Grinding It Out Page 2

  The McDonald’s approach to french fries was a very interesting process to me and, I was happy to observe, it was every bit as simple as the McDonald boys had told me it was. I was convinced that I had it down pat in my head, and that anybody could do it if he followed those individual steps to the letter. That was just one of the many mistakes I would make in my dealings with the McDonald brothers.

  After the lunch-hour rush had abated, I got together with Mac and Dick McDonald again. My enthusiasm for their operation was genuine, and I hoped it would be infectious and rally them in favor of the plan I had mapped out in my mind.

  “I’ve been in the kitchens of a lot of restaurants and drive-ins selling Multimixers around the country,” I told them, “and I have never seen anything to equal the potential of this place of yours. Why don’t you open a series of units like this? It would be a gold mine for you and for me, too, because every one would boost my Multimixer sales. What d’you say?”

  Silence.

  I felt like I’d dragged my tie in my soup or something. The two brothers just sat there looking at me. Then Mac gave that little wince that sometimes passes for a smile in New England and turned around in his chair to point up at the hill overlooking the restaurant.

  “See that big white house with the wide front porch?” he asked. “That’s our home and we love it. We sit out on the porch in the evenings and watch the sunset and look down on our place here. It’s peaceful. We don’t need any more problems. We are in a position to enjoy life now, and that’s just what we intend to do.”

  His approach was utterly foreign to my thinking, so it took me a few minutes to reorganize my arguments. But it soon became apparent that further discussion along that line would be futile, so I said they could have their cake and eat it too by getting somebody else to open the other places for them. I could still peddle my Multimixers in the chain.

  “It’ll be a lot of trouble,” Dick McDonald objected. “Who could we get to open them for us?”

  I sat there feeling a sense of certitude begin to envelope me. Then I leaned forward and said, “Well, what about me?”

  2

  When I flew back to Chicago that fateful day in 1954, I had a freshly signed contract with the McDonald brothers in my briefcase. I was a battle-scarred veteran of the business wars, but I was still eager to go into action. I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns. But I was convinced that the best was ahead of me. I was still green and growing, and I was flying along at an altitude slightly higher than the plane. It was bright and sunny up there above the clouds. You could see nothing but clear skies and endless acres of billowy hummocks all the way from the Colorado River to Lake Michigan. But everything turned gray and threatening as we began our descent into Chicago. Perhaps I should have taken that as an omen.

  My thoughts, however, as we glided through the churning blackness, were on those hidden streets and alleys below where I had grown up along with the century.

  I was born in Oak Park, just west of Chicago’s city limits, in 1902. My father, Louis Kroc, was a Western Union man. He had gone to work for the company when he was twelve years old and slowly but steadily worked his way up. He had left school in the eighth grade, and he was determined that I would finish high school. I was the wrong kid for that. My brother, Bob, who was born five years after me, and my sister, Lorraine, who came along three years after him, were much more inclined to studies. In fact, Bob became a professor, a medical researcher, and we had almost nothing in common, he and I. For many years we found it difficult even to talk to each other.

  My mother, Rose, was a loving soul. She ran a neat, well-organized house. But she did not carry cleanliness to the extremes her mother did. I will never forget my grandmother’s kitchen. The floor was covered with newspapers all week long. Then, on Saturday, the newspapers would be taken up and the floor—which was already as clean as a nun’s cowl—would be scrubbed vigorously with steaming hot soapy water. After it was rinsed and dried, back down would go a fresh covering of newspapers to protect it in the week ahead. That was the old way Grandma had brought from Bohemia, and she was not about to change. My mother gave piano lessons to bring in extra money, and she expected me to help with the housework. I didn’t mind. In fact, I prided myself on being able to sweep and clean and make beds as well as anyone.

  Children were to be seen but not heard in adult company in those days, but I never felt left out. For example, my father belonged to a singing group that often met in our house. My brother and I had to stay upstairs and amuse ourselves while my mother played the piano and the men sang. As soon as the music stopped below, Bob and I would drop whatever game we were playing and rush back to the sewing room, which was right above the kitchen. I would pull the warm-air grate out of the floor (that was before we had central heating, and floor registers were used to let heated air rise to the upper rooms). My mother would put a dish of whatever refreshments she was serving on a tray that my father had affixed to an old broom handle, then she would hoist it up to us. It was a delightful feeling of adventure, because my mother pretended to be sneaking the food away without letting the other adults know.

  I was never much of a reader when I was a boy. Books bored me. I liked action. But I spent a lot of time thinking about things. I’d imagine all kinds of situations and how I would handle them.

  “What are you doing Raymond?” my mother would ask.

  “Nothing. Just thinking.”

  “Daydreaming you mean,” she’d say. “Danny Dreamer is at it again.”

  They called me Danny Dreamer a lot, even later when I was in high school and would come home all excited about some scheme I’d thought up. I never considered my dreams wasted energy; they were invariably linked to some form of action. When I dreamed about having a lemonade stand, for example, it wasn’t long before I set up a lemonade stand. I worked hard at it, and I sold a lot of lemonade. I worked at a grocery store one summer when I was still in grammar school. I worked at my uncle’s drugstore. I worked in a tiny music store I’d started with two friends. I worked at something whenever possible. Work is the meat in the hamburger of life. There is an old saying that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. I never believed it because, for me, work was play. I got as much pleasure out of it as I did from playing baseball.

