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A Day at the Varsity

Frank Gordy founded the Varsity, originally dubbed the Yellow Jacket, in 1928, serving students near Georgia Tech’s downtown Atlanta campus. “Frank’s uncle had a gas station on Luckie Street, and he rented out a lean-to up against it. It was big enough for a pot of chili and a cooler of Coke,” Weiser says. Within a year, Gordy bought the property on North Avenue and Spring Street where the Varsity sits now—and already had an eye on expanding to other cities. “I changed the name to the Varsity because I couldn’t very well open a Yellow Jacket restaurant in Athens,” he explains in What’ll Ya Have: A History of the Varsity.

photo: Mary Caroline Russell

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