How the Oregonian Pronto Pup Became a Midwestern Legend

Along the side of Highway 101 on the Oregon Coast, a giant 30-foot fiberglass corn dog, complete with a zigzag of yellow mustard, looms over the roof of a small white-and-black hot dog shack. On a Saturday in May, the Rockaway Beach, Oregon stand is packed with tourists in tennis shoes and ball caps, milling about the picnic tables outside the snack; kids climb onto the mechanical corn dog sitting outside the front door, mounted with a saddle for them to ride.

Some visitors tap their feet against the black-and-white tiles of the restaurant, perched by a merchandise display with shirts that scream “I rode the corndog” or “You can’t beat our corndogs.” Some sit by the window, biting into cornmeal-crusted hog dogs, pickles, and cheese between handfuls of Tater Tots. Behind the front counter, employees dunk all-beef hot dogs and sausages in a bucket full of batter, then drop each coated frank in a fryer until it emerges hazelnut brown. The result: a juicy, snappy dog in a thick, fluffy, cornmeal crust.

Depending on how you define a corn dog, the Original Pronto Pup is one of America’s first, although a corn dog and a Pronto Pup are not exactly the same thing. They’re both sausages or hot dogs on a stick, dunked in a batter with cornmeal and fried. But purists are quick to note that a Pronto Pup is not overtly sweet like Texas corn dogs, the kind diners can find at state or county fairs across the country. The Pronto Pup batter — which includes a blend of cornmeal, wheat flour, and rice flour — is intentionally quite savory; for comparison, a beef corn dog from Hot Dog on a Stick contains 6 grams of sugar, while a Pronto Pup contains around 3 grams. They have less cornmeal in their batter than some other varieties, which keeps the exterior extremely airy and crisp.

The Pronto Pup location in Rockaway Beach sold 29,946 original Pronto Pups in 2023, not to mention all of the other riffs — Louisiana spicy, smoked sausage — but Pronto Pup isn’t isolated to Oregon’s coastal hot dog shacks. Pronto Pups have been sold at fairs and festivals around the country since the 1940s, in places like Memphis, Idaho, and Minnesota.

Even with the national acclaim, however, if you ask the average Portlander about a Pronto Pup, they might not know what you’re talking about. Despite their Oregonian roots, Pronto Pups don’t have nearly the name recognition of, say, a cheesesteak in Philadelphia or a po’ boy in New Orleans. However, ask a Minnesotan about a Pronto Pup, and they’ll likely have something to say: According to vendor Gregg Karnis, his family’s Pronto Pup business at the Minnesota State Fair sells between 34 and 36 tons of hog dogs at eight stands over the 12 days of the fair. Karnis has sold Pronto Pups at the Minnesota State Fair for 58 years; his father, Jack Karnis, brought the first Pronto Pup franchise east of the Rockies, selling them in Chicago in the early 1940s. The Karnises later brought them to the Minnesota State Fair, where they have been an annual tradition for 80 years, gnawed on by Presidential candidates and local celebrities.

So how did the Oregonian Pronto Pup become a Minnesota hometown hero, and why doesn’t it resonate as powerfully in Oregon?

Identifying a clearly defined creator of the corn dog is tricky. Cornbread-wrapped hot dogs have some ancestors among German immigrants in Texas, according to Alton Brown; however, they likely didn’t involve a stick, more closely resembling a croquette. The Krusty Korn Sausage Pan, patented in the early 20th century, was meant to help people make cornbread-wrapped sausages at home, but they were baked. In the late 1920s, Stanley Jenkins filed a patent for a “combined dipping, cooking, and article holding apparatus,” used for deep-frying foods on a stick, including wieners; according to The Takeout, it doesn’t seem like Jenkins used his invention for commercial gain and he didn’t make money from his patent. The Oregon Encyclopedia notes that a columnist alluded to a “corn dog” at a Dallas restaurant in the late 1930s. The encyclopedia doesn’t name the specific restaurant or columnist, however, and there’s no evidence that the original column exists on the internet.

It wasn’t until 1939 that George and Versa Boyington, who operated an Oregon Coast hot dog stand, came up with their idea for the Pronto Pup. The most commonly told story about its origins — George Boyington allegedly told two different stories — attributes its invention to the rain: In true Oregon fashion, a downpour had ruined the Boyingtons’ hot dog buns, and the two began working on a way to create a bun they could make themselves on the fly. They developed a batter over the course of two years, and in 1941, the couple finally served their first cornmeal-dipped Pronto Pup in Portland. At the Pacific International Livestock Exposition that same year — and one full year before Fletcher’s served the first “corny dog” at the Texas State Fair — the Boyingtons sold 15,000 Pronto Pups.

David Sulmonetti grew up eating Pronto Pups as a part of his family business. His father and uncle — Alex and Alfred Sulmonetti, respectively — purchased the brand from George Boyington in 1950, and David took over the family business in the early 2000s. He has memories of eating Pronto Pups at the Seaside location in the 1960s and ordering them at fairs throughout his childhood. “Most people that make Pronto Pups, the ones that have been going for a long time, care about making a good product,” he says. “They use a better hot dog, they mix the batter right, they don’t overcook it, and they serve it hot.”

Unlike many franchised fast-food brands, Pronto Pup gives its franchisees and customers free rein: The Pronto Pup company makes the batter mix, which it sells to vendors around the country; how Pronto Pup vendors sell the product is up to them. Really, Pronto Pup is a corn dog batter brand more than a chain — anyone can buy Pronto Pup batter and sell Pronto Pups, though a few original franchises still exist around the country. In fact, the Pronto Pup location in Rockaway Beach isn’t even a franchise. (The company lets the restaurant use the name as long as they exclusively use Pronto Pup batter.) The Karnis family developed its own hot dog recipe for its Pronto Pups, which Bakalars Sausage Company in Wisconsin makes for them.

