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

bottom and force the ice up to lick it. I sold soft drink cups to concessions at Lincoln Park and Brookfield zoos, to beaches, racetracks, and, of course, to the baseball parks. I used to needle my friend Bill Veeck up in Wrigley Field, trying to get him to stock more cups for Cub games. Bill wasn’t very promotion minded in those days. He became a much different guy when he owned the baseball teams himself. I was always on the lookout for new markets, and I found them in some strange places. Italian pastry shops, for example, could be sold “squat-size” cups for pastry and spumoni. They would buy a lot of them for big picnics, weddings, and religious festivals. I also learned that Polish places in the old Lawndale neighborhood would buy the same cups to serve “Povidla,” which was a prune butter. Those folks ate an awful lot of prune butter.
    America had become an ice cream society in the last years of the twenties, thanks in large part to Prohibition. Bars and fine lounges in hotels sold ice cream, because they could no longer sell liquor, and dairy bars began to crop up all over the country. It was an incredible era. The straitlaced Cal Coolidge, who assured the nation that his fiscal probity had brought prosperity here to stay, moved the White House to the Black Hills of South Dakota for the summer and celebrated the Fourth of July by parading around in a cowboy costume. Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the Yankees for the stupefying figure of $70,000 a year. Lindbergh flew nonstop from New York to Paris. Al Jolson sang in the first talking pictures. And—wonder of wonders—in 1929 the Chicago Cubs won the National League pennant!
    Big things were happening in the paper container industry. A paper milk bottle called the Sealcone was introduced by a New York dairy. Sealcone had no closure, the housewife had to snip off the top with a scissors, so it didn’t drive glass bottles from the nation’s doorsteps as predicted. But the same technology that produced the Sealcone, using paraffined spruce fiber, was utilized by the makers of Tulip cups. When that firm merged with Lily Cup in 1929, it gave me a “straight-sided” cup that was much more rigid and adaptable to other container uses. It allowed me to go after sales to coffee vendors and cottage cheese packers. The merger of Lily and Tulip was wonderful, a big step forward. The year’s most notorious event, however, took the entire country several giant steps backward. It was the stock market crash, which ushered in the Great Depression.
    My father was one of the large losers in the economic collapse. After he had given up his position in New York in 1923 and returned to Chicago, taking a demotion to please my mother, he began working out his frustrations by speculating in real estate. That was probably the fastest-building bubble in the whole inflation-bloated country. Newspapers and magazines in the late twenties were full of advertisements for correspondence courses that were guaranteed to help you get rich quick in real estate. My father didn’t need to take any of those courses. He owned property scattered all over northeastern Illinois. I remember that he bought a corner lot on Madison Street in Oak Park one month and sold it to an automobile dealership the following month at a handsome profit. The real astonisher, however, was a lot he bought in Berwyn for $6,000 and sold a short time later for $18,000!
    Father seemed to have a Midas touch when it came to picking property. He was so busy pyramiding his landholdings, though, that he somehow failed to see—as we all failed to see—whatever warnings there might have been of the impending crash. When the market collapsed, he was crushed beneath a pile of deeds he could not sell. The land they described was worth less than he owed. This was an unbearable situation for a man of my father’s principled conservatism. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage