By midcentury, racial caricatures were so common that Sam Battistone and Newell Bohnett did something that now seems unthinkable: They launched a restaurant chain called "Sambo's." Apparently, neither man had Helen Bannerman's children's book The Story of Little Black Sambo in mind when they opened up shop in 1957—the term was just a mashup of their names. But the restaurants' walls were soon decorated with images based on the book, which tells the story of a child who outwits a tiger that has stolen his clothing. The setting for the tale is India, which explains the look of the lad on the Sambo's menu.