Part of Karnis’s success also has to do with longevity. Pronto Pups arrived at the Minnesota State Fair in 1947, just a few years after the first were sold in the Midwest. “There was nothing like it,” he says. “The Minnesota State Fair was the first state fair to have Pronto Pup, and it was a phenomenon from the very beginning.”

Fair culture in Minnesota is serious business. The Minnesota State Fair is the second-largest state fair in the United States; it’s only topped by Texas, which is corny dog territory, with a state fair that now sees around more than 2 million visitors each year. Minnesotans are deeply loyal to their chosen hot dog on a stick — either die-hard corn dog or Pronto Pup fans — and there seems to be a clear winner. “It’s a multi-generational thing,” Sulmonetti says of the Pronto Pup fervor in Minnesota. “For their parents, their grandparents, part of the deal of going to the fair is that you’ve gotta have a Pronto Pup while you’re there.”

Oregon, meanwhile, doesn’t have the same state fair culture as other parts of the country, particularly Minnesota. Around 346,000 people went to the Oregon State Fair in 2022, compared to the 1,842,222 who attended the Minnesota State Fair. And even still, not every Pronto Pup vendor identifies themselves that way, according to Sulmonetti; many sell their Pronto Pup-battered franks as corn dogs. “In Oregon, a lot of the people I sell the mix to, they don’t necessarily call them Pronto Pups, which pains me,” he says. “They don’t want to get into the whole ‘What’s a Pronto Pup’ thing.”

The Pronto Pup isn’t the only Pacific Northwestern food to be championed by the Midwest. In 1953, F. Nephi Grigg invented the Tater Tot in Ontario, Oregon as a way to reuse the potato scraps produced by french fry company Ore-Ida. While Oregon has its own Tater Tot culture — particularly in the form of totchos, or Tater Tot nachos — it is far more commonly associated with the Midwestern hotdish. Even tuna noodle casserole first appeared in a 1930 issue of Sunset, attributed to a “Mrs. W. F. S.” from Kennewick, Washington.

“So many of these classic, indelibly American foods come from the Northwest,” says Heather Arndt Anderson, the food writer behind OPB’s Superabundant newsletter, which covers the stories behind some of Oregon’s most beloved ingredients and foods. Anderson has covered the state’s food traditions and history extensively, including in her book Portland: A Food Biography. She has a few theories for why Oregonian foods tend to resonate in other parts of the country, most related to the weather and similar agricultural conditions. But really, she sees Oregon as a state that attracts weirdos — including very intelligent, inventive ones. “Oregon is the Wild West,” she says. “This is the region of the country where the most fringe ideas tend to take root.”

Still, Oregon is rarely known as the birthplace of these dishes outside of the state — or even here. While Oregonians love and cherish these foods, this is a state whose population is constantly in flux. As of 2018, less than half of all Oregon residents were born in Oregon, compared to around two-thirds of Minnesotans. Minnesota is a “stickier” state; in other words, people born there tend to stay. According to a 2023 study, 70.9 percent of the people born in Minnesota still lived there in 2021; in the same year, Minnesota had 5 percent less out-migration compared to Oregon. These trends may explain why Oregon’s growing and shifting population doesn’t have the same institutional appreciation for distinctly Oregonian nostalgia.

In Anderson’s perspective, the state’s ever-changing identity has, ironically, been a constant over the course of Oregon’s history: the fur trade and timber industry attracted eclectic groups of people from around the world in the state’s earliest days — some who settled down, some who worked a single season, and some who came to get rich quickly and leave. As a result, Oregon has a low supply of multi-generational families and restaurants keeping specific regional dishes alive. The state’s food culture has shifted frequently over time; more saliently, much of its culinary richness lies in the foods it grows and harvests. “Oregon doesn’t have an official food,” Anderson says. “But we do have Indigenous foodways, things like salmon and huckleberries.”

These Indigenous foodways — the produce that grows natively here, the animals found in our forests and rivers — have become defining parts of the area’s food culture more than any specific potato dish or deep-fried snack. Even beyond native foods, Oregon’s agricultural reputation has become a defining facet of its culinary profile: This state is known for its farmers and the chefs dependent on them, referenced in now-grating Portlandia sketches; lists of the state’s most famous foods often include things like marionberries, hazelnuts, and seafood. It makes sense: Even if the human population changes, morels will emerge out of the ash of wildfires. Strawberries will grow as volunteers in abandoned gardens and woodlands.

And yet, Pronto Pup’s devotees — whether they’re multi-generational Oregonians or new residents — will skip the Oregon hazelnuts and salmon candy on the coast, and instead visit the corn dog’s birthplace. Some will arrive as early as 10 a.m. on Saturday mornings, the same way they’d start a day at the fair with a breakfast Pup. Diane Langer, the co-owner and proprietor of the Pronto Pup location in Rockaway Beach, purchased the business in 2021 without knowing about the brand’s cult following; she says countless Minnesota tourists will make a pilgrimage to Pronto Pup, as well as Oregonians and visitors from places like Idaho and Florida. Langer herself isn’t from Oregon; she splits her time between the Oregon Coast and her home in Washington state.

Although the identity of the state has shifted, those moving to Oregon often bring their own home state traditions with them — including the Pronto Pup.

“When I’m out working at different events, I’ll run into people from Idaho who know Pronto Pups from Idaho, or Michigan, or the Memphis area,” Sulmonett says. “People love nostalgia, you know?”