McDonalds and Others


cfake3.jpgMay 15, 2017 (Monday)
A church, in reaching out to young people, served McDonald’s hamburgers after the worship service. The kids liked that, so the church did it again. And again.. Soon the group was known as “the church of the golden arches.” It got that name because McDonald’s logo, a giant “M” resembled golden arches.

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The chain actually started out as a barbecue place, in San Bernardino, California,
operated by Richard and Maurice McDonald, in 1944. In 1948, the owners changed
over to hamburgers, created in a process that resembled the assembly line made
popular by Henry Ford many years before. The “White Castle” burger chain had been
using the method for twenty years before McDonald’s adopted it.
In 1953, in Phoenix, Arizona, they opened the first McDonald’s franchise with the arches logo. A fellow by the name of Ray Kroc became franchise agent for the company and later bought it all, moving the headquarters to Chicago in 1955. McDonald’s fast food restaurants can be found just about anywhere around the world, in 120 countries. Sixty-eight million customers per day keep the franchise going in almost 37,000 places.
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My mother and stepfather were in the restaurant business in Houston. Of course, their places were nothing like McDonald’s. They were old-fashioned diners. They had three restaurants and I worked in each of them at one time or another during my teen years. In 1941, when my parents divorced, my sisters and I lived with our maternal grandparents. My father lived with his parents, and my mother was on her own. At first, she worked in a laundry substation, a little kiosk on the street where people could leave their laundry to be washed and come back later and pick it up. A truck from the big laundry picked up the clothes and delivered them back to her.
After that, she went to work as a waitress in a cafe on Canal Street in the East End, for a lady named Alice. Alice really liked my mother and made her manager of a smaller cafe on the west side of town on Houston Avenue. Alice became ill and before she died, gave the smaller business to my mother, who changed the name of the place to “Jessie’s Cafe.” A little later she met my stepfather-to-be, Joe Heim, and they were married. Together they managed the small cafe, living in a room in the building, on the other side of the kitchen.
My mother and stepfather moved to a house on the south side of the city on Ruth Street. They sold the small cafe and bought another one directly across Milby street from the city bus barn, naming it the Day-N-Nite Dinette. They and the landlord completely remodeled the place before opening it for business. They had a good, dependable clientele, mainly bus drivers and other workers from the big transportation depot.
Their lunch was served from a steam table, from which customers selected a lunch for fifty cents in 1945. I worked there from time to time, as did my sisters later on. The business did well, and they opened another cafe on Navigation Avenue, near Lockwood, in an industrial area that provided many customers for lunch. They named it the Day-N-Night Dinette #2, and opened both places 24 hours each day. I worked there, too, sometimes.
Then they bought still another restaurant, in partnership with a Mr. Adell, called the L & L. It was in the Houston Heights on 19th Street, a block east of North Shepherd Drive. It already had a steady flow of customers and was a popular place. I worked there the entire summer after high school graduation. My sisters worked there also. At that point in time, I went away to college, and began a whole new life, serving in summertime in revival meetings, and serving on the staff of a church, then as pastor of a church, before moving on to the seminary in Fort Worth, when Wanda and I married and began our life together.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.