Grinding It Out by Ray Kroc Read Free Book Online Page A

but it was one of the most uncomfortable 180-minute periods of my life.
    That incident didn’t cheer Ethel up at all either. We were doing well financially, and she even liked the apartment. But she was growing exceedingly homesick. At least when I was working all the time in Chicago, she’d had her family and friends to keep her from being too lonely. Here, she had no one at all. Her sister was dating, leading her own life, and they seldom saw each other. So the warm weather was cold comfort for Ethel. Finally we agreed to go back to Chicago. Our lease on the apartment ran until March 1, but Ethel couldn’t wait that long. I put her and the baby on the train about the middle of February and stayed alone to play out my two weeks’ notice so the orchestra could get a replacement for me.
    That long drive home alone in my Model T was an unforgettable experience. I caught snatches of sleep along the road from time to time, but aside from that, I drove straight through. I had no top coat, and the weather got increasingly colder as I drove north. When I reached Chicago’s southern limits, the streets were covered with ice. At Sixty-third and Western, the car went into a skid, and I ended up on the curb on the wrong side of the street. A big policeman came rushing over swearing at me, sitting there shivering in my light suitcoat, “What’s the matter,” he yelled. “Are you drunk?” I was afraid I was due for another few hours in jail, but I explained my plight and he let me go. Like most Chicagoans, he figured anyone who’d been taken in the Florida real estate scandal was a damned fool, but more to be pitied than scorned.
    My parents’ home never looked more welcome than it did that day. Ethel fed me hot soup and got me into a warm bed, and I slept for fifteen hours straight.
    I had left Florida in the nick of time, it turned out. The business decline that began when the real estate boom collapsed caught up with the nightclubs soon after I left. The Silent Night closed its gates for good. Palm Island popped into the news once in a while as time went by. Al Capone built a home there. Then Lou Walters, father of TV’s Barbara Walters, opened the Latin Quarter. But it was to be a long time before I saw Florida again.

 
    4
    The ten years between 1927 and 1937 were a decade of destiny for the paper cup industry. It was exciting to watch the business grow. But if I had known the disillusionment that was waiting for me, I might have gone into some other line of work.
    When I returned to selling paper cups, I vowed that this was going to be my only job. I was going to make my living at it and to hell with moonlighting of any kind. When I played the piano, it would be for pleasure only. I intended to devote every ounce of my energy to selling, and that’s exactly what I did.
    My boss was a shrewd operator named John Clark, a man who could recognize sales talent when he saw it. I didn’t see his true colors for several years, after he made a bargain with me that the devil himself would have been proud of. Clark was president of Sanitary Cup and Service Corporation, whose biggest stockholders were a pair of bachelor brothers in New York by the name of Coue. This corporation was the exclusive Midwest distributor for Lily brand cups, which were manufactured by Public Service Cup Company. They made cups in several different sizes, from one ounce on up to sixteen ounces. These were rather primitive containers by today’s standards. The larger ones had to be pleated and then coated with paraffin wax to make them rigid enough to hold liquids, and they had rims that were limp and floppy.
    I peddled these cups all over Chicago. I sold lots of the smaller sizes to Italian pushcart vendors who filled them with flavored ice and sold one ounce for a penny, two ounces for two cents, and five ounces for a nickel. They called them “squeeze cups” because you would squeeze the