Museum of Me: April 2022

Hello and welcome to the April installation at the Museum of Me. The staff has been working hard on a new exhibit. This has involved some searching through the archives, dusting, and rearranging. If you'll please follow the docent, she'll show you around this month's exhibit. This month it's a job I had early in my life.

That job was at McDonald's. I grew up in a rural area so there weren't a lot of nearby options for summertime work. McDonald's was only 25 minutes away, they provided me with full-time hours, and it even turned out to be fun. So much fun, that I worked there for three summers, from 1973 to 1975. 

I don't have any actual pictures from that time, but this is what we wore:

I have no idea why this is in the National Museum of American History, but the photo does show the delightful shininess of the 100% polyester uniform top. We wore these along with navy blue polyester pants. Polyester was the perfect fabric to hold in the delightful smell of old grease from the grill, but at least I was lucky enough to have two uniforms. I would come home from work, soak the uniform in some Lestoil and then wash it while wearing the spare uniform the next day. 

I started working on the counter taking orders but was quickly moved to the grill. One day we were getting timed by some McDonald's corporate people. They were using actual stopwatches to see f we could serve people at lunchtime in 60 seconds. A woman brought her cheeseburger back to me and said she had ordered it without pickles, but this one had pickles. I was more worried about going over the allotted 60 seconds, so I told her she could just remove the pickles herself. For 33 cents that seemed reasonable to me. My kind manager thought I might do better on the grill.

And I did. We had a great team of four of us that worked the grill. We were all high school students of the same age, and we learned to work together so efficiently that we also had time for lots of fun. We all worked from 6:00 am to 2:30 pm, so we made each other very strong coffee in the morning, sometimes adding a shot of vanilla, chocolate, or coffee milkshake. If any of us happened to feel a little hungover, the others would cover for us while we rested on the five-gallon buckets of pickles in the walk-in refrigerator. During downtime after the lunch rush, we would melt the white plastic coffee stirrers on the grill just enough to stick them together into sculptures. We made little people, wheelbarrows and bicycles, and even a moving ferris wheel later on. 

The four of us returned every summer for three years until we went to college. The kind manager had been to Hamburger University to become a manager and our last summer he sat us all down as a group and said he wanted to recommend all of us for Hamburger U. We had all been accepted to different colleges, and the kind manager seemed a bit sad that none of us were willing to continue our careers with McDonald's. I remember him telling one of the boys, "Anyone can go to Lehigh, but Hamburger U. is very selective!"

I didn't think I would work there for three years, but it wasn't a bad job for a teenager. I still hate the smell of grease from the grill, and that has put me off eating at McDonald's for the past 48 years, but that's not a bad thing. Like many other things, it was the people that made it enjoyable. 

Thank you for visiting the Museum of Me to hear more about McDonald's than you might have wanted to. The Museum of Me exhibits will be changed monthly on the second Friday of the month, so please stop by again in May for the next carefully curated installation. (The gift shop is on the right on your way out!)