McDonald’s Before McDonald’s (from HISTORY This Week)

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May 15, 1940. It’s opening day. San Bernardino, CA 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.

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