Seventy years ago this week, a hamburger joint named McDonald’s opened in northwest suburban Des Plaines. No one except for its Oak Park-raised owner Ray Kroc may have believed the tiny to-go place that offered hamburgers for 15 cents ($1.80 in today’s dollars), fries for 10 cents ($1.20) and milkshakes for 20 cents ($2.40) would one day become the second-largest fast-food chain in number of stores in the world. (McDonald’s was overtaken by a Chinese bubble tea and ice cream brand in March, according to Newsweek.)
Certainly the Tribune didn’t. The paper didn’t write about the operation until 1962. By then, McDonald’s had 341 restaurants in 40 states and had served its 700 millionth burger. Today there are 36,000 restaurants in more than 100 countries.
Though the restaurant’s concept began with brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald in southern California, many of the company’s innovations have happened right here in Chicago. Here’s a look back at what we found about them in the Tribune archives with commentary provided by Kroc himself from his 1977 autobiography written with former Tribune feature editor Robert Anderson, “Grinding it out: The making of McDonald’s.”
At 52 years old, Kroc had eked out a living for himself, his first wife, Ethel, and their daughter, Marilyn, as a pianist, a failed real estate speculator in Florida and then a dedicated paper cup salesman for the Lily-Tulip Co. and distributor for the Multimixer milkshake machine.
Kroc’s life changed after he saw eight of his Multimixers in action inside a red-and-white tiled octagon-shaped drive-in operated by the McDonald brothers in San Bernardino, California. “Speedee” was the eatery’s original mascot.
“Hamburgers, fries, and beverages were prepared on an assembly line basis, and, to the amazement of everyone, Mac and Dick included, the thing worked!” Kroc wrote in “Grinding it out.” “Of course, the simplicity of the procedure allowed the McDonalds to concentrate on quality in every step, and that was the trick. When I saw it working that day in 1954, I felt like some latter-day Newton who’d just had an Idaho potato caromed off his skull.”
The McDonald brothers — who had no desire to leave California — agreed to let Kroc franchise copies of their bustling business.
Why did Kroc choose to build his first location in Des Plaines? Convenience. The lot at 400 N. Lee St., southwest of the intersection of River and Rand roads, was “a seven-minute drive from my home and a short walk from the Northwestern Railroad Station, from where I could commute to the city.”
Immediately, there were issues in replicating the McDonald’s brothers’ playbook. Their 900-square-foot, red-and-white tiled building had been designed for a desert climate and not for rain, freezing temperatures and snow. Their process of creating french fries from scratch, when followed here, produced a mushy, bland concoction. Food storage required a basement for the building, which had to be negotiated with the brothers because it deviated from their designs. Still, Kroc worked out the kinks.
On its first day, the store’s sales were $366.12 and $705.13 on its second (a Saturday). Customers walked up to a window to place their order, but had to eat their food in their cars because there was no indoor seating.
“When the American family of today thinks of something to do, they think about going somewhere in the car,” Kroc told the Tribune in 1962. “And when they think about something to eat, it’s more likely to be hamburger than anything else. We just built a place where car meets hamburger. And we built rainbows on it so it wouldn’t go unnoticed.”
The original Des Plaines location closed in March 1984, but McDonald’s Museum opened in its place in May 1985. Some thought that building — which often flooded due to its proximity to the Des Plaines River — should be preserved as a historic landmark, but it was torn down in January 2018. Today, the site is a gravel lot.
Five years after the McDonald’s in Des Plaines opened, 200 more were up and running. Though Kroc still used the McDonald brothers’ guidelines, he also developed his own slogan: “Q.S.C. & V: Quality, service, cleanliness and value.”
By 1961 — when McDonald’s grossed $55 million and Americans were eating 100 million 15-cent burgers a year — it was clear the company needed to train its owners and high-level employees from around the country to create uniformity in the products they sold. That’s how Hamburger University was created.
