McDonald’s Before McDonald’s

HISTORY This Week

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History, Education, Society & Culture

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

May 15, 1940. It’s opening day. San Bernardino, California is a city on the rise, and to meet this new demand for cheap, good food, two brothers have created a restaurant: McDonald’s Famous Barbecue. You can order a PB&J sandwich, barbecued pork, baked beans, and yes, a hamburger. It’s a work in progress, but Dick and Mac McDonald never stop innovating. How did the McDonald brothers engineer a system that would be replicated in thousands of locations across the globe? And why don't they get the credit they deserve? Special thanks to Adam Chandler, journalist and author of Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America's Fast-Food Kingdom; and Marcia Chatelain, professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Here are two other great books we used in putting this episode together: Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away by Lisa Napoli; and McDonald’s: Behind the Arches by John F. Love. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History Channel, original podcast.
0:05.3	History this week, May 15th, 1940.
0:11.1	I'm Sally Helm.
0:14.5	San Bernardino, a working-class city 60 miles east of Los Angeles.
0:20.4	It's known for its orange groves and as a rest stop for weary drivers making their way across the Mojave
0:27.0	desert on Route 66.
0:29.5	And today, there's a new stop on that route, a strange-looking octagon-shaped wooden building.
0:44.3	It has a huge overhanging roof trimmed with signs, red-hots, giant malts, hamburgers, and a neon sign announcing the name.
0:47.3	McDonald's Famous Barbecue.
0:51.3	This restaurant is opening today, and it caters to a new kind of American consumer,
0:58.5	drivers. The owners are two brothers, Dick and Mac McDonald. They want to give people good
1:04.7	food and quick service right at their cars. Those cars pull in headfirst, fanning out from the octagon like spokes on a
1:13.7	wheel. And the waitresses, or car hops, come right up to your window. The menu is varied. You can get the
1:21.5	featured items, barbecued beef, ham, or pork. There's a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or what's called an aristocratic
1:29.8	hamburger. All of it served with a side of fries. Mac MacDonald later says that opening day
1:37.9	went relatively smoothly. There's still a lot to figure out, but he and his brother are off to a good
1:43.6	start.
1:45.8	Better than they know.
1:52.5	Because they had no real plans of launching the biggest fast food chain in the world.
1:58.7	But that's exactly what McDonald's famous barbecue would become.
2:06.3	Today, the McDonald's brothers open McDonald's. How did Dick and Mac engineer a system that would be replicated in thousands of locations across the globe?
2:11.5	And why don't they get the credit they deserve?
	...

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