JAMES AT 16
Or, When the wonder years at McDonald’s proved to be no Kroc for one grateful Philadelphia high-schooler
Just in time for the Oscars it didn’t get nominated for, I finally saw Michael Keaton’s The Founder over the weekend, about the early days of what became the McDonald’s empire.
Good enough movie, I guess. (Made me hungry.) But also a bit disappointing: Two-hour running time and not a single frame with me in it. Not one. Just plain odd, if you ask me.
Or am I the only former employee who still considers the McDonald’s story my story, fully forty years after a part-time job there?
Were the impressions that the company and the experience made on me that deep?
The number I read is that one out of eight Americans has worked at McDonald’s. Mostly as teenagers, I assume. I was 16. My first real job, in the fall of 1976. (I don’t count the two weeks at Jean’s Pizza that Bicentennial summer: Any job that starts with a 13-hour shift devoted to peeling onions and then ends at 1am with vomiting in the curb doesn’t deserve it.) It was at a brand-new McDonald’s — “the first fully-automated franchise in all of Philadelphia” — that was being fashioned out of the just-closed S.S. Kresge 5-and-10 on Frankford Avenue in the Great Northeast. Interested crewmembers needed only apply; half of everyone I knew, from either school or the neighborhood, did and was hired.
While ours completed construction, training was held at a satellite McDonald’s a few zip codes away. The whole of it lasted about a week and consisted mainly of two things: Watching tutorials (How To Dress a Bun, Milkshakes the Easy Way, The Six Rules of Customer Service) on something called a videocassette tape and then live training in a very busy kitchen. I excelled at exactly one of the two. Then in no time our shiny new store was ready for us — and we, presumably, for it. First with a cold-open (no charge) for crewmembers’ families and then with a grand opening a few days later for the public. Most all of which I and every other new employee knew, too.
It was a strange McDonald’s — in part because the cavernous place was what was known as a townhouse location (no parking lot, just one of many connected brickfront stores along a busy pedestrian strip) and in part because that was the boss’s name. Mr. Strange. To us, he was. Effective, but strange.
Cut from drill-instructors’ cloth, he regularly lined up his 16-year-old charges those first few weeks for stern and regimented instruction just this side of a queers-and-steers movie taunt. We were young and new to the work force, so we feared and listened. And learned. What the McDonald’s brand meant. How our work supported it. The importance of all Six Rules of Customer Service. Passion for what you do and how you do it. “When a customer comes up to you at this counter,” said Mr. Strange, “I want you to welcome them to McDonald’s and I want them to know that you mean it!”
I’m pretty sure he pronounced the exclamation point.
If training was tough, the jobs themselves, once we settled into them, were not. Crewmembers were divided up by area — girls in front for order taking and guys in back for order making. (Blame the decade, not me.). I was relegated to a sort of Grill apprentice, part of the bun-toasting-and-dressing delivery line, precision-timed to whatever’s working on the grill — a subordinate position that may or may not have had something to do with my charring every single piece of meat I was given to cook during live training. The role felt … less-than. Outside the sphere of influence.
How I envied the guys at the grill. With those spatulas came such power.
Mr. Strange may have lived up to his name, but his methods created a dedicated and disciplined team. Inside of just a few weeks, we rocked our poly-blue smocks. Greet, cook, toast, dress, top, wrap, present. A smooth assembly line process. McDonald’s created it; we perfected it. Small order, big orders, special orders. Fish-heavy Fridays. Fries and pies. Late-night rushes. Early morning commuters. Ice for sodas that only went as far as the bottom of the M on the side of the cup. To-go orders carefully packaged according to the number coded on the bottom of the bag. Oven temps calibrated once a day; grease traps emptied every night.
Shakes drawn, fries salted, patties seared, waste tossed and counted, counters wiped, grills seltzer-ed clean, dishes done. A science and an art of the kinds we weren’t learning at school. A stainless-steel symphony played out by teenagers feeding hundreds or more a day, sometimes without much supervision, one Rule of Customer Service at a time.
