Grinding It Out (9 page)

A salesman without a product is like a violinist without a bow. So I scratched around and made a deal with Harry B. Burt to sell a line of low-fat malted milk powder and sixteen-ounce paper cups for a drink called Malt-a-Plenty. It was mixed in the cup, using the metal sleeve or collar, just like One-in-a-Million. I kept needling Earl Prince to come up with some new ideas for me to sell, but it seemed as though he could think of nothing that wasn't illegal or rationed. I managed to make a living on Malt-a-Plenty, but paying off my debt to John Clark became a real nightmare. I did it, though, and when World War II ended I was able to go back to selling Multimixers as my own. It was a glorious feeling.

Business recovered after the war, and soon it was better than ever. New soft-mix ice cream purveyors were starting up as franchises, and I was in there pushing Multimixers into this expanding market, to Dairy Queen, Tastee-Freeze, and the rest. I sold a Multimixer to a guy named Willard Marriott, who had just opened a drive-in called A & W Root Beer. His method of operation fascinated me. I considered myself a connoisseur of kitchens; after all, selling Multimixers took me into thousands of them. I prided myself on being able to tell which operations would appeal to the public and which would fail. Willard Marriott looked like a winner to me from the start. I had no more idea than he did back then, though, of what a giant his Marriott Corporation would become in hotels and restaurants. I was spending a lot of time in bars in those days, too. Not as a customer, but as a critic. The whole mixed-drink industry seemed entirely too bland to me. It needed livening up with new drinks that used ice cream. They would be mixed, of course, on a Multimixer. My favorite concoction was brandy or crème de menthe, crème de cacao, or Kahlua with ice cream. The result was a soft custard that could be both an after-dinner drink and dessert. I called the thing the
Delacato.
One place, the Evergreen, a well-known steak house in Dundee, Illinois, served the Delacato in a champagne glass, to be eaten with a spoon or sipped through a little straw. Obviously, my invention did not alter the nation's drinking habits, but it was an interesting notion.

My pattern of travel in peddling Multimixers hinged around the restaurant and dairy association conventions. I hit all of their national shows and the larger regional ones as well. I would order a dozen or so Multimixers to be sent to each show by Railway Express from our plant in downstate Illinois. When I arrived, I would display some of them in my own booth and set the others on the counters of the big manufacturers of soda fountains, Liquid Carbonic, Bastion-Blessing, Grand Rapids Soda Fountain, and others. I never left one of those shows without selling all of my samples, in addition to other orders. That's why I dreaded the last day of any show. I'd have to repack the machines for shipment to the purchasers. I've never been handy with tools, and crating those machines was always an interlude spiced with splinters, skinned knuckles, and plenty of profanity. It was worth the irritation, naturally, but I sometimes wished I'd gotten into selling something I could fit in my pocket. My sample case for the Multimixer weighed close to fifty pounds. I had wheels installed on the bottom of it so I could pull it down the street like my little red wagon. But it was a hassle to get it in and out of taxicabs or up a long flight of stairs.

I didn't bother setting sales goals for Multimixer. I didn't need any artificial incentives to keep me working at top speed. My estimate of when I was having a good year was when I sold 5,000 units. I have several of those. One year—1948 or 1949—I sold 8,000.

That kind of volume was making my style of operating from outside the office increasingly difficult. I needed more help. But I was reluctant to hire another office worker. It was useless to ask Ethel to come in, she had made that perfectly clear. Yet it didn't seem to me that the business was strong enough to add another hand. Finally, late in the fall of 1948, my accountant, Al Doty, convinced me that I was going to have to hire a bookkeeper. I respected Al's judgment. He had been recommended to me by my friend Al Handy at Harris Trust & Savings Bank, and his firm handled my accounting for many years. Anyhow, Al got me going and I put an ad in the papers. I can't remember how many girls I interviewed, but I'll never forget the brilliant waif who got the job. There was no question in my mind after we talked for a few minutes that this Mrs. June Martino was the one to hire. She was wearing a faded coat that hardly looked adequate for the December storm that was whipping down the LaSalle Street canyon that day, and she looked as though she'd missed several meals. Yet she had a presence that conveyed integrity and a restless native ability to deal with problems. This was enveloped in a warm, compassionate personality, a rare combination of traits. The fact that she had no bookkeeping experience bothered me not at all. I knew she would master the technical routines quickly. So I told her I couldn't pay much, but if she was willing to work hard anyhow, I could promise her a bright future. We talked the same language. She did work hard—unbelievably hard—and in less than twenty years she was one of the top women executives in the country, secretary and treasurer of McDonald's Corporation.