The school, which offered degrees in Burgerology, started in the basement of the Elk Grove Village restaurant. The location worked because there was a hotel across the street where managers from locations outside the area could stay while completing classes. Fifteen students graduated from the first class in February 1961.
By 1967 — when McDonald’s opened its first restaurant outside the United States in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, and Kroc bought out the McDonald brothers for $2.7 million — all prospective operators of a franchise were required to spend three weeks there learning cooking and management techniques.
A new $500,000 Hamburger University opened at 2010 E. Higgins Road in Elk Grove Village in November 1968 and included closed-circuit television to demonstrate techniques used in the company’s restaurants. Cutaway models of kitchen equipment and even classes on how to serve dine-in guests — which McDonald’s didn’t accommodate until 1969 — gave students hands-on experience.
Now there are numerous H.U. campuses around the world, according to the company.
In 1965, there were 700 McDonald’s restaurants; the Filet-O-Fish, created by Cincinnati franchisee Lou Groen, was added to the national menu; and the company offered shares of common stock to the public at $22.50 (or $229 in today’s dollars) per share.
The first stock split happened one year later and there have been 11 more since then. The current price for one share of McDonald’s stock is more than $300. If you had purchased one share of McDonald’s stock at its initial offering and held onto it, according to the Motley Fool, then you would now own 729 shares worth more than $218,000.
The same year the Big Mac made its way to the McDonald’s menu, Petty, a former barber, became the first Black man to franchise a McDonald’s location. He also was the founding president of the National Black McDonald’s Operators Association.
“McDonald’s is vastly different now from the company it was back in the early days, and that’s good,” Kroc wrote in his autobiography. “We responded to the social changes of the late sixties by increasing minority hiring, and organizing a program to bring in qualified black and women operators.”
The Tribune reported in 1977 that 14 of the 52 McDonald’s locations in Chicago had Black owners. Four of the 14 were owned by Petty. Today, 67 restaurants in Chicago and Northwest Indiana are Black-owned, according to the Black McDonald’s Operators Association.
Petty died on March 21, 2009, and a section of Marquette Road near his first McDonald’s at 6560 S. Stony Island Ave. — across the street from the future Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park — is named in his honor. A multipurpose room inside the center’s Forum Building will also be named after Petty.
As McDonald’s locations underwent a dramatic transformation to become brick-sided buildings topped with sloping roofs, so did the company’s headquarters.
Originally occupying three floors of the LaSalle-Wacker Building at 221 N. LaSalle St. in Chicago, a new campus design was unveiled at McDonald’s annual meeting in 1969. Ground was soon broken on the 74-acre site in Oak Brook.
Space-age designer William L. Pulgram was hired to create “think tank” spaces inside the eight-story building to boost creativity. They hosted waterbeds. Workspaces were without doors — not even for Kroc’s workspace, which featured a photo of him and his fellow World War I ambulance driver trainee Walt Disney. Desks folded into walls, hi-fi stereos pumped out music for inspiration and modern sculptures complimented the futuristic design.
Hamburger University moved to Oak Brook in 1984 and the campus expanded to include a hotel to house its attendees.
The 80-acre former Oak Brook campus site was bought for $40 million in 2019 by John Paul DeJoria, who co-founded John Paul Mitchell Systems and Patrón Spirits Company. Plans for the proposed Oak Brook Reserve development include restaurants, shopping and condominium and townhouse residences.
After the first McDonald’s location with indoor seating opened in Huntsville, Alabama, in July 1966, the company began appealing to families. Commercials aired starting in 1970, featuring the McDonaldland gang: Hamburglar, Captain Crook, Mayor McCheese, Grimace, Big Mac and Ronald McDonald (who had been introduced in 1965). Sid and Marty Krofft won a copyright infringement case in 1973 since the characters were similar to their “Living Island” inhabitants.)
In 1982, restaurants introduced either indoor or outdoor playground areas, which later became known as PlayPlaces. Parents could sit and enjoy their Egg McMuffin or hot fruit pie after their children devoured their Happy Meals and bounced around nearby in a themed jungle gym or ball pit. Some locations hosted birthday parties that included party favors, activities and even a birthday cake.
