There was once a time in America when summers didn’t automatically include grilling in the backyard, and then Grant Hastings came along with a keen idea. Sure, there were other grills that were primarily used for camp-style cooking, but Hastings figured that he could make something much better.

Hastings and his pal Gus Baker scraped four hundred dollars together, commissioned a guy to weld a grill, and in 1948, the Hasty-Bake was born.

Today, Hasty-Bake has grown in to a successful Tulsa-based company with an international fan base and several different grill models–all of them built around Hasting’s initial idea of heat convection. In this episode of Goodbye Tulsa, Mark Brown, who co-authored a book about Hasty-Bake with Hastings, explains the grill’s enduring appeal.