June came from an improvident German family on the northwest side of Chicago. She and Louis Martino were married shortly before World War II. He was an engineer with Western Electric, and the company wanted to have him exempted from the military draft because he was working on a coaxial cable invention that could be vital to defense communications. One day June took some papers down to the army personnel office that was processing Louis's classification. When she left, he had been exempted from the service, but she had been sworn in! She was very patriotic and just got carried away. As a WAC she studied electronics at Northwestern University and learned trigonometry and calculus and God knows what else. She had to do it by intensive tutoring, because she had no special aptitude for higher mathematics. But that's the sort of person she was; no challenge was too big for her. If she didn't know something, she'd burrow into library books and find out.

June had a couple of children toward the end of the war; then her father and Louis's mother both became seriously ill. Soon they were $14,000 in debt. They decided to move the whole shooting match, in-laws, kids, and the two of them, to a farm near the Wisconsin Dells. Housing was cheap up there, and they figured they could raise a lot of their own food. Louis planned to get a job in a television repair shop and work the farm, too. A lot of young couples were doing that sort of thing at the time. It may have panned out for a few of them, but many more, the Martinos among them, found they couldn't make a go of it. Louis couldn't afford to leave his job to look for work in Chicago, so June came down and stayed with a friend while she haunted the employment agencies. That's how she happened to walk into my office that bitter cold December day.

A charming thing about June was that despite her solid business sense, she was absolutely innocent about money matters. She also had a remarkable intuition. It bordered on the psychic at times, and she had a childlike faith in it. I saw it work the first day she was in my office. I sent her over to the bank to make a deposit. She had exactly twenty cents, as she explained later, and that was her carfare home. But she passed a Salvation Army band playing on the corner, and something in her heart would not let her go by with that money in her purse. So she tossed the two dimes into the kettle and went on to the bank. When she got back to the office, she was ecstatic.

“Oh, Mr. Kroc, what a wonderful day this is! I got this job, and it's my little boy's birthday. He's still up on the farm, of course, and I was wishing I could buy a present to send him but it seemed impossible.” She then went on to tell me about having only twenty cents to her name and how she'd tossed it into the Salvation Army kettle. As she left the bank, coming back to the office, her heel caught in a sidewalk grating. She looked down to dislodge it, and there, next to her foot, was a twenty-dollar bill! “I went back into the bank and asked the tellers if they had any idea who had lost it. One of them looked at me and said, ‘Lady, I think you really ought to keep it.' Can you imagine such luck?”

That's typical of the kind of thing that happened to June. I thought it was good to have a lucky person around, maybe some of it would rub off on me. Maybe it did. After we got McDonald's going and built a larger staff, they all called her “Mother Martino.” She kept track of everyone's family fortunes, whose wife was having a baby, who was having marital difficulties, or whose birthday it was. She helped make the office a happy place.

It wasn't easy to be cheerful about my business in the early 1950s. Al Doty once told me that he liked to have lunch with me because he always learned something about his own business trends. “You seem to be able to see further into the future than the rest of us,” he said. I believe I did. And what I saw made me very unhappy. It was clear that Multimixer's days were numbered. Liquid Carbonic Corporation's stockholders had engaged in a big proxy fight. The man who had inherited the presidency was determined to continue the firm's manufacture of soda fountains out of dedication to employees who had served that division loyally for many years. His opponents wanted to scrap the soda fountain division, because it was losing money. They won. Other manufacturers were cutting back, too. The handwriting was on the wall, and Walgreen's underscored it when, for the first time, they began pulling soda fountains out of their stores.

