Meet The Four-Fingered Hamburger Man Who Inspired The Hamburger Helper Glove
When chef Claude Waddle lost his finger, he thought his career as a hamburger man was over.
“Traditionally, hamburger men use all five fingers to mix seasonings into the beef, as well as to form the patties” says Waddle, who still refuses to discuss exactly how his middle finger got cut off or what happened to it. “Take the first four letters of the word ‘hamburger’: h-a-m-b. Now change the ‘m’ to an ’n’, and flip the ‘b’ so it’s a ‘d.’ You see why I was concerned.”
Claude soldiered on for two fingerless years after the mysterious accident, always with an eye over his shoulder. “I could tell that my patty game was slipping, and the chief hamburger man at the restaurant let me know it. Then there was the fear that a customer would take a bite of their burger at the very same moment they looked over and saw the gap where my finger used to be, and spit out their burger for fear of accidentally eating finger meat.” Waddle sighs, “It happened more than once.”
It wasn’t until fate brought Fern Bergeron — brand manager for Betty Crocker’s Hamburger Helper line of products — to Waddle’s hamburger restaurant that his whole life changed.
“I was in a strange city to rendezvous with a lover I had met on the internet” chirped Bergeron, who is only 5 feet tall. “When I’m in the mood for love, I’m in the mood for burgers, and the desk clerk at the Residence Inn suggested I try the only hamburger place in town.” It just so happened that four-fingered Claude Waddle was working the grill that night.
“The patty I ate was so loosely packed, yet it still held on the bun” Fern recalls. “I could tell that this hamburger, more than any I had eaten before, had really been helped. When I heard Claude’s story, I knew it would resonate with our brand’s audience. When I saw his hand, I saw our future.”
Waddle thought that Bergeron was drunk when she first proposed the idea of using his hand as the model for her brand’s spokesglove. “She told me that only a disfigured man could so perfectly understand the medium of ground meat. I traced my hand on a placemat, she gave me $700, and two months later that glove was on TV.”
Claude and Fern married in 2009. They have two sons, one of which was — quite ironically — born without a middle finger. They eat Hamburger Helper for dinner every night, except for Fridays when they eat Tuna Helper because they are Catholic.
“Claude has helped hamburger more than anyone in history, save the cattle industry itself,” says Bergeron, who chose to keep her maiden name in case they get a divorce. (This is her third marriage.) “In helping Hamburger Helper, he’s become the REAL Hamburger Helper. Did he tell you how he lost his finger? He won’t tell me.”
Claude has still not told us.
Originally published at aboveaverage.com on March 4, 2016.
