Cheese Louise!Now comes word of a third...

Cheese Louise!Now comes word of a third candidate for the title of Father of the Cheeseburger.

After reading our column about the rival claims of Lionel Sternberger of Pasadena and Louis Ballast of Denver, Colo., Larry Deckel of Los Feliz informed us that Kaelin’s restaurant in Louisville, Ky., contends that it was the first to slap a slice of American on a meat patty. “They’ve got plaques all over the place,” Deckel said.

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Sure enough . . . : “Yes, (founder) Carl Kaelin came up with the idea in 1934,” said Kaelin’s day manager Sean Hanley. “He was expanding his deli into a restaurant and since he was feeding a lot of kids from the college (University of Louisville), he decided to throw on some cheese and see what would happen. It caught on big and just spread across the country.”

Kaelin’s was unaware of rival claimants until 1987, when Denver authorities laid a granite monument on the now-vacant site of Ballast’s establishment, the Humpty Dumpty Barrel Drive-In, where the first cheeseburger was allegedly served in 1935.

“We heard it on the news,” Hanley said. “Then the Chicago Tribune called. And a reporter from England.”

Of Ballast’s credentials, Hanley said: “He said he invented it a year later (than Kaelin). They put a plaque where a restaurant doesn’t even exist anymore while our place is still here. That was sort of funny.”

And Pasadena’s Sternberger? “We never heard of him,” Hanley said.

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Double Sternberger vote, coming up: A few years ago, as we have reported, American Heritage magazine said Sternberger constructed the cheeseburger in the 1920s, meaning he would have predated Kaelin (1934) and Ballast (1935).

And he has picked up a second backer. Author Gloria Ricci Lothrop recently wrote in The Californians, a history magazine, of “the inspired union of hamburger and cheese first combined by the youthful cook Lionel Sternberger at Pasadena’s Rite Spot cafe.”

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Also served here . . . : Lothrop gives L.A. additional credit for several other firsts, including:

* The Shirley Temple (non-alcoholic) cocktail, Cobb Salad and grapefruit cake (the Brown Derby).

* The Orange Julius (Willard Hamlin). (Did Hamlin think that title sounded snappier than Orange Willard?)

* Chiffon cake (Harry Baker, a Hollywood insurance salesman).

* Veal Oskar (Scandia’s Kenneth Hansen).

And then there was the exotic concoction of Art Elkinal, who “in 1935 . . . sold both hot dogs and chili from his pushcart in Inglewood. When someone suggested that he place the chili atop, the chili dog was created.”

Let’s see someone try to take that title away from Southern California.

miscelLAny:

The Hula-Hoop, whose invention forms the plot of the coming fictional movie, “The Hudsucker Proxy,” was also a local contribution, introduced by Wham-O of San Gabriel in 1958. During the resulting craze, the company sold 25 million of the toys, priced at $1.98, in three months.