The upshot of all this, I knew, was that I had to find a new product. Preferably something that would be as innovative and as attractive as Multimixer had been fifteen years earlier. I thought I had it in a unique folding kitchen table and benches that a neighbor of one of my salesmen had made. The idea appealed to me, so I went out to the man's home to see it. The table and benches folded up into the wall like an ironing board. It seemed like a great spacesaver for small kitchens. I had Louis Martino construct a model for me. It looked great. I had some reservations about it, but my anxiety to get a new product for my salesmen to market overcame my doubts. I gave it the name “Fold-a-Nook” and had the sample shipped to the Beverly Hills Hotel in California, where I intended to introduce it with a big splash.

All the top developers and builders I'd invited for the occasion came and sipped cocktails in the elegant room I'd rented. They admired the fresh flowers and praised the hors d'oeuvres. The party was a terrific success, but “Fold-a-Nook” was an enormous flop. I got not a single order.

I might have pursued that project, disappointed though I was at the lack of response in California, but I learned that unbeknown to June Martino and me, the salesman who had put me onto the thing was conspiring with my secretary to pirate the “Fold-a-Nook” from me. I fired both of them on the spot. Their rejoinder was to copy the “Fold-a-Nook” and bring it out under another name. That man had been a fellow worker and golfing companion since Lily Tulip Cup days; I had loaned him money for the down payment on his house. So I took no pleasure in the fact that they later went broke. By the same token, however, I couldn't listen for a moment when he called later to plead for a chance to get into McDonald's. A good executive does not like mistakes. He will allow his subordinates an honest mistake once in a while, but he will never condone or forgive dishonesty.

It was not long after the “Fold-a-Nook” fiasco that I became intrigued by the stories of the McDonald brothers and their operation that kept eight Multimixers whirring up a bucket brigade of milk shakes out there in sunny San Bernardino. “What the hell,” I thought, “I'll go see for myself.” So I booked my fifty-two-year-old bones onto the red-eye special and flew west to meet my future.

 

6

In the early 1930s in Southern California there developed a remarkable phenomenon in the food service business. It was the drive-in restaurant, a product of the Great Depression's crimp on the free-wheeling lifestyle that had grown up around movie-happy Hollywood. Drive-ins sprouted in city parking lots and spread along highways and canyon drives. Barbecue beef, pork, and chicken were the typical menu mainstays, but there was an endless variety in service approaches as feverish operators hustled to outdo one another. Aspiring starlets worked as carhops, glad of an opportunity that would help them pay the rent and exhibit their charms at the same time. The drive-in operators cooperated by competing to see who could come up with the most exciting carhop costume. One of them had his girls zooming around his parking lot on roller skates.

Into that strange scene came my future mentors in the hamburger business, the McDonald brothers, Maurice and Richard, a pair of transplanted New Englanders. Maurice had moved out to California in about 1926 and got a job handling props in one of the movie studios. Richard joined him after he was graduated from West High School in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1927. Mac and Dick worked together in the studio, moving scenery, setting up lights, driving trucks, and so forth until 1932, when they decided to go into business for themselves. They bought a run-down movie theater in Glendora. It provided a very sparse living, and Mac and Dick perfected the art of squeezing the bejesus out of every penny. They sometimes ate only one meal a day, and often that was a hot dog from a stand near their theater. Dick McDonald recalls that watching the owner of that hot dog stand, who had one of the few places in town that seemed to be doing any business, was probably what gave him and his brother the idea of going into the restaurant field.

In 1937 they talked the owner of a lot in Arcadia, near the Santa Anita racetrack, into putting up a small drive-in building for them. They knew nothing about food service, but they had a man who was experienced as a barbecue cook, and he showed them the ropes. Obviously, they picked it up pretty fast. Two years later they were scouting around the railroad town of San Bernardino looking for a location for a bigger barbecue operation. A fellow named S. E. Bagley from the Bank of America got them started with a $5,000 loan.