The Editors of New Word City - Ray Kroc

You may not want to share this information with your teenagers: Ray Kroc - the visionary behind McDonalds and one of the most successful entrepreneurs in American history - was a high-school dropout. And the man who changed the way the world eats didnt open his first restaurant until he was in his fifties.

Clearly, Kroc didnt follow the book - he wrote a new one. The saga of his ascent from paper cup salesman to one of Time magazines 100 most important people of the twentieth century is a vivid lesson in leadership, drive, and common sense.

He never gave up music. In his teens, he and two friends opened a small music store. It didnt last long, but his entrepreneurial spirit kept growing. He also had a job at an uncles drugstore soda fountain. According to Grinding It Out, Krocs entertaining autobiography, That was where I learned that you could influence people with a smile and enthusiasm and sell them a sundae when what theyd come for was a cup of coffee.

Kroc saw life as a learning process; he soaked up business and sales lore like a human sponge. School was another matter. The only thing he enjoyed was debating; he loved getting attention as he smoothly won arguments and influenced people. In one memorable debate, he was called upon to defend smoking before an audience clearly against him. After his opponent attacked the habit, Kroc asked his audience to picture his grandfather, a Bohemian immigrant near the end of his hardworking life. One of his few remaining pleasures was sitting in an easy chair puffing on his pipe. Who among you, Kroc asked, would deprive him of one of his last comforts on earth, his beloved pipe? Point made. Another sales lesson for young Kroc: When it comes to persuasion, emotions usually trump intellect.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Kroc was a fifteen-year-old dropout selling coffee beans door-to-door. He lied about his age and signed up with the Red Cross to be an ambulance driver. While training in Connecticut, he was puzzled by another trainee who never joined the off-duty sport of chasing local girls. He always stayed in camp, drawing pictures. Years later Kroc got it. The solitary doodler was young Walt Disney.

The war ended before Kroc shipped out, so he returned to the Midwest and hit the road selling ribbons and notions. He set up shop in hotel rooms, invited store owners in, and learned to size up their needs in a flash. No self-respecting pitcher throws the same way to every batter, he wrote in his autobiography, and no self-respecting salesman makes the same pitch to every client. Though still a teenager, Ray Kroc was on the way to earning the equivalent of a masters degree in marketing - and it had all started with the sundae school.

Kroc also paid a lot of attention to his appearance. Lean and compact, he wore his hair slicked back and parted in the middle, just like Rudolph Valentino, the 1920s heartthrob of silent film fame. Early photos show Kroc as a natty dresser, with a wry smile that seems to say, Stick with me, well make money and have fun doing it.

His own path to money and fun included gigs as a piano player. His musical career took a life-changing turn when he played at a lakeside summer resort in Michigan. There he met Ethel Fleming, his first wife. When they married in 1922, Kroc was twenty, practically a child groom, but he was old enough to land a job selling Lily brand paper cups. He was the proverbial young man in a hurry.

Ray Kroc continued juggling two careers - selling paper cups during the day and playing piano on a local radio station at night. His daughter Marilyn was born in 1924. Paper cup sales slowed drastically in the winter, and Kroc caught Florida fever. In the early 1920s, Florida exploded with a real-estate boom, complete with overbuilt beach houses and a mortgage bubble straining to burst. Kroc took a six-month leave from Lily, packed up his family, and headed to Miami in a Model T - a rough trip nearly a quarter century before interstate highways.

Kroc got a job playing piano with a big dance band at a fancy speakeasy on an island off Miami.

The club was surrounded by a high hedge with a gate; if federal agents showed up, the doorman pressed a button alerting everyone inside to banish the booze while he stalled the feds. One night, he couldnt stall them long enough. Kroc was arrested and spent three hours in jail. He wasnt bothered; every business has its hazards. What he took away from the job (in addition to a police record) was the speakeasys streamlined way of doing business. All drinks were a dollar each, and the menu offered only three items: lobster, steak, and duck. The simplicity impressed Kroc and, years later, influenced his first motto for McDonalds managers: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

Kroc went back to Chicago and Lily, which soon merged with Tulip cups. Over the next decade, he honed his skills as a top salesman supervising fifteen others - and this was during the Great Depression. His trademarks were straight-arrow honesty and the ability to turn a customer into a partner. If he knew the price of cups was about to rise, he alerted customers ahead of time so they could put in a big order before it happened. His bosses werent happy with this practice, but Kroc was too valuable to let go. For one, he kept his sales force in top shape - clean, sharp, well-dressed. He insisted, as he later recounted, The first thing you have to sell is yourself.

Ray Krocs paper cup customers included many soda fountains and ice cream shops; his interest in this nascent fast-food market grew. Milkshakes were especially popular, but the mixers then in use frothed only one shake at a time and often couldnt keep up with demand. Help was on the way. One of Krocs customers, an ice cream shop owner, invented a machine called the Multimixer that mixed five shakes at once. It changed Ray Krocs life. He became Multimixers sole national distributor. Ethel Kroc was furious that her husband would trade the security of Lily Tulip for this gamble. But Ray Kroc trusted his instincts - and the marriage suffered a breach from which it never recovered.

Kroc became a one-man band, traveling all over the country, lugging his heavy sample case, pitching this amazing new contraption at trade fairs, conventions, big stores, small stores, any place he could find a potential buyer. The hours and travel were brutal, and nothing less than his future was at stake.

In his book, Kroc describes his technique for clearing his mind and getting a crucial good nights sleep, I would think of my mind as a blackboard full of messages, most of them urgent, and I practiced imagining a hand with an eraser wiping that blackboard clean. I made my mind completely blank.... Then I would relax my body, beginning at the back of my neck and continuing on down, shoulders, arms, torso, legs, to the tips of my toes. By this time, I would be asleep. He would then wake up in the morning fresh and rested.

By the early-1950s, Kroc made a good living selling Multimixers, but he was hardly wealthy. Then he heard about a drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, California, with such a demand for shakes that it kept eight Multimixers whirring all day long. The place was owned by two brothers named McDonald. Kroc decided to fly out and take a look.

After World War II, the United States finally shook off the Great Depression and rediscovered prosperity. Postwar jobs were plentiful, suburbs blossomed, people bought cars for commuting to work, and soon we were a nation on wheels, paving the continent and creating a highway culture. From coast to coast, families loved to pile into their new Chevys and Fords to find bargain appliances at new shopping centers and quick meals at new drive-in restaurants.