What was Hobo Joe’s?
In September 1965, a cartoon tramp in a battered hat took up residence on the northeast corner of Scottsdale Road and First Avenue, and for the rest of the decade every kid in town knew exactly what he was pointing at.
Hobo Joe’s Coffee Shop was the Scottsdale link in a homegrown Arizona chain founded that same year by Herb Applegate, with two partners whose names carried weight in the state: Joseph F. Martori and Robert W. Goldwater, brother of Senator Barry. Applegate held half the company and had a clear model in mind — Bob’s Big Boy, the Southern California coffee shop that proved a mascot and a cheap hot meal could build an empire. He hired artist James Casey to draw the hobo, a “world traveler, philosopher, and connoisseur of good food,” and planted a fiberglass statue of him outside each store. The Scottsdale one stood on the corner from opening day.
The formula worked fast. By 1970 there were about eight Hobo Joe’s across Arizona, including a second Scottsdale store at Los Arcos Mall, and the chain was sketching regional expansion. Families came for hot plates at low prices; children came for the treasure chest, a box of toys unlocked by a clean plate. It was as unpretentious as Scottsdale dining got in the 1960s, a block from the Sugar Bowl and a world away from the velvet of Lulu Belle.
Then the founder took the whole thing down with him. Applegate sold to Colony Food in April 1971 amid embezzlement of more than $1.5 million and far darker headlines; he died in 1974, and the restaurants faded out through the decade. The Scottsdale corner’s last day went unrecorded. By the 1980s the hobo was gone.
The formula: hot plates, a mascot, and a box of toys
Hobo Joe’s sold volume, not romance. The menu was standard American coffee-shop issue — breakfast plates, burgers, hot entrées, pie, bottomless coffee — priced for families who ate out on a Tuesday because nobody felt like cooking. That was the whole Big Boy insight, transplanted to the desert: make the food reliable and cheap, make the room bright and clean, and let the character on the sign do the marketing.
The character did a lot of marketing. Casey’s hobo was designed to love people and children, and the chain leaned on him hard. The statues out front were the era’s roadside-giant craze applied to a coffee shop; a 22-foot fiberglass version Casey sculpted in 1967 burned two months after completion, and a fiberglass manufacturer named Marvin Ransdell later produced another giant. On a Scottsdale corner still selling itself as the West’s Most Western Town, a grinning tramp in a bowler hat was a genuine landmark — the kind of thing families gave directions by.
The treasure chest closed the deal. Finish your plate and a server walked you to a box of toys. It was a cheap trick and an effective one; a generation of Scottsdale kids remembers the toy better than the meal, which is precisely how the chain wanted it. Parents got a quiet dinner, children got a prize, and the kitchen got clean plates to bus.
The hours mattered too. Coffee shops of this type ran long days for a town whose evening options were still thin outside the resort lounges. Hobo Joe’s fit the gap between the drugstore lunch counter and the Pink Pony steak dinner — the everyday room in a downtown that was, in 1965, only beginning to have everyday rooms.
A Goldwater, a hobo, and a very fast fall
Hobo Joe’s belongs to a specific Arizona moment: the mid-1960s, when the state’s population boom convinced local entrepreneurs they could build chains of their own rather than wait for California’s. Applegate had the concept, Martori had the business standing, and a Goldwater on the letterhead lent the whole enterprise a civic glow. For about five years it looked like the plan was working — eight stores, statues going up, a mascot with real name recognition.
The unraveling was not a restaurant story. Applegate diverted over $1.5 million from the company, and his name surfaced in connection with a Las Vegas murder case and alleged organized-crime figures. Whatever the truth of every allegation, the reputational damage was fatal for a family brand whose entire premise was wholesomeness. The April 1971 sale to Colony Food changed ownership but not momentum, and the chain wound down through a decade in which national competitors — Denny’s, Sambo’s, the pancake houses — were multiplying across the same intersections.
What survived is the giant. The Buckeye Main Street Coalition restored a surviving Hobo Joe statue and installed it in 2020, making a small West Valley town the unlikely keeper of a Scottsdale-born chain’s memory. Old Town itself kept nothing; the corner at Scottsdale Road and First Avenue rolled through other tenants, and the Sugar Bowl across the way became the intersection’s only continuous link to the 1960s.
Honest assessment: Hobo Joe’s was not good food, and nobody who ate there claims it was. It was cheap, dependable, and aimed squarely at children, and in a town with a decade-long shortage of family rooms that was enough to make a corner famous. Its real lesson is how quickly a brand built on a friendly face collapses when the man behind it turns out to be something else. Scottsdale’s breakfast tradition later went to Butterfield’s and its heirs; the hobo went to Buckeye.