April 15, 1955: McDonald's (As We Know It) Is Founded

April 15, 1955: Ray Kroc opens the 1st franchised McDonald's restaurant, in the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines, Illinois. Food on planet Earth will never be the same.

Brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald, New Hampshire natives whose family had lived in California since the 1920s, opened a hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California in 1940. In 1948, they created the Speedee Service System to produce their meals, a method that became the standard for fast food.

They focused on a reduced menu, consisting of 9 items: Their 15-cent hamburger, a 20-cent cheeseburger, soft drinks, milk, coffee, potato chips, and a slice of pie. They were successful enough to begin franchising their system in 1953, with a restaurant in Phoenix.

In 1954, the brothers bought 8 Multi-Mixer machines for mixing milkshakes from Prince Castle. That caught the attention of the Prince Castle salesman who took the order, Ray Kroc. Kroc went to San Bernardino in 1954, and met the brothers. They hired him as their franchise agent. On April 15, 1955, Kroc opened his 1st McDonald's, in Des Plaines.

Ray Kroc

Kroc became frustrated with the McDonald brothers' desire to maintain a small number of restaurants. The brothers also consistently told Kroc he could not make changes to things such as the original blueprint. Finally, in 1961, Kroc bought the brothers out, for $2.7 million, calculated so as to ensure each brother received $1 million after taxes. (In 2022 money, that $2.7 million works out to about $29.5 million.)

Maurice McDonald died in 1971, at the age of 69. Richard McDonald died in 1998, at 89. They got their million after taxes, and that was about it. Kroc became one of the richest men in the world, dying in 1984, with McDonald's having over 50 billion hamburgers served.

A 2019 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History featured "Nice" Peter Shukoff playing Ronald McDonald, and "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist playing the Burger King, with rapper MC Goldiloxx putting on a bright red wig and playing Wendy from Wendy's.

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April 15, 1955 was a Friday. Football was out of season. The NBA season had ended 5 days earlier. The Stanley Cup had been won the night before. And there were only 3 baseball games scheduled for that day:

* The New York Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox, 6-4 at Fenway Park in Boston. The day before, Elston Howard became the 1st black player for the Yankees in a regular-season game. He did not play in this game, but Moose Skowron, Hank Bauer and Joe Collins hit home runs, and Mickey Mantle wetn 1-for-4. Ted Williams did not play.

* The Brooklyn Dodgers beat their arch-rivals, the New York Giants, 6-5 at the Polo Grounds. Carl Furillo hit 2 home runs, and Duke Snider added 1, in support of Billy Loes. Jackie Robinson went 0-for-5. Willie Mays went 2-for-4.

* And the Cleveland Indians beat the Detroit Tigers, 7-3 at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. (It was renamed Tiger Stadium in 1961.) This was the major league debut of Herb Score, a 22-year-old lefthanded pitcher from Queens, and he went the distance, striking out 9 -- but he also walked 9. Score would end up striking out more batters than any rookie in major league history, until Dwight Gooden in 1984. Al Kaline went 2-for-4 with an RBI, starting a season that would see him become the American League's youngest-ever batting champion.