  Baseball was truly the national pastime in those days, of course, and our neighborhood games in the alley behind my house were grand contests. My father was a baseball buff, too, and he began taking me to see the Chicago Cubs play in the old west side ballpark when I was seven years old. I saw plenty of double plays pulled off by the Cubs’ famous Tinker to Evers to Chance combination. The Cubs were contenders then, and I knew all the statistics about every player down to his shoe size. My father belonged to the same lodge as Joe Tinker, and that gave me the upper hand over other kids in our frequent arguments about baseball players, especially when it came to the Cubs. I had to know more about it, of course, because my old man knew Joe Tinker personally. What sweet strife those alley altercations were. And how fiercely we played the game—with a garbage can lid for home base, a well-chewed bat (pocked from hitting stones for batting practice), and a ball bandaged in black friction tape. How agonizing it was though when my mother would step out onto the back porch and call, “Raymond! It’s time to come in and practice.” The other guys would mimic her voice and inflection jeeringly as the chesty expert on the Cubs shouted resentfully, “I’m coming!” and shuffled off to submit to his mother’s piano instructions.

  I took to the piano naturally. My facility at the keyboard pleased my mother, and I’m still thankful to her for those hours of disciplined practice, although at the time I often thought her demands were excessive. I became proficient enough to acquire a minor reputation in the neighborhood and to prompt the choirmaster of the Harvard Congregational Church to recruit me to play the organ for his practice sessions—a slight lapse of judgm
ent on his part. I was willing and able, but the stately chords of the hymns began to oppress me. I fidgeted on the bench of the old pump organ through the entire second half of the evening. How those people managed to put up with all the interruptions, the lecturing of the choirmaster, and his repetition of the same passages over and over again I could not understand. Moreover, the music itself was so saccharine and slow that I was suffocating up there in the organ loft. When he concluded the last hymn of that seemingly interminable session and said, “That’s it, ladies and gentlemen, good night.” I reacted spontaneously by playing the old vaudeville tune tag, “Shave and a haircut, two-bits.” Naturally, the choirmaster was scandalized. He never reprimanded me for that little breach of decorum, but he never asked me to play the organ again either.

  My musical interest was more commercial. I admired the piano players in the big Woolworth and Kresge stores in Chicago’s Loop. They would play and sing to attract customers into the music department, where there were racks of sheet music and accessories for sale. If you saw a piece of music that interested you and wanted to hear the arrangement, the piano man would oblige with a snappy rendition. I daydreamed that I was a piano man too, and the opportunity came the summer after I started high school.

  I had spent the previous summer and lunch hours during the school year working in my uncle Earl Edmund Sweet’s drugstore soda fountain in Oak Park. That was where I learned that you could influence people with a smile and enthusiasm and sell them a sundae when what they’d come for was a cup of coffee. In any event, I saved just about every penny I earned and finally had enough in the bank to go into the music store business with two friends. We each invested a hundred dollars and rented a little hole-in-the-wall shop for twenty-five dollars a month. We sold sheet music and novelty instruments such as ocarinas, harmonicas, and ukuleles. I was the piano man, and I did a lot of playing and singing but not much selling. The sad truth is that we didn’t do enough business to put in your eye. We had a month-to-month lease, and after a few months we gave it up, sold our stock of goods to another music store, divided the money that was left three ways, and that was that.

  My sophomore year in high school passed like a funeral. I began to feel about school the way I had felt earlier about the Boy Scouts. It was simply too slow for me. I’d been eager to become a Boy Scout, and I enjoyed it for a while. They made me the bugler. But a bugle is a very limited instrument, and I found myself doing the same things over and over in meetings. It was small potatoes. I wasn’t progressing, so I said to hell with it. School was the same—full of aggravations and little progress.

  The only thing I really enjoyed about school was debating. Here was an activity I could get my teeth into—figuratively, of course—but I would not have hesitated to bite a debate opponent if it would have advanced my argument. I loved being the center of attention, persuading the audience that my side was right. One debate that I remember in particular was on the question “Should Smoking Be Abolished?” As happened more often than not, I was on the side of the underdogs, trying to defend smoking. It was a very spirited exchange, but my opponents made the mistake of painting the demon tobacco too black, too vile, too evil to be countenanced by a sane society. Rhetoric is fine as long as it maintains some contact with reality. So I attacked their excesses by telling very simply the story of my great-grandfather and his beloved pipe. Grandpa Phossie, we called him, which means Grandpa Beard. I told of the hardships he’d undergone in Bohemia and how he had made his way to the United States. I related in pithy detail how he had built a home for his family with the sweat of his brow. Now he had little time left in life and few pleasures beyond throwing a stick for his little dog to fetch and looking into the swirls of smoke from his ancient pipe to recall scenes from happier days. “Who among you,” I asked, “would deprive that whitebearded old man of one of his last comforts on earth, his beloved pipe?” I was delighted to note that there were tears in the eyes of some of the girls in the auditorium as I finished. I wished my father could have heard that applause. It might have made up for some of his disappointment in my lack of scholastic interest.

