Speedee service

BY THE END OF 1944, Carl Karcher owned four hot dog carts in Los Angeles. In addition to running the carts, he still worked full‑time for the Armstrong Bakery. When a restaurant across the street from the Heinz farm went on sale, Carl decided to buy it. He quit the bakery, bought the restaurant, fixed it up, and spent a few weeks learning how to cook. On January 16, 1945, his twenty‑eighth birthday, Carl’s Drive‑In Barbeque opened its doors. The restaurant was small, rectangular, and unexceptional, with red tiles on the roof. Its only hint of flamboyance was a five‑pointed star atop the neon sign in the parking lot. During business hours, Carl did the cooking, Margaret worked behind the cash register, and carhops served most of the food. After closing time, Carl stayed late into the night, cleaning the bathrooms and mopping the floors. Once a week, he prepared the “special sauce” for his hamburgers, making it in huge kettles on the back porch of his house, stirring it with a stick and then pouring it into one‑gallon jugs.

After World War II, business soared at Carl’s Drive‑In Barbeque, along with the economy of southern California. The oil business and the film business had thrived in Los Angeles during the 1920s and 1930s. But it was World War II that transformed southern California into the most important economic region in the West. The war’s effect on the state, in the words of historian Carey McWilliams, was a “fabulous boom.” Between 1940 and 1945, the federal government spent nearly $20 billion in California, mainly in and around Los Angeles, building airplane factories and steel mills, military bases and port facilities. During those six years, federal spending was responsible for nearly half of the personal income in southern California. By the end of World War II, Los Angeles was the second‑largest manufacturing center in America, with an industrial output surpassed only by that of Detroit. While Hollywood garnered most of the headlines, defense spending remained the focus of the local economy for the next two decades, providing about one‑third of its jobs.

The new prosperity enabled Carl and Margaret to buy a house five blocks away from their restaurant. They added more rooms as the family grew to include twelve children: nine girls and three boys. In the early 1950s Anaheim began to feel much less rural and remote. Walt Disney bought 160 acres of orange groves just a few miles from Carl’s Drive‑in Barbeque, chopped down the trees, and started to build Disneyland. In the neighboring town of Garden Grove, the Reverend Robert Schuller founded the nation’s first Drive‑in Church, preaching on Sunday mornings at a drive‑in movie theater, spreading the Gospel through the little speakers at each parking space, attracting large crowds with the slogan “Worship as you are… in the family car.” The city of Anaheim started to recruit defense contractors, eventually persuading Northrop, Boeing, and North American Aviation to build factories there. Anaheim soon became the fastest‑growing city in the nation’s fastest‑growing state. Carl’s Drive‑In Barbeque thrived, and Carl thought its future was secure. And then he heard about a restaurant in the “Inland Empire,” sixty miles east of Los Angeles, that was selling high‑quality hamburgers for 15 cents each – 20 cents less than what Carl charged. He drove to E Street in San Bernardino and saw the shape of things to come. Dozens of people were standing in line to buy bags of “McDonald’s Famous Hamburgers.”

Richard and Maurice McDonald had left New Hampshire for southern California at the start of the Depression, hoping to find jobs in Hollywood. They worked as set builders on the Columbia Film Studios back lot, saved their money, and bought a movie theater in Glendale. The theater was not a success. In 1937 they opened a drive‑in restaurant in Pasadena, trying to cash in on the new craze, hiring three carhops and selling mainly hot dogs. A few years later they moved to a larger building on E Street in San Bernardino and opened the McDonald Brothers Burger Bar Drive‑In. The new restaurant was located near a high school, employed twenty carhops, and promptly made the brothers rich. Richard and “Mac” McDonald bought one of the largest houses in San Bernardino, a hillside mansion with a tennis court and a pool.

By the end of the 1940s the McDonald brothers had grown dissatisfied with the drive‑in business. They were tired of constantly looking for new carhops and short‑order cooks – who were in great demand – as the old ones left for higher‑paying jobs elsewhere. They were tired of replacing the dishes, glassware, and silverware their teenage customers constantly broke or ripped off. And they were tired of their teenage customers. The brothers thought about selling the restaurant. Instead, they tried something new.

