Friday, April 8, 2022

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!)

15 comments:

  1. I love your McDonald's memories! My sister worked at McDonald's in high school, and she has similar good memories. (She also turned down Hamburger U, I'm afraid.) By the time she was working there, the uniforms were sunny yellow . . . same polyester, same "grill smell." We still laugh about her manager's motto (which I'm pretty sure he learned at Hamburger U): "If you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean." Thanks for sharing your most excellent exhibit, Bonny!

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  2. What a great and fun exhibit Bonny. Look at those prices!!! I'm also cracking up about how selective Hamburger U was. LOL

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  3. I love this memory! I worked at Micky D's for a stint my junior and senior year of high school I worked after school for the "dinner rush" and it was just enough to know that I did not want to work there for the remainder of my days! :)

    I am nodding at Kym's comment... Yep, I heard the 'if you've got time to lean...' comment frequently! LOL :)

    Thank you so much for sharing this fun memory!

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  4. how neat! I worked at a local restaurant and remember exactly what I wore and the fond memories of many regular customers! Look at those prices :)

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  5. We didn't have a McDonold's in our area until the 1970s, but I worked at the A&W drive in for one summer. I was also at the grill and wore a polyester DRESS! I couldn't stand the smell and was so happy to quit early so my family could leave on an extended summer trip. The next summer I worked in a rest home kitchen. They didn't have friers and the malodors were different. Thank goodness the next summer I had an office job. I enjoy walking through your Museum every month!

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  6. I think this might be the best Museum of Me entry to date, although there have been some other very good ones. Your memories of this are so vivid that they evoked lots of other people's memories from that time in their lives, and that made a lot of us smile and laugh early on a Friday morning. Thanks, Bonny, and a job well done! Have a great weekend, maybe a burger?

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  7. I've been to Hamburger U! I worked for one of McD's ad agencies in the 80s and this was a requirement. Glad you went to college instead!

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    1. That's very interesting! I've never known anyone that actually attended before (except our kind manager), so it's always seemed almost like a make-believe place. I imagined Ronald McDonald, Mayor McCheese, and the Grimace as professors!

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  8. I just snorted out loud at "Anyone can go to Lehigh, but Hamburger U. is very selective!" It sounds like this job taught you the very important lesson that sometimes it's not the job itself but the people you work with who make the job a good one.

    Also, do you want fries with that? ;-)

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  9. We didn't have a McDonalds in our area until my senior year of high school. My first job (besides babysitting) was at Woolworths. This was in our downtown, before the mall opened, and I loved seeing so many people I knew. I worked mainly as a cashier, but also put together Easter baskets, Christmas displays, and helped with the annual inventory. One time another high school student and I got called in when the store was closed to help corral hundreds of turtles that escaped their enclosure and were all over the store! Our manager got us pizza for helping clean up that mess!

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    1. Your Woolworth's job sounds quite interesting! I loved going to our Woolworth's, which carried everything from record albums to makeup to clothing and turtles. It sounds like you have good memories of that job (and learned the important skill of turtle-wrangling)!

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  10. This is great! I did a year at Burger King myself. My mother wouldn't let me bring the clothes or shoes in the house after my shift. My uniform went straight into the washer on my way into the house (it was conveniently located between the back door and the kitchen), and my shoes stayed just outside the back door.

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  11. I laughed so hard at ............"anyone can go to Lehigh". Oh MY WORD!!!

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  12. I love this exhibit and the insight into what it's like to work at McDonald's! I can't believe (sarcasm) you didn't jump at the opportunity to attend the very selective Hamburger U!

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  13. Wow, Bonny - what an interesting story! I'm glad you found so many good things to recall about the experience. and all those years without McDonalds isn't a bad thing either.

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Thank you for visiting and taking the time to comment! :-)