R-Gym concepts, where children were encouraged to increase their physical activity after McDonald’s was criticized for contributing to child obesity, came and went in the early 2000s.
The same year Chicken McNuggets were introduced, Chicago got its first 24-hour McDonald’s restaurant at 600 N. Clark St. in the River North neighborhood.
The flagship’s decor was inspired by a 1950s soda fountain and included neon sculptures and a Wurlitzer jukebox — something Kroc outlawed inside his early outlets along with pay telephones and vending machines.
“All of those things create unproductive traffic in a store and encourage loitering that can disrupt your customers,” he wrote in “Grinding it out.” “This would downgrade the family image we wanted to create for McDonald’s. Furthermore, in some areas the vending machines were controlled by the crime syndicate, and I wanted no part of that.”
Named the Original Rock ‘N’ Roll McDonald’s, the site hosted sock hops, cruise nights, film festivals and offered MacMan order delivery. Ten years later, it was serving about 8,000 customers a day. The only busier location in the world was in Moscow.
But by 2004, the site was tired. Its 24,000-square-foot replacement with two drive-through lanes opened in April 2005. Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin called the two-story glass-lined structure “supersized meets retro” but also “a missed opportunity to lift this part of Chicago out of its theme park muck.”
The restaurant was rebuilt again — this time in an environmentally friendly way — in early 2018.
In 1983, Forbes estimated Kroc was worth $475 million, making him the fifth richest Illinoisan behind the Pritzkers (hotels, real estate, investments), Searles (pharmaceuticals), Crowns (Materials Service Corp.) and Donnelleys (printing).
Kroc had been able to purchase whatever he wanted — except for his hometown baseball team the Chicago Cubs. Though Chicago Bears owner George Halas once quipped he offered Kroc a cut of his team. Instead, Kroc settled for the San Diego Padres in 1974, whose fans were grateful to him for keeping the team in California instead of moving it to Washington, D.C. (Though he had to apologize to his players after berating them during a game over the public address system.) The team remains in San Diego. Their stadium, Petco Park, has a locker dedicated to Kroc that includes a photo of the first McDonald’s location in Des Plaines.
Kroc, whose Hula Burger concept was among a few of his ideas that failed, became a philanthropist. He celebrated his 70th birthday by giving away $7.5 million to Chicago charities and institutions. The first Ronald McDonald House, where families could stay while their children were treated at a nearby hospital, opened in Philadelphia in 1974 and the second opened in Chicago in April 1977.
But the founder of the franchise was slowing down. In 1980, Kroc suffered a stroke. He had diabetes throughout his life and arthritis was complicating his health, too. A report in 1982 said he had been using to a wheelchair for some time.
Kroc died of heart failure at his La Jolla, California, home. He was 81.
Kroc’s memorial was held in Oak Park so his employees could attend in person or watch it from work. On the same day, a Cook County Circuit Court judge awarded a record $52 million to an ice cream maker who contended that Kroc and McDonald’s went back on an agreement for it to supply the chain with a “Triple Ripple” ice cream cone.
More than 2,000 corporate employees exchanged the forested Oak Brook campus for a modern nine-story building in Fulton Market and the neighborhood known as the West Loop.
The new $250 million headquarters building has a restaurant open to the public on the first floor, Hamburger University on the second floor and the third floor houses test kitchens.
Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios once stood on the site.
Named for CosMc (pronounced “cosmic”), a little-known company character (a space alien who visited the fictional McDonaldland in the late 1980s and early ’90s), the theme essentially throws back to the McDonald’s drive-in origin story. Though, instead of milkshakes and hamburgers, customers can order popping boba slushies and spicy queso sandwiches.
And it’s a drive-thru only. There is no indoor dining room, outdoor seating or walk-up window. There are also no restrooms, important for a beverage concept, but you are welcome to visit the McDonald’s next door, said a CosMc’s employee.
