Eighty years ago, brothers brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald opened a barbecue joint in San Bernardino, Calif., a restaurant they would redesign, eight years later, into what would become one of the world’s most recognizable corporate brands.
The original restaurant, according to the Press Enterprise, was a popular spot in the post-World War II cruising scene. The brothers saw the emergence of the Baby Boom generation, and in 1948, reopened their restaurant as a family-oriented, burgers and fries joint.
The brothers’ paths would soon cross with native Chicagoan Ray Kroc, who left high school after his sophomore year to join the World War I Red Cross ambulance corps.
The war ended before his unit was sent overseas with Kroc returning home to earn a living as a musician and later selling paper cups, according to the McDonald's corporate history website. In 1939, he became the exclusive distributor of the Multimixer, a milkshake mixing machine.
In 1954, Kroc visited the McDonald brothers which led to him becoming their franchise agent. He opened up the first restaurant for McDonald’s System, Inc., a predecessor of McDonald’s Corp. in Des Plaines, Ill., on April 15, 1955, designating the location McDonald’s No. 1.
Kroc bought the rights to the brothers’ company in 1961 for $2.7 million.
In 2015, several scenes of "The Founder," starring Michael Keaton as Kroc, were filmed in Atlanta, including at Alfredo's Italian Restaurant on Cheshire Bridge Road.
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In 2019, the publicly traded McDonald’s Corp. made almost $22 billion in revenue. McDonald's restaurants are found in 120 countries and territories and serve 68 million customers each day.
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