Made In America - Bill Bryson [215]
An ominous new term, juvenile delinquency, began to fill news pages and excite comment. The Blackboard Jungle, a 1955 movie that dealt with delinquency and other manifestations of youthful angst, was thought so sensational that Clare Booth Luce, America’s ambassador to Italy, led a campaign to forbid its being shown abroad lest people get the wrong impression about America. Apparently she was not worried that they might instead conclude that America no longer believed in freedom of expression. The movie’s theme tune, ‘Rock Around the Clock’, was for most non-teenagers their first experience of the music known as rock ‘n’ roll, a term popularized by a Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed, who had studied classical trombone before taking to the airwaves, where he introduced his listeners to the music of Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and other such exotics. He first began referring to the music as rock ‘n’ roll in 1951, though among black Americans the expression was older, having originally been applied to sex and later to dancing.
Above all, what separated America’s teenagers of the 1950s from previous generations was that they were rich. By mid-decade, as one historian has noted, ‘America’s 16.5 million teens were buying some 40 per cent of all radios, records and cameras, more than half the movie tickets, and even 9 per cent of all new cars. Altogether they were worth over $10 billion a year to the economy.’5
Much of their wealth came from, and often returned to, another phenomenon of the age, the hamburger joint, which provided employment for thousands of teenagers and a haunt for most of the rest. Though the hamburger had been part of the American diet for half a century, it underwent a kind of apotheosis in the 1950s. As late as 1950, pork was still the most widely eaten meat in America, and by a considerable margin, but over the next two decades the situation was reversed. By 1970 Americans were eating twice as much beef as pork, nearly a hundred pounds of it a year, and half of that in the form of hamburgers. One company more than any other was responsible for this massive change in dietary habits: McDonald’s.
The story as conveyed by the company is well known. A salesman of Multimixers named Ray Kroc became curious as to why a small hamburger stand on the edge of the desert in San Bernardino, California, would need eight Multimixers – enough to make forty milk-shakes at a time, more than any other restaurant in America could possibly want to make – and decided to fly out and have a look. The restaurant he found, run by the brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald, was small, only 600 square feet, but the burgers were tasty, the fries crisp, the shakes unusually thick, and it was unquestionably popular with the locals. Kroc at this time was fifty-two years old, an age when most men would be thinking of slowing down, but he saw an opportunity here. He bought the McDonald’s name and began building an empire. The implication has always been that the original McDonald’s was an obscure, rinky-dink operation in the middle of nowhere, and that it was only the towering genius of Ray Kroc that made it into the streamlined, efficient, golden-arched institution that we know and love today. It wasn’t entirely like that.
By 1954, when Kroc came along, the McDonald brothers were already legendary, at least in the trade. American Restaurant magazine had done a cover story on them in 1952, and they were constantly being visited by people who wanted to see how they generated so much turnover from so little space. With sales of over $350,000 a year (all of it going through one busy cash register) and profits