“The two most important requirements for success are: first, being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it.”          Ray Kroc

 1954 – On the road in Central Missouri: Ray Kroc found a phone booth, stopped, and called the corporate office. He thought there had been a mistake on the sales order. He had received an order for eight milkshake machines from a San Bernardino, California, restaurant. He wondered, “What kind of restaurant makes eight milkshakes at a time?” But the order was correct.

Still, the order puzzled Kroc. He had sold paper and equipment to restaurants for more than 30 years and had seen more than his share of good and bad restaurants. He had to find out about this restaurant. He pulled out his map – 1,782 miles to San Bernardino. Kroc phoned his wife and told her he would not be home until Sunday.

The son of an unsuccessful real estate salesman who had emigrated from Czechoslovakia, Ray Kroc grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. At 15, like another Oak Park teen, writer Ernest Hemingway, Kroc dropped out of high school to become a Red Cross ambulance driver during World War I. After the war, he joined the Lilly Tulip Cup Company and sold paper cups for 16 years.

In 1937, after seeing a machine that mixed multiple milkshakes at a time, he told his wife, Ethel, that they could get rich selling these wonder machines. Against her advice, he quit his job as Midwest sales manager for Lilly Tulip and went to work for the Prince Castle Company near Chicago. For 17 years he drove around the country selling the mixers out of the trunk of his car. He didn’t get rich, but his job paid the bills most months.

Two days after receiving the unusual order for eight milkshake machines, Kroc pulled up at the McDonald brother’s restaurant on North E Street in San Bernardino. What he saw amazed him. People were lined up at the order window to buy hamburgers, french fries, and milkshakes. It was 2 p.m.

Kroc had never seen a restaurant as clean, organized, and efficient. Orders were typically ready in one minute, not 30 minutes. After enjoying the best french fries of his life, he met the restaurant owners, Dick and Mac McDonald.

Kroc was excited. Instead of a hamburger joint, he saw a gold mine. He suggested that the brothers franchise their business and take the restaurant coast to coast. But the brothers, who already had three mediocre franchises in Southern California, weren’t interested in Kroc’s wild idea.

A week later, Kroc called Dick, but the answer was still no. After numerous calls and another trip to San Bernardino, Kroc finally persuaded the McDonalds to hire him as their exclusive franchise agent. They agreed to a half percent of gross sales.

When Kroc told Ethel that he was quitting his job and buying a McDonald’s franchise, he promised her they would be rich. She had heard it all before and ran to her bedroom and cried. On April 15, 1955, 52-year-old Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. Within a year, he opened a second franchise in his hometown of Oak Park. By 1960, Kroc had franchised 250 restaurants nationwide when he bought the McDonald brothers’ interest in the business for $2.7 million.

With dogged determination, Ray Kroc turned McDonald’s into one of the world’s largest fast-food restaurant chains, and the golden arches became an American icon. At the time of his death in 1984 at age 81, there were 9,000 McDonald’s restaurants in 41 countries. Today the business that started as a hot dog stand in 1940 in San Bernadino has more than 50,000 restaurants in more than 100 countries.

Atlanta newspaper columnist Lewis Grizzard once joked, “Life has really changed; we used to go the bathroom outside and eat inside. Now we go to the bathroom inside and eat outside.” Ray Kroc is primarily responsible for changing America’s eating habits. How did a high school dropout, paper-cup-and-milk-shake-machine-salesman do it? According to Kroc, the Father of Fast Food, two words, “vision and persistence!”