^^^ That photo was taken local to me, in Crestwood, MO.

Not only did wages and prices change, but they can no longer legally allow 14 year old idiots to open the place up all on their own for the lunch hour.

It was my first real job...having a paper route and getting up at 4 am daily to ride my bike in the horrific weather to deliver 60-70 newspapers not being a real job to a 14 year old of course. I arranged my schedule so that I could go work mid day rush. They asked me to open it up at 10am and I did well enough that the manager gave me a key and I was the only person in there getting it ready for the lunch hour.

100 lb sacks of potatoes got drug up from the basement, tossed in an industrial machine that looked like overambitious sandpaper lined it. A spinning platen on the bottom (also sandpapered) would spin rapidly, bouncing the spuds around and wearing the outer shell of brown skin off. I'd finish cleaning up the grill if the night shift didn't do a good job (common as they were tired and wanted to go home) and run the french fry grease though a strainer and add more grease if necessary. The "grease in 1969 came in 50 lb blocks, but often you'd simply scoop off part of a block to top off the vat. Periodically all the grease got drained/tossed out and replaced. With the grill and french fry machine on, next task would be to grab the now clean spuds and ram them though a wire grate like press to make something that was a potato look like french frys. It was a fast process: grab a spud, put it up and pull the handled, ram it though, repeat: but faster. They would get put in wire racks and blanched at a lower temperature and hung up in racks so that they could fry up quick when the hoards came in.

As that was happening the grill had the worlds first triple burger cooking (this was before big macs and even double burgers hd been invented although they introduced the mac while I worked there).

Inventory control only counted the wrappers, not meat pieces or buns. As the "triple burger to be" sizzled, I'd double back to the sandpaper french fry peeler and clean it out (BTW, the unmistakable odor of vodka came out of the traps that caught the peelings that got missed in the first trap), then put anything away that needed to be put back that I'd missed the first go round. A quick circle around to check that the place was spotless and ready to roll and I'd kick back, toast the bun, then put extra pickles and onions and enough ketchup to make me happy on the bun. The onions being reconstituted ones of course.

Hamburgers were $.15/cents Frys were .12/ and a coke was dime. I sort of remember Big Macs being .45/cents each, which seemed like a crapload of money then, but I could be wrong. I was making $1.25 an hour...they clearly were overpaying me.

Dad considered fast food vile so when we were kids we seldom ever got to go to MickyDs. In high school a couple of locally owned burger joints were our regular go-tos. It wasn't until I was living the life of a starving college student that the McDonald's near campus became a regular if infrequent haunt. It did have a drive thru, though.

quote:

Originally posted by jimb888:
...The "grease in 1969 came in 50 lb blocks, but often you'd simply scoop off part of a block to top off the vat. Periodically all the grease got drained/tossed out and replaced.

This triggered a memory...
The Mickey D's I worked at in college was my second foray into fast food employment. In HS I worked for a 'competitor' of sorts, a regional place called Carrols. They had a similar bill of fare to McD's... their Big Burger=the Quarter Pounder, the Club Burger=the Big Mac, had a fish sandwich too, etc. Also had 'Country Fried Chicken' and Roast Beef Heroes, which were not available at the golden arches...

Anyway, one evening I was tasked to clean one of the chicken deep fryers in the back of the store. They were separate from the fryer for fries, and the one for fish sandwiches. The process was to turn it off, let the oil cool, drain it from the front spigot, then scrub out the tank with hot sanitized water and rinse clean. Dry, close the spigot, and pack shortening around the heating elements so that they wouldn't overheat. Turn it on, and once that shortening had melted down, add more until the tank was full. Simple, right?

I was training a new hire, and it was his first time. He got almost everything right, but made three critical errors.
(1) He forgot to close the spigot after the rinse.
(2) He left the stainless steel bucket of rinse water under the spigot.

Right after we turned on the fryer, it got busy. So we abandoned the fryer to work the grille and the french fry station. It was probably an hour before we got back to it, and in the interim someone had notice the melted shortening draining into the rinse pail, and shut the spigot.

(Anybody see where this is going yet?)

We finished the rush, went back to the prep area, and I tell the trainee to check the fryer.

"All melted?"

"Yup."

"OK, add the rest of the shortening. Be careful not to burn yourself."

Well, I expected him to put the rest of the 50lb block into the fryer. Instead,

(3) he scoops up the pail and pours a quart of semi-congealed shortening, floating on perhaps three gallons of rinse water, right into the tank half full of 350 degree oil.

I grabbed him, ran him into the managers office, slammed the door, and luckily, neither of us got scalded when it exploded.

But that cleanup took HOURS.

quote:

Originally posted by jljones:
I remember when my town only had one McDonalds. And a Burger Chef. And a Burger Queen.

I remember pre McDonalds,

we had a Burger Chef, (I think,,, )

Kelley's

and a bunch of Dairy Freeze/burger joint type places ,

all gone now,

there is a Dairy Freeze in Hurt Va,, and there used to be one on the main dray thru Rustburg,,

RVA still has Whataburger (not related to the Tx chain) and a Roy's Big Burger (similar to whataburger)

I honestly don't recall when I first started seeing drive-thrus. I remember regularly going to an A&W as a young teenager in Helena MT, that would have been around 1971-72 give or take. It was not a drive-thru, it had the pull-up-and-park ordering pedestals and the girls that brought your order out to you, albeit minus the roller skates. We moved to Boise in mid-1973 and I really don't remember the fast food joints there. I moved out here in 1978 and everything was drive-thru by then. So sometime between `73 and `78 is when the changeover had to have happened.

I did not remember it was that late. I was in my teens in 1975, and would have guessed they had drive-in windows back in the '60s.

I think this must be because my family did not eat McDonalds (or other fast food) very much. We took car trips, but my mom packed a cooler with sandwiches and the like. We ate many meals at concrete picnic tables at roadside rest stops.

I just read a story about the original drive thru. It opened in Sierra Vista AZ in 1975, because Soldiers from Fort Huachuca couldn't wear their uniforms off base.

The drive-thru was kind of a cheat. They didn't have to take their uniforms off, because they never left their cars. Now they could get lunch off base, and not get in trouble.

Stumbled over this while planning a trip to Tombstone and Fort Huachuca.