This coming Friday, June 19 — 2,000 miles and 82 years from his birthplace in Buffalo, New York — John Gullo will sit down at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office and sign copies of his newly published memoir, “Extraordinary Adventures of an Ordinary Man.”
Granted, it is not the Oval Office. That one remains in the West Wing of the White House. This is a replica, located in the Treehouse Children’s Museum on 22nd Street in downtown Ogden.
And if it weren’t for John, it wouldn’t be here.
His American Dream Foundation donated the money to build The Great American Freedom Trail, an Americana exhibit that takes up the museum’s entire second floor. As a kind of Ogden rite of passage, each school year, every fifth grader in Weber County has an opportunity to go on a field trip to visit the Oval Office and sit at the Resolute Desk.
The museum exhibit is just one of many contributions John has made to his adopted city of Ogden ever since he traded in western New York for northern Utah and drove three-quarters of the way across the country to open a Burger King franchise.
That was half a century ago.
Born in humbling circumstances in 1944 in Buffalo — “when I was a kid, I was so poor I couldn’t pay attention,” he says — John was the last of his mother Rose’s six children, all of them delivered before she was 20. His father left when he was 6. He grew up on the streets of an Italian neighborhood swarming with “wiseguys and cannoli.” College was never on the radar. John likes to say he graduated with a “bachelor in arts from the University of Hardknocks, Buffalo, New York.”
After working for a grocery store chain in New York, his big break came in 1971, when he joined a company with ambitious national expansion plans called Burger King. After working up to a district manager position on the East Coast, he and a partner were given the opportunity to open franchises of their own in a place John had barely heard about, let alone seen: Utah. They opened the state’s second Burger King (the first was in St. George) in Logan in 1977, followed the next year by a store in the Ogden suburb of Riverdale.
Over the next two decades, at a rate of more than one a year, John opened franchises in Utah, Wisconsin and Arizona — including the first-ever BK connected to a gas station in Hurricane, Utah. By the turn of the millennium, Gullo owned more than 50 Burger Kings.
Then he decided to sell them off — and, with no loss in enthusiasm, turn his attention to philanthropy. The Burger King king became the king of giving back.
In Ogden, the first indication the city had as to just how serious John was about doing things for his community came in 2001, when he started the Hot Rock’n 4th.
Deeming it unacceptable that Ogden didn’t have a proper Fourth of July celebration, John single-handedly organized an extravaganza with entertainment, food, a demolition derby and a massive fireworks show — and invited everyone to attend. Over a 15-year period, the Hot Rock’n 4th grew until it was held at the Weber State stadium and 33 charities were involved.
He was just getting started. Under the umbrella of the American Dream Foundation — the nonprofit he set up with seed money from his business success — over the course of the past quarter-century he has thrown his philanthropy behind dozens of good causes, including but not limited to the aforementioned Treehouse Children’s Museum, the American Fallen Fire Memorial, Enable Industries for people with disabilities, Prevent Child Abuse, the Children’s Justice Center, Youth in Transition, the Ogden Police Department Let’s Play Program and the Christmas House Box.
Over, during and in between all that, he was a pioneer in introducing the sport of pickleball to the Ogden area. He’d discovered the game while recovering from quintuple bypass heart surgery in St. George in 2008. Crediting pickleball with helping him lose 100 pounds and saving his life, when he returned to Ogden he took the lead in getting courts built throughout the area. In addition, he started the Professional Pickleball Federation and the Tournament of Champions, a national event with prize money from his own pocket. That effort was instrumental in his induction into the national Pickleball Hall of Fame in 2024.
All this, and plenty more, is in “Extraordinary Adventures of an Ordinary Man,” which John wrote with the help of Bridget Cook-Burch (the book is available at johnagullo.com and on Amazon).
In the book’s acknowledgments, John explains what prompted him to pen his memoir:
“After I’d checked off a good number of life boxes — building businesses, dodging disasters, doing some good in the world — a surprising number of people began telling me I should write my life story,” he writes. “Either they saw value in it … or they just wanted proof that half of it actually happened.”