McDonalds On My Mind
For ten years I taught at Cornell on Monday evenings, ending at 7pm and then getting in my car for a four hour drive back to NYC. I have a house in Ithaca, so I’m still not sure why I did it that way, but I did and it lasted ten years with very few exceptions. Part of the routine was to stop at the East Hill Plaza, which was on the way out of town for me and get a Burger King dinner to eat on the first part of the ride. With my lapband, I was lucky if I got through half of the Whopper or whatever was on the menu that night, but it was easy, it was fast and it became a habit. I can’t say I like BK any more for it and in fact, I rarely go to one willingly. The same cannot be said for McDonalds for some reason. I was never in a McDonalds routine like that, but also, there is something inherently more appealing to me about a quick meal from McDonalds than a quick meal from any other fast food joint.
I have made lunchtime outings for fast food a bit of ritual here on the hilltop, mostly because of all the workmen I have sponsored over the past year and half, most notably the deck crew. I have gone to the quintessential California joint, In and Out Burger, the southern Christian homophobic chain, Chick-fil-A, Arby’s, Taco Bell, and even Panda Express. I get hankerings for one or the other of these once in a while, but the stores I have never had any desire to frequent for some reason are Jack-in-the-Box, Carls Jr. and DelTaco. I’m sure their offering isn’t much different from the others, but they always strike me as the B Team like Burger King is the Avis to McDonald’s Hertz.
Now that I am teaching again, I am once again falling into a fast food dining habit. I teach Advanced Corporate Finance at University of San Diego at their beautiful Alcala campus near downtown San Diego. My class starts at 7pm and runs to 9:50pm on Wednesdays. I will have the same time slot for my Ethics course in the Spring, so it’s starting to feel like a routine already. Kim packs me a dinner/lunch to take and I generally eat it in the car down in the underground parking lot that sits under the building where I teach. Actually, I eat a half or less and eat the rest, if I’m hungry, on the ride home after class. That’s all well and good, but the issue is getting a drink that can last the duration of the long class session. During my first class, I noticed the lecturer before me had a big fountain soda and I decided that was definitely the way to go since I can’t find any vending machines in the building.
And that’s the funny thing. I teach in the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice (KIPJ) on the University of San Diego campus. She and husband Ray, the “founder” of McDonalds Corporation made a $50 million transformative bequest to the University and they named this Institute and this building after her. So, every time I come here to teach I get off the elevator and stare straight at Joan Kroc’s life-sized portrait and immediately think of her husband Ray and the movie The Founder, staring Michael Keaton. It tells the story of how Ray Kroc swindled the McDonald brothers, Dick and Mac, out of their company and their very name. It was not a sweet tale of justice, but a ruthless tale of corporate manipulation. When he began the juggernaut, he was married to Ethel, not Joan, but Joan entered the picture in 1969 when her husband was trying to get a McDonalds franchise for Minneapolis and Ray heard her playing the organ. Fifteen years later, Joan inherited Kroc’s fortune when he died and she began a spree of philanthropy to give away Kroc’s fortune. The most notable benefactor of her legacy was the Salvation Army, to whom she donated over $1.5 billion.
All that and she couldn’t put a McDonalds soda fountain in the building that bears her name and portrait? Nope, I have to stop down the hill at the only fast food drive-up joint in the area. It’s a Carl’s Jr. and while the fountain Diet Coke is standard and fine, the drive-up service is nothing short of abysmal. Luckily, I always make the half hour drive in my Tesla with plenty of time to spare. I see no reason to risk getting caught in rush hour traffic (even though it’s mostly going the other way) and it’s not like I don’t have the time to come early.
So here I sit in the Joan Kroc Institute building as the sun sinks into the Pacific Ocean, just a few miles west of this magnificent bluff. It seems evening classes are all the rage in the business School here since the classrooms in this rather large building are all filled. I also haven’t found a convenient lounge, so I sit on a hard wooden bench in the hallway. It’s the kind of Spanish style bench you would expect at a Catholic school like University of San Diego. It has a certain Spartan sternness to it that screams penance. I am paying for whatever sins I have committed this week (I am confident I have earned this punishment and more), but at least I have my big fountain Diet Coke to keep me company. I also have my ubiquitous iPad in hand and never far away from dropping a story to gain a day in my blog roster. I believe this story will not see the light of day until Monday and that’s only if something urgent doesn’t arise that requires more timely publication, thereby pushing everything else back a day.
I think from what I have read of Joan Kroc, she would be pleased to learn that I’m teaching in her building. Given that her money was the spoils of ruthless corporate war and that her husband Ray was certainly not so charitably inclined as she, I think she would appreciate what I am trying to bring to my students here at USD. I’m certainly trying to educate them in the ways of finance, something that is deeply imbedded in my experience base, but more importantly (at least, so I believe), I am trying hard to explain and teach them the importance of ethics so they do not end up like Ray Kroc as being a man who cheated McDonald’s out of their birthright name all for the sake of amassing a fortune which his third wife then gave away to a bunch of do-gooders.
Such is the way of the world it seems. Unless we are Ford or Rockefeller and our fortunes predate the estate planning rules and laws, we all effectively die broke and our ability to control or even influence the world past the moment of our death is increasingly limited, as it should be. McDonalds may be on my mind, but it has taken Joan Kroc to remind me that we all go from dust to dust.