As a little girl, Amber Fletcher memorized the landmarks off the highway as the car made its way to the State Fair. Her family lived in Double Oak, an hour north of Dallas, and she learned that the water tower in Carrollton meant they were getting warmer, and the cool elliptical pink building of the Renaissance hotel meant they were even warmer, her anticipation building to the moment the Ferris wheel emerged on the horizon like a big blue sun.
Most kids look forward to the fair, with its sensory overload and rides that cheat gravity, but Amber looked forward to it more than most. The fair was the family office, and a chance to see her dad, whom she was so attached to that three weeks away felt like a lifetime.
Skip Fletcher was the Corny Dog King, a role he inherited from his father Neil Fletcher, the original Corny Dog King. Skip had an outsized personality that fit the brand. He wore red shorts and red shoes, sometimes red shirts, too. He cruised around the fairgrounds in a gussied-up golf cart called the Corny Dog Chariot, and you could hear his loud laugh before he arrived.
The Fletcher family opened their first stand at the State Fair in the ‘40s, and they nurtured the business through boom and bust, both professional and personal, selling about half a million corny dogs a year. Their product was not a “corn dog” — one of those frozen suckers plopped on a cafeteria tray or sold at some random kiosk. The Fletchers’ claim to fame was a hand-dipped, deep-fried, golden-brown wand of sweet-and-savory crunch as recognizable as Big Tex.
Eventually, Amber would work those booths, stickin’ dogs in the back with her brother Aaron and her cousin William, and then practicing her math skills as she took coupons, barely tall enough to see over the counter. But in the beginning, the fair was a world of wonder to explore with her father. Once, she got her heart set on the stuffed animal that was a carnival prize, and Skip burned up tickets trying and missing to get a ball in a milk jug before he finally gave up and handed some cash to the guy at the counter. Amber went home with a St. Bernard as big as she was.
Amber never wanted to leave the fair — and in a way, she never has. Now 37, she runs the Fletcher’s company with Aaron and William, the first woman to have such a high-profile role in their 82-year history. Although Amber’s mother Glenda Gale, more often known as G.G., is the majority owner, she has ceded most of the decision-making to the next generation. Their challenge is to grow a company whose very promise is that things don’t change.
It is no easy feat, to be new and old at once. As Skip Fletcher used to say, “Corny dogs are simple, but they ain’t easy.”
The spark of inspiration
The legacy Amber stepped into began as something of a lark. Skip’s father Neil and his brother Carl Fletcher were song-and-dance men trying to find their next stop after vaudeville. They’d tippy-tapped around the country and settled in Dallas, where their theater group the Madcap Players performed at the 1936 Texas Centennial, and the play was such a smash they kept coming back. The Fletcher brothers were charismatic showmen, and at some point, the State Fair offered them their own concession stand.
“We said ‘Sure’, ” Neil told The Dallas Morning News in 1978. “Then, over a bottle of bourbon, we tried to figure out what we could sell.”
Neil Fletcher usually attributed his spark of inspiration to an old Dutchman who sold a novelty snack on Oak Lawn. It was a hot dog nestled in cornbread batter and baked inside a shaped cast-iron pan so the finished product looked like an ear of corn. What Fletcher may or may not have known is this dainty baked good had become a sensation at carnivals and drive-ins across the country. “The world’s cleanest sandwich!” crowed an ad in a San Angelo paper. “America’s favorite quick lunch — the hot dog — put on a new dress,” said a 1940 trend piece in a Tallahassee paper. “Dubbed across the nation as the ‘Corn Dog.’ ”
This “corn dog” sandwich took a while to bake, though, and Carl hatched the idea to deep-fry the wieners and stick ‘em. With Neil’s wife Minerva at the mixer, the trio began experimenting with recipes in their East Dallas kitchen, looking for a batter that was neither too thin nor too thick, breading that stayed on the dog. They called their product “brown bombers” (it was wartime), and they tried “meal on a stick” (well, it was true). They called them “K-9s,” but eventually, the needless pun went away, like silk from an ear of Golden Bantam, to reveal what nature must have intended. The corny dog.
It’s unclear whether the Fletchers actually invented the deep-fried wiener on a stick. Other businesses have made plausible claims, and it’s likely a lot of folks were experimenting in the early ‘40s, when the Fletchers opened that booth. But no other family has done more to elevate the humble fair treat to its iconic status. They took a scrappy little brand and slingshotted it to the stars.
“It is like a Russian fried sausage,” said Mikhail Gorbachev, former leader of the Soviet Union, when he visited Fletcher’s in 1998. “Is it traditional for Texas?”
Now it was.
Innocence, disrupted
For Amber, growing up at the fair could be like getting a backstage pass to a magic show. While the adults were setting up booths in the days leading up to the big event, she and the other kids would explore the empty fairgrounds. They roamed the echoey halls of the Science Place, with its dinosaurs and distant galaxies. At one station, she blew a bubble so enormous she could walk into it.
