Renting a small building at 503 South Bluff in downtown Wichita and purchasing secondhand equipment to make pizzas, the Carneys and Bender opened the first Pizza Hut restaurant; on opening night, they gave pizza away to encourage community interest. A year later, in 1959, Pizza Hut was incorporated in Kansas, and Dick Hassur opened the first franchise unit in Topeka, Kansas.

“We found a guy from Indiana that was an airman at McConnell, who lived at the same apartment complex as our sister and brother-in-law, and we talked with him, because we didn’t know how to make pizza,” Frank Carney says.

“He said he had some great pizza. His name was John Bender. We had him over, he made pizza, and we liked it. We said ‘If you bring the recipe, you can have a full-time job here with whatever time you can get out of the air base, and a third of the business.’ He did, and it went from there, and that’s where we got our pizza.”

McConnell Air Force Base (IATA: IAB, ICAO: KIAB, FAA LID: IAB) is a United States Air Force base located four miles (6 km) southeast of the central business district of Wichita, a city in Sedgwick County, Kansas, United States.

They did not start offering delivery of their pizzas until 1986. In 1989, they delivered pizza to the White House, for a "Reading Is Fundamental" pizza party thrown by Barbara Bush.

The other is that the building they used, the former bar, had a shape that reminded the ex-Airman Dan Carney of a hut.After opening their Wichita location using secondhand equipment, they started franchising in 1959 with a location in Topeka, Kansas.

They ran the company with help from John Bender, an Air Force buddy of Dan's who had worked in a pizza parlor in Indiana, until they bought him out in 1963.

Mr. John W Bender was one of the founders of the original Pizza Hut Company. After leaving the business, he became one of its largest franchisees in the Midwest, building a 25-store chain throughout the state of Indiana. He also serves as chairman of Bender Lumber, an eight-store retail building materials chain in south-central Indiana.