He has a beef with Pasadana’s cheeseburger claim

The most shocking recent news out of Pasadena for Wisconsinites is not that the Badgers lost their second straight Rose Bowl game.

The most shocking news is that Pasadena is claiming to have invented the cheeseburger.

A Jan. 15 Pasadena Sun article, reprinted in the Los Angeles Times, noted:

“Pasadena is staking its claim this week as the birthplace of one of mankind’s greatest discoveries with the launch of Pasadena Cheeseburger Week, a Chamber of Commerce event promoting area restaurants.

“Legend has it that teenage short-order cook Lionel Clark Sternberger invented the cheeseburger one fateful day in the mid-1920s at a restaurant called The Rite Spot on Colorado Boulevard.”

Now, I have nothing against Pasadena, other than the fact that when I was there at dawn for the Rose Parade in 1999, it was as cold as I’ve ever experienced anywhere. Until the sun finally came up, a few of us had been conspiring to throw NBC’s Al Roker out of the broadcast booth just to steal his coffee.

Some readers may recall I’ve had nice things to say about a Pasadena greasy spoon, the wonderfully named Pie ‘n Burger, which I note is a participant in Pasadena Cheeseburger Week. A lot of Badgers fans clogged their arteries at Pie ‘n Burger during the Rose Bowl.

But I am not prepared to concede that someone in Pasadena made the first cheeseburger, and certainly not in the 1920s.

The reason is that before there can be a cheeseburger, there must, of course, be a hamburger. And the hamburger was invented — more on this momentarily — in Wisconsin in 1885 by 15-year-old Charlie Nagreen, a true American hero.

It then stands to reason that sometime in the next few years — and surely in the next couple of decades prior to 1920 — someone in Wisconsin, where cheese was not exactly in short supply, placed a piece of cheese on his or her burger and created the cheeseburger.

It may be I am a bit sensitive on this topic because five years ago, the effort to declare Seymour, west of Green Bay, the birthplace of the hamburger sparked controversy.

At the time — January 2007 — the New York Times took note of a feud between Athens, Texas, and New Haven, Conn. People in Texas were insisting that the hamburger was invented in 1904 by Athens luncheonette owner Fletcher Davis, who took it to the St. Louis World’s Fair, where it was a big hit.

Meanwhile, the owner of Louis’ Lunch in New Haven was claiming — with a Library of Congress citation, no less — that his grandfather made the first burger in 1895.

It was left to a Wisconsin newspaper columnist — ahem — to point out that the issue had been settled the previous summer at the annual National Hamburger Festival in Akron, Ohio.

At that event, a mock trial called the Hamburger Hearings was held, and four claims to the birthplace of the hamburger were examined.

One was a pair of brothers in Akron (making it a home game for them) sometime between 1885 and 1892; two others were in Athens and New Haven, as previously mentioned; and the fourth candidate was Charlie Nagreen of Seymour.

Born in Hortonville in 1870, Charlie at age 15 traveled to a fair in Seymour to sell his meatballs. It seemed no one at the bustling fair wanted to sit down to eat. So Charlie mashed a meatball flat, placed it between two pieces of bread, and sold it as something to eat while you walked. He named it after the Hamburg steak in Germany.

Later in life, when he had an ice cream store in Appleton, Charlie had a sign indicating he’d been selling hamburgers “since 1885.”

The mock trial in Akron failed to produce a consensus, so the festival put it to a vote on its website. Charlie Nagreen and Seymour captured first place and nearly 40 percent of the vote.

This week, I sent a note to Seymour’s “Home of the Hamburger” website, mentioning Pasadena’s cheeseburger claim and noting that surely someone in Wisconsin had made a cheeseburger prior to 1920.

They wrote back: “While we have much documentation about Hamburger Charlie and the burger, we have nothing about the cheeseburger. I agree, it probably happened, but we can’t prove it.”

Someone can. Let me hear from you. Somewhere in Wisconsin someone ate a cheeseburger before 1920. The truth is out there.

Moe is a columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, Wisc. He can be reached at (at 608) 252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com.