Mcdonald Brothers Quotes

No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages 1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5. 3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.” 4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank. 5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13. 6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14. 7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15. 8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil. 9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19. 10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961. 11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936. 12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23 13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24 14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record 15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity 16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 28 18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world 19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter 20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind 22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest 23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight 26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions. 27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon. 28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas 30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger 31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States 32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out. 33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out. 35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa. 36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president. 37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels. 38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat". 40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived 41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise 42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out 43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US 44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats 45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President

...in a world where McDonald's now sells salads with low-fat dressing, anything is possible.

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.

In essence, the message was always the same, “I want one of those mixers of yours like the McDonald brothers have in San Bernardino, California.” I got curiouser and curiouser. Who were these McDonald brothers, and why were customers picking up on the Multimixer from them when I had similar machines in lots of places? (The machine, by this time had five spindles instead of six.) So I did some checking and was astonished to learn that the McDonalds had not one Multimixer, not two or three, but eight! The mental picture of eight Multimixers churning out forty shakes at one time was just too much to be believed. These mixers sold at $150 apiece, mind you, and that was back in 1954.

Talvin Singh, Thievery Corporation, A.R. Rahman, AmarBaaba Maal, Asian Dub Foundation, Autechre, Badmarsh and Sri, Bjork, Black Star Liner, The Blue Nile, Boards of Canada, The Chemical Brothers, Dead Can Dance, The Fake Portishead, Future Sound of London, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Goldfrapp, Jamyang, Joi, Jeff Buckley, Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham: original movie soundtrack, Nitin Sawhney, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Rakesh Chaurasia, Sigur Rós, State of Bengal.

and offered them little in any event. There was even talk of pressuring North Korea to demilitarize significantly. The Chinese wished for peace, not conflict, in the region and James Marshall was the president’s man to make it happen. Lifelong friends, they had both excelled in their fields, President Jack King in the military and James Marshall in business. When James had announced his retirement on his fifty-fifth birthday, President King had pounced; Marshall was perfect to obtain the treaties that would secure the Far East. Jack loved and trusted him like a brother. With over four hundred million dollars in the bank, all James Marshall had wanted was to enjoy life but he’d never let Jack down and he’d certainly never

more than 21,000 restaurants in no fewer than 100 countries.1 Leadership ability— or more specifically the lack of leadership ability—was the lid on the McDonald brothers’ effectiveness.

Power relations among new people and existing owners evolve, but always as politics. Activists and unions in Los Angeles once fought off a Walmart successfully. It is not biological evolution if Walmarts grow when planted. It’s the struggle of history. Joan Didion left California, sold to McDonald’s, and chose to re-zone the ranch. Her brother, whom she worked with to do this, was a powerful lobbyist for the National Realty Committee during the time when such lobbyists pushed to deregulate mortgage underwriting. He participated in the lead-up to the crisis in mortgage-backed securities in 2008. Powerful land-owning families play a role in how we build our cities, how we claim and imagine the land. I wanted Didion to cop to her role in the process.

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

Cooking with gas was a popular expression at the time, but it was an in-joke with us. When somebody was cooking with gas around our place it meant that he was really doing everything right. This stemmed from our experience in patterning our stores on the plans provided by the McDonald brothers. Jim Schindler insisted on using gas units for making french fries instead of the electric friers the McDonald boys were using. Gas proved to be more efficient for this purpose. It was cheaper, and we got a better product. So we tried to “cook with gas” in all our operations at McDonald’s. The

But I paid particular attention to the french-fry operation. The brothers had indicated this was one of the key elements in their sales success, and they’d described the process.

The McDonald brothers kept their potatoes—top quality Idaho spuds, about eight ounces apiece—piled in bins in their back warehouse building. Since rats and mice and other varmints like to eat potatoes, the walls of the bins were of two layers of small-mesh chicken wire. This kept the critters out and allowed fresh air to circulate among the potatoes. I watched the spuds being bagged up and followed their trip by four-wheeled cart to the octagonal drive-in building. There they were carefully peeled, leaving a tiny proportion of skin on, and then they were cut into long sections and dumped into large sinks of cold water. The french-fry man, with his sleeves rolled up to the shoulders, would plunge his arms into the floating schools of potatoes and gently stir them. I could see the water turning white with starch. This was drained off and the residual starch was rinsed from the glistening morsels with a flexible spray hose. Then the potatoes went into wire baskets, stacked in production-line fashion next to the deep-fry vats.

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.

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,

But after World War II, the brothers realized they were running hard just to stay in one place. They weren’t building volume even though their parking lot was always full. So they did a courageous thing. They closed that successful restaurant in 1948 and reopened it a short time later with a radically different kind of operation. It was a restaurant stripped down to the minimum in service and menu, the prototype for legions of fast-food units that later would spread across the land. Hamburgers, fries, and beverages were prepared on an assembly line basis, and, to the amazement of everyone, Mac and Dick included, the thing worked!

but I would have rights to franchise copies of their operations everywhere else in the United States. The buildings would have to be exactly like the new one their architect had drawn up with the golden arches. The name, McDonald’s, would be on all of them, of course, and I was one hundred percent in favor of that. I had a feeling that it would be one of those promotable names that would catch the public fancy. I was for the contractual clauses that obligated me to follow their plans down to the last detail, too—even to signs and menus. But I should have been more cautious there. The agreement was that I could not deviate from their plans in my units unless the changes were spelled out in writing, signed by both brothers, and sent to me by registered mail. This seemingly innocuous requirement created massive problems for me.

