QSR History | 1398 North E Street — The Drive-In That Fired Its Own Carhops

The hamburger sold for fifteen cents, and getting it to that price meant firing twenty carhops.

Richard and Maurice McDonald opened a drive-in on this corner on 15 May 1940, at Fourteenth and North E Street, on San Bernardino's stretch of the Route 66 business district.

They called it McDonald's Bar-B-Q, and it sold roughly twenty-five things — ribs, pork and beef sandwiches, hamburgers — carried out to parked cars by uniformed carhops.

It was not their first food business. That was the Airdrome, an octagonal stand near the Monrovia airfield, and the building itself was moved here.

The drive-in did well and was difficult at the same time. Teenagers filled the lot for hours without spending much, carhops turned over constantly, and a long menu kept the kitchen slow.

In 1948 the brothers closed for about three months and took their own business apart.

Out went the carhops, the crockery and most of the menu. Nine items stayed: hamburger, cheeseburger, soft drinks, milk, coffee, potato chips and pie.

The kitchen was rebuilt as an assembly line, with fixed stations, purpose-made tools, and a walk-up window where customers now collected their own food.

They named it the Speedee Service System, priced hamburgers at fifteen cents, and abolished tipping.

Business fell when they reopened that December. Dismissed carhops came back to heckle, and regulars asked when the old service was returning.

Families arrived instead, and within five years the brothers were licensing the design to other operators — Phoenix in 1953, then Downey that August.

A word about "first" is needed here, because at least five stores can claim a version of it.

The Airdrome came earliest; the first restaurant called McDonald's opened on this corner in 1940; the first one running Speedee reopened here in December 1948.

Phoenix took the first building with the golden arches, in 1953, and the first franchise Ray Kroc opened was the chain's ninth store, at Des Plaines in 1955.

Even the reopening day is unsettled. The 12th of December is widely repeated but traces to retellings rather than a document, and one architectural record prints that same day four years later.

Nothing of the 1940 building survives. The lot now holds an unofficial museum run by the founder of a local chicken chain, a hamburger-faced statue, and a reproduction of the fifteen-cent Speedee sign.

The marker standing beside that sign is the thing to read: SITE OF ORIGINAL McDONALD'S, RICHARD & MAURICE McDONALD.

Photo: Marykdan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons