The corporation was bleeding money as the ambitious salesman added staff to expand the empire and police stores for consistency. Meanwhile, drama was brewing between Kroc and the inventors of the system he was propagating across the land. (Unpaid, of course-and out of sight.) From the back office, she dutifully placed orders to local suppliers for potatoes and such, helping to launch her husband as a successful franchisee. Wives were the only women allowed then to work at the hamburger stands. With a bonus Rollie earned for his hard work, he, Joan and their daughter decamped to Rapid City in 1959 to open the first outpost of the fast food chain in South Dakota. Soon, Joan’s employer, Jim Zien, was buying in to the fast-food game, and, not coincidentally, hiring Joan’s husband to manage his McDonald’s outpost in nearby St. Ray, himself a pianist, was smitten by her musical proficiency, not to mention her striking good looks. Paul called the Criterion, one of three jobs she juggled to make the family’s ends meet. Then 28, Joan serenaded diners on a Hammond organ in an upscale restaurant in St. Their hamburger stand in San Bernardino, one of countless such operations on the emerging byways of post-War America, had emerged as a runaway success because of their spare menu and well-choreographed “Speedee” system of service they’d artfully charted out on a tennis court. Kroc, a former paper cup and milkshake machine salesman, was himself married, and peddling franchises around the mid-west on behalf of brothers Dick and Mac McDonald. Rollie didn’t own a restaurant he was a Navy veteran working as a fireman on the Milwaukee Road railroad. Joan was, indeed, married to a man named Rollie Smith when she collided with Kroc in 1957 in St. But rather than setting the record straight, “The Founder” plays fast and loose with the facts, leaving an erroneous impression about the mechanics of the deal, as well as about Ray’s formidable and largely unsung third wife, Joan. The story of how Kroc morphed an idea sprouted in the California desert into an international franchising empire is studied in business schools around the world even today, though it’s most typically told through the lens of unchallenged mythology. (Just try, as an independent researcher unaffiliated with the company, to gain access to the voluminous corporate archives.) The only existing history of McDonald’s was composed under the watchful eye of its executives, way back in 1986. Such moments are notable, given McDonald’s notorious resistance to outside scrutiny. Not since musician Mark Knopfler immortalized the irascible CEO in his 2004 song “Boom Like That” has the early beginnings of the company been depicted in popular culture. That’s the pivotal plot point in the “The Founder,” a film that purports to tell the true story of the controversial corporation that defined fast food and forever changed the way the world ate. One thing she did not do, however, was convince her second husband to deploy milkshake mix in place of real ice cream in the stores. The late philanthropist Joan Kroc accomplished much during her 12-year courtship and subsequent 15-year marriage to Ray Kroc, the founding chairman of the McDonald’s Corporation.
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