Even as a teenager, Amber’s affection for the fair did not dim. She never grew sullen and rebellious about the family trade. She was home schooled in her last two years of high school, and she worked full time at the fair.
But the childhood innocence the fair represents must end eventually. For Amber, that happened when she was 21.
It was a Monday morning, and she was returning to her place in Double Oak for some clothes when two men blindfolded her, bound her hands with duct tape and pushed her into a truck. The ordeal that followed is not something she likes to talk about. It reoriented her nervous system. At one point, she was forced to call her mother, G.G., and tell her if she didn’t give the men $100,000, she would be killed.
Over the next 10 hours, Amber’s parents worked with law enforcement, including the United States Marshals Service and the FBI, and after G.G. arranged a drop location for the money, police were able to nab the men, and Amber was returned unharmed.
Not unchanged.
At 21, most kids are out in bars courting mischief, but Amber moved back in with her parents. She got a German shepherd.
The Fletchers’ story is shot through with moments of tragedy. Two days before Amber was kidnapped, Skip’s son Neil from a previous marriage died of liver failure.
For a brand that represents sunny childhood memories and the freedom of the fair, the Fletchers have shouldered more than their share of pain. The reason Amber became a Fletcher is that in 1984, Skip and G.G. lost their son Rodney in a car accident half a mile from the house. In the grief that followed, they adopted Aaron in 1985 and his half-sibling Amber in 1987. Amber wonders if that’s why she’s so attached to her parents; because all four of them lost something, and they needed each other to heal it.
Amber worried her life was over after the kidnapping, but the show must go on. She went into counseling. She got a security system at her new place. When the fair rolled back into town in the fall, she was there.
Oprah Winfrey was, too. Amber watched from the stands, surrounded by relatives, smiling at the sight of her mom and dad chatting with the queen of daytime, wearing a cowboy hat, as she bit into a Fletcher’s corny dog.
“Oh my God,” Oprah said. “I’m gonna want another.”
‘What would dad do?’
Skip passed away in 2017 at the age of 82. That year’s fair was the first that Amber only went to a handful of times. She was 30 years old, and it was hard for her to imagine how the company could go on.
These days, she wears yellow shoes and nail polish the shade of mustard, her own spin on the way her dad always wore red. As the fair cranks up Friday, Amber will once again venture south on the highway past the Carrollton water tower and the pink Renaissance hotel, but this time, she’s in the driver’s seat.
“She’s become the heart of this company,” says her brother Aaron, sitting in Skip Fletcher’s former office at G.G.’s home in Double Oak. “The way I’ve seen her grow in the last four years has been the coolest thing to watch.”
The company is now run by the third generation. Aaron handles the business end of things, and Amber credits him with calming her and her mom in stressful situations, like Skip did once. There is also William, the son of Skip’s brother Bill (a co-owner before he retired), an easygoing fix-it man with a contagious laugh.
Amber took on the role of being the public face of the company. It didn’t come naturally. Unlike her father, she was camera shy. She took improv classes and a media training course. “I had to just say, ‘What would dad do?’ And pull myself out of my shell,” she says.
The past several years have been tricky. The pandemic forced Fletcher’s to improvise, pairing with Golden Chick for drive-thru corny dogs when the fair got canceled. There was also an ugly lawsuit that played out in the press, with Skip’s granddaughter Jace and her mom Vickie opening a venture called Fletch, which turned into a trademark dispute that ultimately resulted in them running that business as CornDog With No Name.
Families can be messy, but Fletcher’s is steering into its ninth decade by growing the brand without losing tradition. They cater events and weddings, like one where the bride’s parents had their first date at the state fair, eating a Fletcher’s corny dog. In 2022, Fletcher’s opened a food truck in Klyde Warren Park, and they’ve just started selling at University of Texas at Austin football games after three years at Oklahoma University games. Occasionally people complain the corny dog tastes different, but it’s the same ingredients: The secret mix invented in an East Dallas kitchen, now made by Shawnee Milling Company in Oklahoma, a hot dog manufactured just for their purposes from Syracuse Sausage in Ponder.
The fair is what’s different. And because so many have memories wrapped up in those 24 days, the fair has a taste all its own.
Not long ago, Amber was talking to a woman who goes to the booth each year. They’d only just met, but the woman’s eyes filled with tears, because as a little girl, she went to the booth with her dad, and her dad had been gone five years. Each fall, that woman stood in line for a Fletcher’s corny dog, took a seat on the bench and thought about him.
Amber misses her father, who’s been gone seven years. She thinks of him most when she’s working the deep fryer, which she’ll do on nights when the lines get crazy. Something about the repetition of dunking the dogs in the oil becomes meditative — two to three minutes, over and over — like she can drop into another dimension and find him there.
