Ray Kroc

In 1922, Ray Kroc married his high school sweetheart Ethel Fleming. They had a daughter named Marilyn Kroc. The couple divorced in 1961.

In 1963, he married Jane Dobbins Green, a secretary. The marriage ended in a divorce in 1968.

In 1969, he married Joan Beverly Smith nee Mansfield. They first met in 1957, while he was married to Ethel and she to Rawland F. Smith, a Navy veteran and a McDonald's franchisee. They carried on a secret relationship for years before they could divorce their respective spouses and get married.

Raymond Albert Kroc was born on October 5, 1902, in Oak Park, at that time a village adjacent to the city of Chicago in the state of Illinois. Both his parents were of Czech origin and Ray was their eldest child.

His father, Alois "Louis" Kroc, originally from the village of Bøasy near Plzeò in Bohemia, was a man of great discipline. Employed with the telegraph company, Western Union, he rose to reach a high position in the organization. He was also a baseball fan, a craze Ray inherited from him.

His mother, Rose Mary nee Hrach, was born in Illinois. She was an affectionate lady and a homemaker. She also played the piano, earning extra money by giving lessons to children and adult. Ray also learned the piano from her, showing a natural affinity to it.

He had two younger siblings; Robert and Lorraine. As children, Ray and Bob had very different inclinations and the two often found it difficult even to talk to each other. However, they came closer as they became older.

While Bob was studious, Ray was anything but that. He often came up with novel schemes, dreaming up elaborate plans to make them work, earning the nickname of ‘Danny Daydreamer’. But his dreams were never idle; contrarily they were always linked to some form of action.

In 1919, at the age of 17, Ray Kroc began his career in sales, supplementing his income as a pianist at a nightclub or as a DJ at the local radio station. Subsequently, he held a series of jobs, selling everything from real estate in Fort Lauderdale to feminine accessories and embellishments.

For a while, he also joined American Stock Exchange in New York, reading ticker tapes and translating symbols. Finally, at the age of 21, he got his first steady job as a salesman at Lily Tulip Paper Cup Company.

Young, ambitious and hardworking, he now traveled around the country, selling paper cups, which he knew were there to stay. He took care of his customers’ needs, always keeping in touch with them. Very soon, he began to be counted as one of the top salesmen of the company.

In 1938, while selling paper cups, Kroc met a gentleman called Earl Prince. He had invented something, called ‘Multimixer’, which was actually a milkshake mixer with five spindles. Usually such shakers had one spindle that churned out one milkshake at a time while the ‘Multishaker’ could churn out five.

By then, after 16 years of service at Lily Tulip Paper Cup Company, he was feeling rather frustrated. Realizing that ‘Multimixer’ had great potential, he obtained exclusive marketing rights for the product and at the age of 37, gave up his secured job to form Prince Castle Sales.

In 1954, as the situation was rather grim, Ray Kroc noticed that one restaurant in San Bernardino had continued to order his mixers in bulk quantity. Curious, he made a visit and found it to be a drive-in restaurant with no indoor-sitting arrangements, run by two brothers, Richard and Maurice McDonald.

Looking around, he found that the restaurant used an assembly-line format to prepare and sell a large volume of food in very short time. Moreover, the menu was limited to cheeseburgers, hamburgers, fries, drinks and milkshakes; but the sale was so huge that it ran eight of his mixers continuously.

Amazed, he began to loiter around the parking lot, talking to its customers and found that they came here regularly for its inexpensive, but tasty hamburgers and French fries. Immediately, he began to dream of a chain of McDonalds, each of which would use five to eight of his multimixers.

When he talked to the McDonald brothers they initially did not show any interest; but Kroc convinced them to give him the exclusive rights to sell the McDonald's method. He was then 52 years old, suffering from diabetes and arthritis. Yet, he knew that he must not miss the opportunity.

On April 15, 1955, Kroc opened his first restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois. By the year end, he had opened two more; grossing $235,000 in sales. Everywhere, he used the McDonald brothers’ format, paying special attention to cleanliness. Later, he began to sell franchises, collecting 1.9% of the gross sale.