A fact from Jim Delligatti appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 30 December2016(check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
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Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
The Big Mac is basically just a copy of the Big Boy sandwich. Does he really deserve to get a ton of credit for "creating" the Big Mac? Surely it was a good idea to copy the Big Boy but it's not like he invented the double decker hamburger, which is what this entry appears to credit him with. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.133.48.80 (talk) 01:51, 30 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
@75.133.48.80: I was just wondering the very same thing. Delligatti may deserve credit for introducing the double-decker hamburger sandwich to McDonald's, but he did not invent it. The Big Boy hamburger, of which the Big Mac is merely derivative, dates to at least 1937, a full 30 years before Delligati’s variation on a theme, the theme of a double-decker hamburger sandwich. Seems to me that what’s at work here is a concert of mutual interests: a small town’s need for tourists; a family’s need to keep a notable local entrepreneur’s accomplishments alive and relevant; and a multi-national corporation’s need for constant, positive publicity. — SpikeToronto04:18, 30 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
P.S. From the Washington Post article cited in this Wikipedia article:
The Big Mac became the chain burger by which all subsequent ones have been measured. But Mr. Delligatti, who spent some years in Southern California, acknowledged a debt to Bob Wian, who operated a Glendale, Calif., hamburger stand and crafted a similar double-decker burger in the late 1930s that became the signature item of Bob’s Big Boy restaurants.
“This wasn’t like discovering the lightbulb,” Mr. Delligatti later told the Los Angeles Times. “The bulb was already there. All I did was screw it in the socket.”[BigBoy 1]
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
This article is just the latest (?) in a long series of Wikipedia articles derived wholly (or nearly so) from the obituaries published after the article's subject's death (in this case, eight out of eight sources). As obituaries are largely written or compiled by the decedent's survivors, and nearly always positive, they are a very poor source of unbiased information. If obituaries are truly all the sources available, that suggests that the article's subject wasn't all that notable to begin with. --Piledhigheranddeeper (talk) 13:16, 30 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
— SpikeToronto 04:28, 30 December 2016 (UTC)