A couple of times as a kid in the 60s I visited Texas and we ate at a hamburger place with “Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear” burgers in different sizes. I have no memory of the restaurant name and googllng doesn’t bring anything up. I do remember paper napkins with the bears printed on them.
This thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=884699 with its reference to A&W and its Papa, Mama and Baby burgers made me wonder whether the Papa Bear was an A&W knockoff?
Looks like they were the mascots of A&W at one time:
I can confirm that it was A&W from personal experience.
I loved going to A&W. I remember the pride I felt when I finally graduated to the Papa Bear burger. But best of all was the root beer in the frosty mug.
Refilling the gallon jugs at the drive-up every Friday. 
And taking the gallon jugs with a heckuva lot of popcorn to the Drive-In Theater.
In the Chicago area, we had the Golden Bear restaurants with a Mama, Papa, Baby bear theme. Don’t know if they reached Texas or were just regional. You can see their menu here:
A lot of info about the Golden Bear chain at the Forgotten Chicago Forum.
Didn’t A&W have a barbecued beef sandwich? I remember eating those with their root beer when I was a little kid. They were great!
I’ve eaten at A&W only a couple of times in the last 40 years. Do they still make the barbecued beef sandwich?
A&W had Mamma burger, Poppa Burger, Baby burger and Teen burger but no “bear” in the names. There was the Root-bear mascot but that was later as I recall. The burger family has been resurrected, at least in Canada, as a kinda nostalgia thing.
If the OP really remembers a bear family, that could be one of the outfits mentioned upthread.
Has A&W declined in the US?. In the drive-in restaurant thread, people are talking as if it has become rare.
Let’s all go to A&W
Food’s more fun at A&W
Have a mug of root beer, or maybe two or three
Pick the perfect burger from the Burger Family
Let’s all go to A&W
Food’s more fun at A&W
Hop in the car
Come as you are…
To A&W
That’s how I remember it. Loved me some A&W and also Arctic Circle, neither of which are seen much these days unless you’re in Utah or Idaho (for AC). Only 3 A&Ws in the Portland area. We used to cruise “the gut” in Anchorage, drinking root beer out of the quart cone-shaped containers.
I’m actually surprised that either franchise is still able to compete with McD or the others. Perhaps they’ve gone on the cheap with ingredients like the big guys in order to keep their doors open.
A&W is doing much better in Canada these days… And I just had an extra large “Uncle” sized burger so the tradition and thought is still in the company somewhere.
It’s hard to see, but I think that menu has a “Papa Golden Bear burger” but not a Mama Bear or Baby Bear Burger. Although maybe there was a kids’ menu?
I remember eating at Golden Bear as a kid (the Springfield, IL location, mentioned in Czarcasm’s link). I almost always got pancakes.
Anyone remember trying to drink out of the quart-size “megaphones”?.. impossible without getting a face-full at some point.
I’m sure they thought we’d be genteelly pouring it into frosty mugs, but we couldn’t resist pulling the waxed paper seal off the end (yes, you drank out of the small end), and tipping it up until we got a tidal wave of root beer all over our chins and shirts.
A&W Canada is now entirely separate from A&W US. They have joint rights to the trademarks and things like the burger family, but they’re a going concern here.
Have gone all-in on no hormone meat, locally sourced wheat, etc. They’ve been steadily tearing down the dilapidated 80s style restaurants in my area and building sleek new ones. Their burgers and fries are way better than MickeyD’s.
Last standalone, car service A&W hereabouts closed several years ago, leaving only those co-located with KFC. I believe they have a Papa burger, but not the others.
Random memory from the '60s: another standalone A&W, which was demolished to make way for a (non-interstellar) bypass, had fries that were made from some sort of potato paste which was extruded directly into the deep fryer. At any rate, they had a distinctly odd texture. Anyone else recall something similar?
A&W is frequently co-located with KFC restaurants. I’ve seen them in both Oregon and CA.
In the US, A&W was owned by Yum! (which also owns KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut) from 2002 until 2011. Yum! (which, at that point, was called Tricon) bought a company called Yorkshire Global Restaurants in 2002, and thus obtained both A&W and Long John Silvers. In the years that followed, Yum! created a lot of co-located restaurants like that, with various permutations of the five chains that they owned.
In 2011, Yum! sold off A&W and Long John Silvers, to different buyer groups. I suspect that any A&Ws which still share a restaurant with a Yum! brand are remnants of the era when Yum! owned A&W.
A&W’s are easy to find in Montreal. There’s one about 100 meters from where I’m sitting right now.
I have vague childhood memories of visiting one in the suburbs west of the city circa 1974. They had carhops on roller skates.
Golden Bear! Golden Bear!
A honey of a place (of a place)
Where food is fun!
Golden Bear!
Their song was on their napkins, along with the music. Never heard it played, but we sang it when drunk and dining there. Ah, the 70’s.