McDonalds - Golden Arches

The Boston Herald

The pictures are so old that they're square and fringed in white, blurry silhouettes of my mother and me taken with a Brownie camera in the gloom of a rainy spring day. There we are in front of the Washington Monument. And there we are at the Changing of the Guard.

The year was 1958 and I was in sixth grade and this was our first real vacation - a trip to Washington, D.C., in the first new car my father ever owned, a 1957 Chevy. The trip was full of firsts, maybe that's why I remember it. It was my first time out of Massachusetts, the first time I ever took a week off from school, the first time all my friends said, “You're so lucky,'' the first time I slept at a motel and the first time I ate at McDonald’s.

“April Love'' was on the radio when we pulled under the Golden Arches. I remember because I asked my father if he could please not shut off the car until the song was over. All those hours behind the wheel and he said OK. You remember these things. 

We were in Delaware in the rain and the fog. My father ordered burgers and fries for the three of us. And the bill came to less than a dollar.

You remember these things, too, especially when your father keeps saying, “Fifteen cents. I can't believe the hamburgers were only 15 cents. I wish we had one of these places at home.’'

We toured many sites in Washington - the Pentagon, the White House. We even watched money being made.

But it's the 15-cent hamburger I remember most.

We saw history on that trip but we saw the future, too, though we didn't know it. Who could have guessed that a fast-food place, in a random town on a forgettable stretch of road, was part of a chain that would change the landscape of America - one nation, over malled, indistinguishable with McDonald's and Burger Kings for all. And change the way Americans eat - on the run, in a hurry. And the way Americans look - McLarge. And talk - McMansions, McJobs, McPaper.

For better or worse, McDonald's has changed the world.

It's celebrating its 50th birthday today, though McDonald's was born long before Ray Kroc officially adopted it. Begun by Maurice and Richard McDonald, two brothers who moved from New Hampshire to California, the first McDonald's actually opened in Los Angeles on Dec. 12, 1948.

But it was Kroc, who opened his first McDonald's in a Chicago suburb on April 15, 1955, who grew the chain into McGlomerate.

I ate a lot of McDonald's when I was in high school. There was one in Weymouth by then. You could get gas for 19.9 cents a gallon before the Fore River bridge and a vanilla shake for 15 cents after the bridge, then spend the day at Nantasket Beach for nothing. 

But the burgers never tasted the way that first one did. They were just burgers, not the open road, a spring rain and my father's smile.