The agreement gave me 1.9 percent of the gross sales from franchisees. I had proposed 2 percent. The McDonalds said, “No, no, no! If you tell a franchisee you are going to take two percent, he’ll balk. It sounds too full and rounded. Make it one and nine-tenths, and it sounds like a lot less.” So I humored them on that one. The brothers were to get .5 percent out of my 1.9 percent. This seemed fair enough, and it was.

Besides, the brothers did have some equipment that couldn’t be readily copied. They had a specially fabricated aluminum griddle for one thing, and the set-up of all the rest of the equipment was in a very precise, step-saving pattern. Then there was the name. I had a strong intuitive sense that the name McDonald’s was exactly right.

Instead, they were obtuse, they were utterly indifferent to the fact that I was putting every cent I had and all I could borrow into this project. When we sat down with our lawyers in attendance, the brothers acknowledged the problems but refused to write a single letter that would permit me to make changes. “We have told you by telephone that you may go ahead and alter the plans as we discussed,” said their attorney, Frank Cotter. “But the contract calls for a registered letter. If Mr. Kroc does not have that, he is put in jeopardy,” said my counsel. “That’s your problem.” It was almost as though they were hoping I would fail. This was a peculiar attitude for them to take because the more successful the franchising, the more money they would make. My attorney gave up on the situation.

He had a son-in-law named Ed MacLuckie who was looking for a job and who had expressed a liking for the food service business. Ed was working a wholesale hardware territory over in Michigan at the time and it was not going well. So I talked to him. He was one of these whip-lean, nervous types who are often very fussy and fastidious and have great endurance. Just the kind of qualifications I was looking for, so I hired him as a manager of my first store. Art Bender, the McDonald brothers’ manager, came to Des Plaines and helped Ed and me open that store on April 15, 1955.

I detailed it all, and when I got to the point where they stored them in the shaded chicken-wire bins, he said, “That’s it!” He went on to explain that when potatoes are dug, they are mostly water. They improve in taste as they dry out and the sugars change to starch. The McDonald brothers had, without knowing it, a natural curing process in their open bins, which allowed the desert breeze to blow over the potatoes. With the help of the potato people, I devised a curing system of my own. I had the potatoes stored in the basement so the older ones would always be next in line for the kitchen. I also put a big electric fan down there and gave the spuds a continuous blast of air, which greatly amused Ed MacLuckie. “We have the world’s most pampered potatoes,” he said. “I almost feel guilty about cooking them.

But there was one other agreement they hadn’t told me about, and that was for Cook County, Illinois, where I had my home, my office, and my first model store. The brothers had sold Cook County to the Frejlack Ice Cream Company interest for $5,000! It cost me $25,000 to buy that area from the Frejlacks, and it was blood money. I could not afford it. I was already in debt for all I was worth. I couldn’t blame the Frejlacks, of course, they were completely aboveboard and fair. But I could never forgive the McDonalds. Unwittingly or not, they had made an ass of me—in the Biblical sense. I’d been blindfolded by their assurances and led to grind like blind Samson in the prison house. My

Even with shaggy-dog hair, Mac’s red locks are ten times nicer than mine. My shade of red is more in the Ronald McDonald family. And when I don’t style it in my signature smooth, wavy curls, I look like those Chinese crested dogs that are always getting meme’d on the internet with something cruel. Poor dears.

McDonald’s “two all-beef patties

As a child I was confused by my father’s love of steak. I remember being eight and my dad ceremoniously announcing to the family, “We’re having steak tonight!” as if Abe Lincoln were coming over for dinner. My siblings and I would politely act excited as we watched TV. “That’s great, Dad!” I remember thinking, Big deal. Why can’t we just have McDonald’s? To me, my father just had this weird thing with steak. I thought, Dads obsess about steak the way kids obsess about candy. Well, my dad did. I’d watch him trudge out behind our house in all types of weather to the propane grill after me or one of my brothers barely averted death by lighting it for him. He would happily take his post out there, chain-smoking his Merit Ultra Light cigarettes and drinking his Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch alone in the darkness of Northwest Indiana. He’d stare into the flame like it was an ancient oracle relaying a prophecy that solved the mysteries of life.

In 1954 two brothers, Dick and Maurice McDonald, operated a single drive-in that seemed to be the model of simplicity and efficient execution. Unlike other drive-ins of the era, McDonald’s had three base items: hamburger, French fries, and drinks. It had no seating. The hamburgers were priced at 15 cents, an extra 4 cents for cheese. Fries cost 10 cents, a milkshake 20 cents.

really sorry you lost your sister and brother-in-law. There’s never anything adequate to say in sympathy,

I first met Tracey Gold when we played brother and sister in a McDonald’s commercial. We met again in the made-for-television movie Beyond Witch Mountain. Later she played a cheerleader while I played a football star in the Robin Williams/Kurt Russell film The Best of Times. She was cute, she was good and she was always working on something. I had a bit of a crush on her at the time—which probably sounds a bit creepy to the rest of the world who think of us as siblings.

Ambani did point to an unfortunate trait in his countrymen. ‘You must know that, in this country, people are very jealous.’ It was not like in Hong Kong or other East Asian countries, where people applauded each other’s success, he claimed. In India success was seen as the prerogative of certain families. But he didn’t really mind. ‘Jealousy is a mark of respect,’ he said.