Richard and Maurice McDonald invented the fastest kitchen in America, sold it with their own name for two point seven million dollars, and then watched Ray Kroc open a new McDonald's a short walk from their original restaurant and drive it out of business. This episode follows the whole story: the drive in at San Bernardino, the day in 1948 the brothers fired every carhop and cut the menu to nine items, the kitchen drawn in chalk on a tennis court, the milkshake mixer salesman who flew out to see why one restaurant wanted eight of his machines, the contract that paid the brothers half a percent, Harry Sonneborn's land deals, the 1961 buyout, the handshake royalty the family says was promised and never paid, the Big M, and how Kroc became known as the founder.
Founder Stories tells the story of one founder per episode, told plainly and in order.
