Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,31
the moon.
It’s beautiful. Rather than the standard-issue dual arches, the road sign is a towering single golden parabola with an all-caps marquee that reads HAMBURGERS. Perched atop that is a massive neon rendering of the company’s first mascot, Speedee, a winking, bow-tied, toque-wearing cartoon waiter. The building, the third-ever McDonald’s, was one of the few franchises opened during the reign of the McDonald brothers and still has the company’s original red-and-white tile scheme. Minus the Chevy pickup trucks and Priuses outside, it’s ready-made fodder for a postcard of a 1950s drive-in: no indoor seating and no drive-thru window—a feature that generates about two-thirds of the business for a typical McDonald’s store.* It’s also the only McDonald’s location where a customer can still get a deep-fried apple pie.
The landmark Downey store isn’t just an architectural throwback. Its owner, Ron Piazza, started his improbable-seeming journey to prosperity at just fifteen years old, when he took a dollar-an-hour job on the fryers at McDonald’s in the late 1960s. Like Khan, he also traveled the route from shift worker to supervisor to upper management to ownership. Nearly fifty years later, Piazza is an impressive dead ringer for Buddy Garrity and is the owner of ten McDonald’s franchises.
The constellations of quick-service companies are steeped in this kind of fries-to-fortunes lore featuring young workers and franchise owners alike. Piazza told me the story of a man he hired as an entry-level employee at fifteen and a half who had worked his way up to upper management after escaping the killing fields in Cambodia. The first thing he’d eaten upon arriving in the United States had been McDonald’s, and the rest was history. Piazza numbered off at least four hires who had become owners of their own stores. “Ray Kroc used to pride himself on saying he made more millionaires than anybody else in America.”
Piazza’s remark sounded a lot like one made by Roland L. Jones, who started as a McDonald’s manager in Washington, D.C., in 1965 and went on to run three stores. “McDonald’s has made more African American millionaires than everyone else,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2010. “We are into the second and third generation now of owners.” Jones is a particularly notable figure in McDonald’s history. A cofounder of the National Black McDonald’s Operators Association—an advocacy organization founded in 1972 whose three hundred members now control thirteen hundred franchises in the United States and beyond—Jones was also the company’s first black executive, serving as the head of urban operations in the 1970s.
Then there is the story of June Martino, a World War II Women’s Army Corps vet, who started as Ray Kroc’s bookkeeper in 1948 and rose to become his most trusted lieutenant and one of the most important executives in the company’s history. Over twenty years she would serve formally as the company’s secretary and treasurer and less formally as a recruiter, franchisee mentor, factotum, corporate peacekeeper, and checker of egos and emotions. Unofficially, she was known as “the vice president of equilibrium.” Her contributions were critical to the period in which McDonald’s set the framework for its national ascent, and she reaped the spoils accordingly. After the company went public in 1965, Martino’s holdings soared in value to $5.3 million (about $40 million in 2018 terms). She would retire a few years later, but not before being named to the McDonald’s board of directors for life and becoming the second woman after Queen Elizabeth to be hosted at the New York Stock Exchange’s all-male executive dining room.*
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Taken together, these stories represent a callback to the gauzy, democratic possibilities outlined by James Truslow Adams and embodied by Harland Sanders and other fast-food founders. They are also central to a national narrative about what it takes to thrive in America: Work hard, do whatever it takes, and you can come from nothing, advance quickly, triumph spectacularly, fulfill your destiny, buy a Maserati, have a picture taken of you and your friends duck-faced and jumping in tandem on a beach, live the American Dream. It’s a zero-sum system of thought, part of a specifically American doctrine of self-reliance, individual destiny, and cold-blooded optimism with countless adherents, especially in the upper echelons of industry and government.*
Despite the pitfalls of this seductive, blinkered kind of narrative, it’s still hard to resist the story of someone who fell in love with America from afar and made good on its promise. A story where triumph is a matter of will instead of a question