| riches story. By the time he was done -- or perhaps a better word would be 'paused' -- Anderson had built Famous Dave's into America's largest barbeque restaurant chain. Anderson was born in Chicago to a Choctaw father and Lac Courte Oreille mother. "Both of my parents were victims of the Bureau of Indian Affairs school system," Anderson related. "When they were young, they were sent to boarding schools to be mainstreamed into the dominant White society. And my dad can remember being beaten for speaking his language and following his traditions and customs. Fortunately today that doesn't happen. My parents met and moved to Chicago where they got married." There wasn't anything particularly remarkable about Anderson when he was a kid. He was just one of thousands of kids growing up poor on Chicago's west side. "Growing up in Chicago, I never believed that I could be successful," Anderson said. "I can remember many hot days in Chicago when the temperatures would get over 100 degrees. And you could just see the heat rising up from the asphalt in the city. And then my mom would take us out of the city and we would go up to my grandmother's house on the reservation in Hayward, Wis. And I can remember staying in this little three-room house with no running water and no electricity. At night, many times, as a young kid, I would often look out of my grandmother's window and I would see the billions of stars that were in the sky. I often wondered as a young kid if my life was going to be like one of these stars that shone bright or was going to be like one of those stars that just faded off into the vastness of space." Anderson got a glimpse of what life could be when he visited a friend's house. "I had a number of friends," Anderson said. "Some of my friends were like me and didn't have much. I can always remember being a little bit embarrassed when my mom would invite my friends over snacks after school. And she would go to the pantry and in the pantry would be all of these white cans and they all said USDA on them. I knew something was different because when I went over to some of my other friends' homes, and their mothers fixed snacks and went to the pantry, the stuff in their pantries said 'Campbell's' and 'Jiffy Peanut Butter'. And then I found out one of those friends owned a business. So I can remember as a young kid growing up that I wanted to be like his dad and own my own business. So for a lot of my growing up years, my dream, one of my goals, was to own a business." And once Anderson had his dream, he got his inspiration when his father took him to a speech. "I had the opportunity to hear a speech by Zig Ziglar who is America's foremost authority on motivation and inspiration," Anderson said. "And at the end of that speech, he said 'It doesn't matter where you come from. It doesn't matter what you've been through. The only thing that matters in this great country is that you have to have dreams. And if you have dreams, there just isn't anything that you can't do.' And as a young kid, that story really meant a lot to me." Anderson was non-descript and shy as a child. After he heard Ziglar, he went to work on his presentation. "For many years when my parents left the house, I would be in my basement with a five-dollar mirror that I bought from K-Mart," Anderson said. "And I would read books out loud. And I had a candle that I held a foot away from my mouth and I would say the 'ABCs.' And I would try to put out that candle. And then I shook hands with myself. I smiled at myself and winked at myself. Today I can wink with both eyes. And I kind of tell on myself because all of us sometimes know what we need to do but we just don't get the stuff to change." Next issue: Getting down to business |
| "Famous Dave" spoke at Marketplace 2007 Nothing's gonna stop him by Jonathan Gramling Part 1 of 2 |
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| Dave Anderson, who founded the first Famous Dave's restaurant in Hayward, Wis. in 1994, is a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe tribe. |
| It's almost as if Dave Anderson, the founder of Famous Dave's Barbeque restaurants, stepped right out of a Horatio Alger novel, one of those late 1800s rags-to-riches novels that tout the American Dream. "It doesn't matter where you come from," Anderson exclaimed as he opened his speech at Marketplace 2007 at the Ho-Chunk Convention Center October 11. "It doesn't matter what you've been through. The only thing that matters in this great country is that you have dreams. And if you're acting on your dreams and you're willing to work hard, there isn't anything you can't accomplish." Anderson would almost be a caricature from an Alger novel as he had the audience rise to their feet and repeat after him "I feel happy, I feel healthy, I feel terrific" several times until the audience showed enough enthusiasm. But the fact is that despite being born into relative poverty and facing several addictions in his life, Anderson's has been that rags-to- |