Hyde school.

The second was in the section of the town where the streets bear the name of women.

Laura, Patty, Ida.

That section of the town was known as the Hyde addition and A.A. had bought up the land early on, platted it and named the streets and then sold the lot.

But he saved a square block for a park because he felt that people living here in Kansas should have a shady place.

These are his words that on summer evenings and everything in the summer days, you could go and go into the park and it's still there and it's called Hyde Park.

And the third was a YMCA organization, which is still in existence, I'm quite sure, called Camp Hyde for Children Out on the Little River.

Meanwhile, Hyde's grandson, who was eight when his family moved to New York, returns on a regular basis to serve on the Wichita Public Library Foundation Board.

The Hyde family sold Mentholatum to a Japanese company in the 1980s, but the influence of his generous genius and his therapeutic salve lives on in this city where it all started.

Several other big name brands also got their start in Wichita during the 20th century, further establishing the city's great tradition of entrepreneurism and business acumen.

Now the question is what will be the next big thing to come out of Wichita?

The next big thing is kind of a difficult answer.

Kenton Hansen is among the latest generation of Wichita entrepreneurs.

He helped establish the Labor Party, which rents shared office space to businessmen and women, hoping to make it big.

There's these booms that hit every 50 years or so.

We're right about at that 50 year mark where the next big thing is going to happen.

So I don't know what it is.

You know, I could point to some examples, but there's going to be something soon that's going to come out of Wichita that's going to grab the attention of the nation for sure.

Hansen says the next big national brand probably won't be a restaurant chain or over-the-counter remedy.

Those fields are really tough to crack into these days.

Most likely it'll be something new that's information or tech related that somehow solves a 21st century problem.

The first step to entrepreneurship is finding something that's broken that people have just learned to accept.

And after you do that, then you can find a solution that makes a lot of sense to a lot of people.

In addition, business Professor Malcolm Harris says it takes the right kind of person to turn a great idea into something big.

It's a number of things.

Its someone who's really so dedicated to his or her idea that they're willing to work very hard for it, that they're going to have persistence, that they're going to have the drive to continue and can inspire other people to get excited about the same thing.

Pull together as a team.

These are tough acts to follow for sure.

But after such notable contributions to American business and culture, we can only imagine what the next generation of Wichita tycoons might unleash on the world.

Let yourself go to a Pizza Hut and let yourself go to Pizza Hut where it's pizza.

You want and nothing else will do when there's no stop burn until you know when you're smiling and shooting the breeze, when you want to let loose and be free and just let yourself go.