Gene Snyder holds a box of White Castle sliders during his trip to Columbus, Ohio to be inducted into the restaurant's hall of fame.

A Hermiston man is in the same Hall of Fame as rock legend Alice Cooper.

Not the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, mind you.

The White Castle Cravers Hall of Fame.

The Midwestern restaurant chain inducted Gene Snyder, 74, this year, christening him the “Traveling Slider Man.” The first thing Snyder always does when he travels is check for the nearest White Castle. He has eaten the restaurant’s famous sliders from New York to Las Vegas.

“Its been a part of my life for almost 70 years,” he said.

Last year’s inductees included Alice Cooper, who has discussed his love of White Castle burgers during media interviews in the past. This year no one particularly famous got the honor, but Snyder pointed out that there were only 11 inductees out of 1,148 people who applied.

“It’s easier to get into Harvard than to get inducted into the White Castle Hall of Fame,” he said.

His lifelong craving for White Castle’s two-inch sliders started when he was a kid growing up in Chicago.

“I was always real slight and did not like to eat anything but White Castle, so my mom and dad would take me there to make sure I ate,” he said. “That’s what started it.”

When the family moved to the north side of the city, picking up a bag of White Castle sliders meant an hour-long drive, but that didn’t stop them. Neither did an eventual move to Seattle, where the nearest White Castle was thousands of miles away.

“We would get freshly cooked White Castles and put them in our luggage and take them back to Seattle,” Snyder said. “The smell would permeate the whole cabin.”

His wife Karen said the tradition of bringing White Castle sliders back from vacation continued after the couple married.

“We used to bring them home by the hundreds,” she said.

He said out of all the foods that he missed after moving away from the Midwest, the reason he missed White Castle sliders the most was the restaurant’s unique way of cooking the mini-burgers in a steamer surrounded by juicy onions.

“It’s a whole different taste,” he said.

Today the sliders are available in the frozen food section of some grocery stores in the Pacific Northwest, but it’s not quite the same.

When he saw a notice on one of the boxes calling for people to submit their stories of White Castle cravings he sent something in and then forgot about it, figuring at most he would get a few coupons for free sliders.

Instead, the company contacted him with free round-trip tickets to the restaurant’s headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, where Snyder and his wife were put up in a Hyatt hotel and treated to everything from a VIP museum tour to a buffet lunch of everything from White Castle’s menu.

The trip culminated in a formal dinner where Snyder and 10 other inductees were honored by the restaurant and given a stack of gifts, including a book of recipes for White Castle menu items.