Man who started Taco Time in Eugene remembered

Before there was Taco Bell, before anyone ever made a “run for the border,” there was Taco Time.

And it all started in Eugene, on Jan. 15, 1960, when Ron Fraedrick opened the very first Taco Time on the southwest corner of East 13th Avenue and High Street.

“The love of his life was Taco Time,” said his daughter, Kim Fraedrick Scheuer of Menlo Park, Calif. “He just loved it. He just had a ball.”

Ron Fraedrick, who was born in Eugene in 1928 and spent most of his life here before retiring to Southern California, died on May 17 in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

He was 87.

He sustained a fall on his birthday, April 13, and battled kidney failure and sepsis in the hospital, his daughter said.

When he sold Taco Time in 2003, to Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Kahala Corp., it had more than 300 locations in the United States and Canada, and even one in Kuwait, according to the company’s website.

The sale price was not disclosed then, and Scheuer said on Friday she’s not sure of the amount. But Taco Time most definitely made her father a millionaire, she said.

A 1975 Register-Guard story on the business’s 15th anniversary said it was then a $16 million-a-year enterprise.

Her father’s idea for the fast food restaurant began during a trip to Southern California in the late 1950s, said Scheuer, a 1970 graduate of South Eugene High School who spent her summers working at the original store, along with her sister, Rhonda, who was a year older.

“We worked there every summer, and it was fabulous,” Scheuer said. “We didn’t have to go pick strawberries or beans. We got to sell tacos.”

After graduating from Eugene’s University High School in 1946, then serving two years in the Navy, Ron Fraedrick married Marylynn Tykeson on Dec. 11, 1949, in Eugene.

The two met at the University of Oregon, where Ron received his business administration degree in 1956.

He was working for his father’s heating oil business in the River Road area, as well as running his own gas station in the late ’50s, Scheuer said.

He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, but he knew he didn’t want to run the Fraedrick Oil Co., she said.

During that visit in 1958 to Pasadena, Calif., to see relatives of his wife, Ron Fraedrick was introduced to a man named Tom Hannason, the husband of his wife’s cousin, Scheuer said. Hannason ran a taco stand called Taco Treat.

“And Mom and Dad both fell in love with it,” Scheuer said.

In 1959, Ron Fraedrick took out a second mortgage on the family home, borrowed an additional $5,000 and bought the property at 13th and High that then housed a used car lot, Scheuer said.

Then Fraedrick built the building that would become a walk-up taco store that sold tacos for 30 cents, taco burgers for 35 cents, bean tostadas for 25 cents and milkshakes and sodas for 15 cents.

“And that was basically the menu when he opened,” said Scheuer, who was in charge of facilities and purchasing at Taco Time’s corporate office on West 11th Avenue in the 1980s.

That first store, just a few blocks west of campus, became quite popular with UO students, so much so that her father soon offered two-for-one taco coupons, Scheuer said.

“I mean, nobody had ever heard of a taco before in the Northwest,” she said. “It was just foreign. People loved the food.”

According to a history on the company website, “Fraedrick spent many evenings working on his secret seasoning and hot sauce recipes to develop the perfect taste. He would mix and measure just the right amount of spices into a 55-gallon barrel, rolling it around in the parking lot to thoroughly blend all the flavors. Later, when he opened his second restaurant, he purchased an electric cement mixer to provide mixing muscle.”

The second Taco Time opened in 1961 on Main Street in Springfield, Scheuer said.

A third location opened in 1962 in Tacoma, Wash., which became the company’s first franchisee, Scheuer said.

During the next decade, 48 franchised Taco Time restaurants opened throughout seven western states, according to the company website. By the end of the 1970s, there were more than 150 locations. Taco Time International was born in 1978 with the opening of a store in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.

During the last year of his life, her father was working with a freelance writer on a book about his life and the idea for opening Taco Time, Scheuer said. The family hopes to have it published in time for a celebration of life on Aug. 8 at the Eugene Country Club, she said.

“Everything we did was trial and error, and luck,” Fraedrick says in the book. “The most important thing was to choose good people. We worked hard and we had a lot of fun.”

Ron Fraedrick was preceded in death by his wife in 2010.

In addition to Scheuer, he is survived by his other two children, Rhonda Fraedrick Earle, of Redding, Calif., and Joe Fraedrick of Indian Wells, Calif.; 12 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.

Follow Mark on Twitter @MarkBakerRG . Email [email protected] .