It’s All a Kroc: You Still Can’t Go Home Again

When you’re back near home-sweet-home Chicago for an Elvis Presley impersonators’ convention but stuck at an airport hotel without a car, what do you do?

You walk out a little and reach the kind of neighborhood you thought had stopped existing when you left the Midwest in 1961 and vowed: I’ll never live in this boring place again.

Only now, it looks beautiful to you. Every detail seems precious. The neat lawns. The picket fences. The polite children lined up for the school bus. The proud little hand-carved mailbox in front of the clean brick bungalow that reads, “The Home of Fred Fredrickson.”

The thick air, the catalpa trees, the subtle smells seem so oddly familiar. The lush summer greenery feels like a hothouse to you after spending the past 25 years in dry, dry California. You ask yourself why you ever left.

You must see more of this place that you once called home. So, you look in the front of the phone book for nearby sights to see. Nuts! The Leaning Tower of Pisa YMCA is too far away. But you’re in luck--the McDonald’s Museum is just three miles down the road.

It would be no fun alone, so you pick up some fellow conventioneers. In this case, you seek out two state-of-the-art New Yorkers who caught your eye--Kerry and Claire. He: a Manhattan PR man by day and a country singer by night. She: a director at a leading ad agency by day and, by night, a Jell-O mold artist and a singer with the group the Earnest Borgnines.

Kerry is at the convention trying to sell his song “Back From the Dead and Ready to Rock.” Claire is there taping and “shooting”--photographing--things.

You have noticed them because they are the kind of people who would stand out anywhere--by virtue of their clever comments and their sharp clothes. Claire tells you about the time her agency lost the Oreos account and the boss said, “Let’s not hang on the cross if we’re going down the toilet.”

Kerry is wearing a bright yellow tuxedo adorned with drawings of records bearing the names of Elvis’ greatest hits. His mother sewed it for him from material he purchased at Jimmy Velvet’s Elvis Museum in Miami. Claire wears a ‘70s polyester mini dress and black platform boots with fishnet stockings.

Of course, Kerry and Claire want to go to the McDonald’s Museum, which is housed in the original, primal Des Plaines, Ill., McDonald’s. The Midwest is like a David Lynch movie to them.

We take a taxi and find everything at McDonald’s frozen as it was on opening day--April 15, 1955. In the parking lot, under the neon golden arch, is Speedee, the smiley-faced, running hamburger, wearing a chef’s hat and holding up a sign reading “15 cents.”

Somewhere a sound system plays “Rock Around the Clock.” Claire shoots Kerry leaning against a ’55 Olds Super 88. There is also a yellow Chrysler St. Regis with a dashboard Madonna (the original Madonna), a Chevy Bel Air with a coonskin cap in the back seat and a Ford Fairlane with the April 15, 1955, Chicago Tribune on the front seat. The headline reads, “Stratton Asks Polio Aid.”

Kerry was a year old when this happened. Claire wasn’t born. I was 11, and I find myself feeling oddly close to tears. It was all once actually real to me. And again I ask myself: What was I running away from here?

I slowly rub my hand along the achingly clean red-and-white tile structure. Whoever imagined that a preserved McDonald’s would someday seem beautiful and quaint?

We enter the building and are greeted by Lorraine Peterson and Virginia Cooper, two senior citizens employed as docents. “Oh, get a shot of this,” says Kerry. Claire shoots him next to the potato peeler, touching the DO NOT TOUCH sign.

Lorraine points out that we are in the “first Ray Kroc franchised McDonald’s,” not the first McDonald’s drive-in. That one is in San Bernardino, Calif., and it was there that Kroc, a Multimixer salesman, went on a trip, liked what he saw and decided that we needed another 11,162 of them.

We follow a class of international graduates from Hamburger University into the drive-in’s basement, which is loaded with early photographs and Krocobilia. Claire shoots Kerry with the Hamburger U grads, with the museum janitor and next to the sign telling employees how to scrub the machines with Bab-o. You just know all this is going to be terribly amusing to Claire’s friends in the Manhattan ad world. Every bit of Middle America is a collectible to people who live in New York City.

Moved as I am by this monument to innocence, nevertheless I ask Lorraine, “I hope this doesn’t offend you, but can you recommend a good place to eat around here?”

That is how we ended up at the Sugar Bowl, in downtown Des Plaines since 1921, with long-forgotten foods at low prices. As Kerry climbs on a counter stool to photograph my egg salad sandwich and lime rickey, three white-haired ladies in the booth next to ours, their snap-on shades in the flaps-up position, gaze sternly our way. We are laughing. We look different. We are not sitting in our place. Clearly, they disapprove. I start to recollect why I left.

As we walk back to the hotel, I realize sadly that I just love being with Kerry and Claire on this perfect, hot, lush, green Midwestern afternoon. We start harmonizing to “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine.”

It happens all the time. You have a one-day life with people and never see them again. And sometimes you’re born, raised and live in a place for 18 years and will never belong there again.