We collaborated in the kitchen and commiserated a floor below, on breaks in the old and still-shabby Kresge basement. Where on the busiest of afternoons even a fifteen-minute reprieve off our feet felt like a night’s slumber. Here was a sanctuary where the occasional customer mocking let loose, like of the guy who one day dyed his hair in the men’s room sink or the woman who’d just ordered a Big Mac “with no middle bun” (it’s called the club, lady, to the bun-top’s crown and the bottom’s heel). Where we shared and gossiped and flirted and schemed and made after-shift plans — and then made fun when the inevitable hangovers came calling. (Really? I remember thinking in my naïve way when poor Anne C. limped in one Saturday morning. Girls go out drinking, too? Just like my brothers?)
I valued and made the most of my paper-hat days at McDonald’s, whomever founded the company — because of the very company it had me keep. Because of the introduction it gave each of us to pace and to pressure. And to responsibility — for money and sanitation, for supplies and inventory, for the changing of the Co2 and the laundering of uniforms courtesy of the basement machines. I, we, learned how to work.
I smile at the thoughts of those fish-frenzied Lenten Fridays and of the late-night Saturdays when the final showing over at the Mayfair Theater (Rocky, it seemed, for *months*) meant both a grill and a lobby that became packed in micro-seconds. I remember fondly the panic-ed look on Beth’s face the morning she accidentally on purpose pulled the IN CASE OF GRILL FIRE lever just to see what would happen — only to learn that the answer was Hell On Earth, as an avalanche of powder suppressant was released from every conceivable opening in the kitchen ceiling to cover every surface as far as the eye could see (stamping out both non-existing flames and Beth’s McDonald’s employment). I shudder recalling the day fry-guy Jon dropped a set of tongs into the 400-degree fry-vat and then instinctively reached his hand in to retrieve it, leading to a loud scream and then a swarm of Counter girls all but carrying him to the oversized ice machine in the Back while we guys fumbled for 911. I chuckle at the memory of the few times I myself was given Counter hours and tended to punk customers by asking if their orders were “for here or to stay.” And I blanche in embarrassment still seeing myself injured and stuck inside the giant 6-foot trash bin out back one morning — a long story that that ends with co-worker Bart happening by and asking, “Jim, what the hell are you doing in there?”
I revel in the images conjured up of the special assignment I was given a few months into the job that no one can do but you, Jim (READ: Everyone else said no) — the ignoble 5am Sunday janitorial shift. Because I made the lowly task work for me. What other 16-year-old has his own key to a McDonald’s?, I asked myself each darkened Sunday morning when I rose. Plus, the janitorial duties could be handled in fifteen minutes, which left this particular 16-year-old with more than an hour to devote to having an entire fully-stocked McDonald’s kitchen to himself. To make and then to eat however much of whatever he wanted in an empty 240-person dining-room.
King of my own McDonald’s.
Heck, I don’t even mind the memory of the day I found on the bathroom floor and had to dispose of a used feminine napkin — despite not really knowing what it was.
(I’m unsure of exactly when my 1970s puberty began, but I’m absolutely certain it ended that afternoon.)
I loved the entire group of fellow teens I worked with back then, many of whom I never saw or heard from again after my 14 months at McDonald’s came to an end, as senior year of high school came to demand more of my time. I remember them all, though. The Bobs and Johns and Mikes, the Sus and Sullys and Micheles and Cathys and Beths. The ones whom I later heard had gone on to thrive in non-culinary careers and the ones whom I later read had died before seeing their adult dreams play out. (You can leave the neighborhood, but the neighborhood and its news never leave you.) My friends of youth. My colleagues in blue. The teenaged voices I still hear all these years later, echoing off the kitchen tiles of every McDonald’s I enter, reminding me of a time (and a store) that is no longer. When a Velcro nametag meant self-respect, and $2.15 an hour meant financial freedom.
I can’t speak for either the McDonald brothers or the Kroc family, but forty years on I think I can speak for my fellow crewmembers when I say that the Golden Arches idea of the 1950s played a sizable role for one group of 16-year-olds in the 1970s, in the Great Northeast neighborhood of Philadelphia.
Because the world opened up to them, one Rule at a time.
Speaking of which (you knew it was coming):
1. Greet the customer.
2. Take the customer’s order
3. Suggestive-sell.
4. Assemble the customer’s order.
5. Present the customer’s order.
6. Take the customer’s payment and wish the customer a nice day.
