Mama Burger, Papa Burger, Teen Burger, Baby Burger. The adults' root beer mugs are three feet tall.

Civic Pride Burger Family

Hillsboro, Oregon

When A&W Root Beer began erecting fiberglass Burger Family statues in 1963 -- Papa Burger, Mama Burger, Teen Burger, and Baby Burger -- it was just a promotion for its new four-size hamburger menu.

The company couldn't have imagined that, twenty years later, the Burger Family of Hillsboro, Oregon, would be designated a "Cultural Resource" by the town's Planning Commission, and that ten years after that the Family would be restored (by the Hilhi Art Club) and given a special landscaped place of honor in front of the town's recreation center (by the Tualatin Valley Garden Club), as well as their own bronze information plaque, just as if they were real works of public art.

The plaque notes that Teen Burger was adopted into the Family in 1996 from another A&W, after the original Hillsboro Teen went missing (We'd received a tip then that he'd been stolen by local high school punks and dumped in a local lake).

Smiling at the competition: Golden Arch visible next to Papa's left ear.

Close inspection of the statues shows that they are now firmly bolted to the ground. They've also stood longer in Hillsboro as Cultural Resources than they did selling hamburgers.

There was only one flaw in the Family's ennoblement: though they smiled bravely, they were cruelly positioned to stare directly at a pair of Golden Arches of a McDonald's across the street! And then the McDonald's was shuttered, leaving only part of the Arches to mark its passing. We wonder if perhaps the unblinking eyes of the Burger Family forced the competition to flee.