Pizza Hut co-founder Frank Carney dies from pneumonia

Wichita: Frank Carney, who with his brother started the Pizza Hut empire in Wichita, died on Wednesday from pneumonia. He was 82. Carney had recently recovered from Covid-19, but had Alzheimer’s disease for more than a decade, the Wichita Eagle reported. He died at 4:30 a.m. at an assisted living facility in Wichita, his wife and brother told the Eagle.

Frank Carney was a 19-year-old student at Wichita State University when he and his 26-year-old brother, Dan, borrowed $600 from their mother to start a pizza business in 1958 near their family’s Carney’s Market.

“When you are starting a business that’s going to pay your way through college, you don’t even think about what the economy is doing,” Carney once told a 1992 entrepreneurship conference at Wichita State.


“We didn’t care about who was in the White House or what the unemployment rate was,“ he said. ”The entrepreneur, all he thinks about is: Is there a market for the product? Can I sell it?”

PepsiCo bought Pizza Hut for $300 million in 1977.