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Raymond Albert Kroc Krocs first job was with his uncle, Earl Edmund Sweet, in a soda fountain the summer before he started high school. The next summer Ray dropped out of school, and he used the money he made the previous summer to rent a building with two friends. They sold sheet music and small instruments, but after a few months the business failed. In the early 1940s, Kroc became the exclusive distributor of a multimixer that could mix five milk shakes simultaneously. Two of his best customers were the McDonald brothers, Richard and Maurice , who bought eight of the mixers for their fast-food restaurants. The McDonalds had started with a group of hot-dog carts, and now had a chain of restaurantsfor which Richard McDonald designed the golden arches logo and the number-of-hamburgers-sold sign. In 1954, Kroc went to San Bernardino, California, to see the McDonald brothers restaurant, which used an assembly-line format to prepare foods. Kroc decided to set up a chain of drive-in restaurants based on the McDonalds format and convinced the brothers to sell him the rights to franchise McDonalds restaurants nationwide. His first restaurant opened on April 15, 1955, in Des Plaines, Illinois. Kroc also began selling franchises on the condition that the owners managed their restaurants. Kroc was known for his obsessive cleanliness, and he wanted the restaurants kept very clean. In 1961, Kroc bought out the McDonald brothers for $2,700,000. At this time he had established 228 restaurants, and sales had reached $37,000,000. By 1963 more than 1 billion hamburgers had been sold. | 
