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Jack Maier resembles a man living in the past.
A Johnny Mathis tune plays softly on the intercom, as the trim 74-year-old chairman of Frisch's Restaurants Inc. reminisces about 30-cent curb-service cheeseburgers and fat, tail-finned Chevys.
Wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and tan slacks, Maier sits in his faded orange chair, behind the desk in his dated, wood-paneled office.
Surprisingly, he's not wearing an "I Like Ike" button.
"Frisch's was the place to be," Maier comments. "Cruising the lot and eating Big Boys. That was pure Cincinnati."
MEMORY LANE
Maier is giving a guest a tour of the company's stark Gilbert Avenue headquarters. Along the corridor leading away from his corner office, dozens of framed black-and-white photos tell the Frisch's story. Lots of smiling servers and cooks with paper hats. Old, faded menus and souvenirs from a bygone era.
But a funny thing happened on the way back to the 1950s. Continuing down the hallway, Maier makes a quick left turn into a secluded office.
A huge, mysterious-looking Hewlett-Packard computer hums away in the center of an otherwise empty room, spitting out clear-plastic maps of cities such as Columbus, Dayton and Louisville. The detailed, color-coded sheets show population, competition and demographics for cities Frisch's is considering entering.
"These days, computers tell us when to close old restaurants and where to open new ones," Maier says. "It even tells us which side of the street to put them on."
Maier himself used to decide such matters. He found the locations, designed the stores, trained the managers and even invented the sandwiches. But times change, and Maier was forced to change, too.
So who had the unenviable task of coaxing the old World War II veteran into buying computers and hiring consultants? Actually, nobody.
"I wanted a computer model to help us become more scientific in our approach to expansion," says Maier. "Now, I don't know how this thing runs, but I was the one who they designed the system for."
Today, Frisch's Restaurants is a $150 million company. The company operates and licenses the family restaurants under the name Frisch's Big Boy. It runs 89 Big Boy restaurants in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, and eight Hardee's stores and two hotels in Cincinnati.
"To me, they...