The McDonalds fired all their carhops in 1948, closed their restaurant, installed larger grills, and reopened three months later with a radically new method of preparing food. It was designed to increase the speed, lower prices, and raise the volume of sales. The brothers eliminated almost two‑thirds of the items on their old menu. They got rid of everything that had to be eaten with a knife, spoon, or fork. The only sandwiches now sold were hamburgers or cheeseburgers. The brothers got rid of their dishes and glassware, replacing them with paper cups, paper bags, and paper plates. They divided the food preparation into separate tasks performed by different workers. To fill a typical order, one person grilled the hamburger; another “dressed” and wrapped it; another prepared the milk shake; another made the fries; and another worked the counter. For the first time, the guiding principles of a factory assembly line were applied to a commercial kitchen. The new division of labor meant that a worker only had to be taught how to perform one task. Skilled and expensive short‑order cooks were no longer necessary. All of the burgers were sold with the same condiments: ketchup, onions, mustard, and two pickles. No substitutions were allowed. The McDonald brothers’ Speedee Service System revolutionized the restaurant business. An ad of theirs seeking franchisees later spelled out the benefits of the system: “Imagine – No Carhops – No Waitresses – No Dishwashers – No Bus Boys – The McDonald’s System is Self‑Service!”

Richard McDonald designed a new building for the restaurant, hoping to make it easy to spot from the road. Though untrained as an architect, he came up with a design that was simple, memorable, and archetypal. On two sides of the roof he put golden arches, lit by neon at night, that from a distance formed the letter M . The building effortlessly fused advertising with architecture and spawned one of the most famous corporate logos in the world.

The Speedee Service System, however, got off to a rocky start. Customers pulled up to the restaurant and honked their horns, wondering what had happened to the carhops, still expecting to be served. People were not yet accustomed to waiting in line and getting their own food. Within a few weeks, however, the new system gained acceptance, as word spread about the low prices and good hamburgers. The McDonald brothers now aimed for a much broader clientele. They employed only young men, convinced that female workers would attract teenage boys to the restaurant and drive away other customers. Families soon lined up to eat at McDonald’s. Company historian John F. Love explained the lasting significance of McDonald’s new self‑service system: “Working‑class families could finally afford to feed their kids restaurant food.”

San Bernardino at the time was an ideal setting for all sorts of cultural experimentation. The town was an odd melting‑pot of agriculture and industry located on the periphery of the southern California boom, a place that felt out on the edge. Nicknamed “San Berdoo,” it was full of citrus groves, but sat next door to the smokestacks and steel mills of Fontana. San Bernardino had just sixty thousand inhabitants, but millions of people passed through there every year. It was the last stop on Route 66, end of the line for truckers, tourists, and migrants from the East. Its main street was jammed with drive‑ins and cheap motels. The same year the McDonald brothers opened their new self‑service restaurant, a group of World War II veterans in San Berdoo, alienated by the dullness of civilian life, formed a local motorcycle club, borrowing the nickname of the U.S. Army’s Eleventh Airborne Division: “Hell’s Angels.” The same town that gave the world the golden arches also gave it a biker gang that stood for a totally antithetical set of values. The Hell’s Angels flaunted their dirtiness, celebrated disorder, terrified families and small children instead of trying to sell them burgers, took drugs, sold drugs, and injected into American pop culture an anger and a darkness and a fashion statement – T‑shirts and torn jeans, black leather jackets and boots, long hair, facial hair, swastikas, silver skull rings and other satanic trinkets, earrings, nose rings, body piercings, and tattoos – that would influence a long line of rebels from Marlon Brando to Marilyn Manson. The Hell’s Angels were the anti‑McDonald’s, the opposite of clean and cheery. They didn’t care if you had a nice day, and yet were as deeply American in their own way as any purveyors of Speedee Service. San Bernardino in 1948 supplied the nation with a new yin and yang, new models of conformity and rebellion. “They get angry when they read about how filthy they are,” Hunter Thompson later wrote of the Hell’s Angels, “but instead of shoplifting some deodorant, they strive to become even filthier.”