Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,20
the Big Mac and Egg McMuffin to Ronald McDonald and the Filet-O-Fish.
Kroc was also exacting, fastidious, and cruel. He broke up with his second wife through his lawyer at a party for their fifth anniversary, drank rail whiskey like a prefilleted fish (even after he became obscenely wealthy), and treated business as warfare. “If they were drowning,” Kroc once said of his competitors, “I’d stick a hose in their mouth.” He later bought the long-suffering San Diego Padres as a retirement project and was nearly boycotted by his players after he berated them over the stadium’s public address system in the middle of a game. (This public shaming was, notably enough, met with approval from the crowd.)
Though Kroc was a bully, what separated him from most other bullies was the moral lucidity and meticulous vision that drove his madness and paranoia. In the early days of the company, he would fly over communities in a light plane, scouting potential locations by looking for church steeples and schools. According to legend, Kroc would continue to harangue the managers of various McDonald’s stores about their cleanliness until the end of his life. “If you see a man in a three-hundred-dollar suit picking up paper in the parking lot,” one old admonition went, “you’d better get out there and help him, because it’s Ray Kroc.” And rather than dispense new McDonald’s franchises solely to his golfing buddies and country-club peers like highballs, Kroc sought out hungry young operators. He wanted success for himself and partners made in his image. He gravitated toward high school dropouts and blue-collar strivers, those with unpretentious minds who could credibly serve their working-class customers, who would also treat the grueling work as a cherished livelihood, and who would stay faithful to one thing—the rigid consistency his system required. And for that, Kroc turned a countless generation of them into millionaires.
Famed chef Jacques Pépin even praised Kroc for understanding American appetites and how they stood in contrast to the traditional habits of the Old World. “Instead of a structured, ritualistic restaurant with codes and routine, he gave them a simple, casual and identifiable restaurant with friendly service, low prices, no waiting and no reservations. The system eulogized the sandwich—no tableware to wash,” Pépin wrote in an entry that named Kroc one of Time’s most important people of the entire twentieth century.* Pépin concluded with this poignant truth: “One goes to McDonald’s to eat, not to dine.”
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Though he became singularly successful, Ray Kroc was hardly the sole lurking admirer of the McDonald brothers’ original operation. The founders of Burger King, Carl’s Jr., and Taco Bell, along with countless other would-be entrepreneurs, made their hamburger hajj to San Bernardino and were inspired to try their hands at empire-making after seeing the brothers’ model in action. “Our food was exactly the same as McDonald’s,” an unnamed founder conceded. “If I had looked at McDonald’s and saw someone flipping hamburgers while he was hanging by his feet, I would have copied it.”
Held together along with figures like Ray Kroc, Harmon Dobson, and Harland Sanders, this class of fast-food founders comprise an impressive, intergenerational consortium of self-made entrepreneurs. Imbued with the Protestant work ethic by which America is still defined and critiqued, they mainly flourished in the wake of an unmatched stretch of national economic fertility. In a way that’s telling and now seems heroic, the founders of American fast food also had a lot in common. Overwhelmingly, they came from hardscrabble roots, knew hunger as children, committed to some form of wartime national service, worked countless blue-collar jobs, and generally didn’t triumph until well into middle age. They harbored prophetic visions, grand delusions, and Talmudic fixations. Admittedly, most of the ones that succeeded benefited from majority status in race, sex, and religion; they were also relentless enough to endure and overcome endless setbacks.
As we know, Harland Sanders escaped frontier poverty, cleaned ashpans on the North Alabama Railroad, and sold chicken in a roadside gas station in southeastern Kentucky during the Great Depression. Along the way, Sanders would encounter and mentor Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas—an orphan and a high school dropout who exorcised his ancient demons by setting up a foundation for foster kids and by getting his GED when he was sixty years old. And that’s just the curl of the Frosty. After serving as a navy cook in the Pacific during World War II, Wilber Hardee resisted a call to join the family corn-and-tobacco farm to work as a grill