  As school ended that spring, the United States entered World War I. I took a job selling coffee beans and novelties door-to-door. I was confident I could make my way in the world and saw no reason to return to school. Besides, the war effort was more important. Everyone was singing “Over There.” And that’s where I wanted to be. My parents objected strenuously, but I finally talked them into letting me join up as a Red Cross ambulance driver. I had to lie about my age, of course, but even my grandmother could accept that. In my company, which assembled in Connecticut for training, was another fellow who had lied about his age to get in. He was regarded as a strange duck, because whenever we had time off and went out on the town to chase girls, he stayed in camp drawing pictures. His name was Walt Disney.

  The armistice was signed just before I was to get on the boat to ship out to France. So I went marching back home to Chicago, wondering what to do next. My parents talked me into trying school again, but I lasted only one semester. Algebra had not improved in my absence.

  I wanted to be out selling and playing the piano for money, and that’s what I did. I got a territory selling ribbon novelties, and I took to it like a duck takes to water. I’d have a sample room set up in whatever hotel I was staying in, and I’d learn what each buyer’s taste was and sell to it. No self-respecting pitcher throws the same way to every batter, and no self-respecting salesman makes the same pitch to every client. In 1919 anyone making twenty-five or thirty dollars a week was doing well, and it wasn’t long before—on good weeks with a lot of musical jobs—I was making more money than my father.

  I was a regular “sheik” at seventeen—cocky and probably annoying to be around. Rudolph Valentino was driving the girls wild then, and I modeled myself after him. I parted my rather wiry hair in the middle and plastered pomade on it to get that slicked-back, patent-leather look. I bought sharp clothes and smoked Melachrino cork-tipped Turkish cigarettes when I went out on dates. After my date and I were seated I would produce my box of imported cigarettes with a flair and place it on the table to show how sophisticated I was. This was just a passing phase, but it still embarrasses me to recall it, because there’s nothing I dislike more than phony sophistication. In fact, I take a kind of perverse pleasure in the memory of the night most of the “sheik” was shocked out of me.

  A musician named Herbie Mintz, who always knew where work was to be found, confided to me that he knew a nightclub that was looking for a piano player with my kind of style. It was located way down in Calumet City, but it paid well above the going rates. I jumped at it. Getting from Oak Park on the west side to the far southeast suburb was a major undertaking. I rode several different buses and trains, but somehow I made it on time for the 9 P.M. opening.

  The place turned out to be a bordello. The downstairs “cabaret” where we played was decorated in the most god-awful, garish gay-nineties plush and gilt you could imagine. It was presided over by a madame who must have weighed 200 pounds. I have never seen such a getup as she wore. Her hair and makeup were as flamboyant as the decor of the place, and she reeked of cheap perfume. I got plenty of good whiffs of it as she hung over me and sang to my accompaniment. I can still see her yellow pearls bouncing on that heaving bosom, those rings flashing on her pudgy fingers, as she belted out songs in her gravelly voice.

  Between sets, when she got a lull in directing traffic to the bedrooms upstairs, Big Momma came over to the piano and warmed up to me.

  “Where do you live, honey?” she asked.

  I had all I could do to keep my voice from quavering as I told her I came from Oak Park.

  “Well, now, that’s too far for you to travel late at night. Tonight, you stay here.”

  I was afraid to say no, and I squirmed uneasily on the piano bench the rest of the evening, watching her out of the corner of my eye and hoping she’d keep her distance. The customers were a pretty har
d and rowdy lot, so I had no reassurance there. Just before the final set, I sidled over to the bartender and called him aside. I strove mightily to act casual and keep my voice steady.

  “Listen, we have only one more set to play and I’ve got a long ride home. I don’t want to hang around,” I said. “So how about paying me off right now?”

  Without a word, poker-faced but knowing, he reached under the bar and handed me my money. I hurried over to the men’s room, where I stuffed the cash into my sock. I didn’t trust anybody in that place. After the set, while the other guys in the band were still putting away their instruments, I was running down the street, putting as much distance as possible between me and that 200-pound madame.

  I never went back.

  My selling job with the ribbon novelty outfit began to hit its limits before long. It was interesting, but I could see that I was not cut out for a career of peddling rosebuds for farm wives to sew on garters and bed cushions. So I gave it up in the summer of 1919 and got a job playing in a band at Paw-Paw Lake, Michigan. That was a genuine taste of the era. We were really “with-it,” in our striped blazers and straw boaters. Talk about your “flaming youth” and “Charleston-crazed kids,” wow.

  I played in a dime-a-dance pavilion called the Edgewater. The lake was a very popular summer resort in those days, and we used to draw people from the hotels all around. Late in the afternoon our whole band would get aboard one of the ferryboats that plied the lake, and we would steam along the shoreline playing frantically. One of our boys would get up in the bow with a megaphone and call out, “Dancing tonight at the Edgewater, don’t miss out on the fun!”