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Answering your question proved to be a little trickier than we had anticipated. We started out by visiting the McDonald's category in the commercial branch of the Yahoo! directory. From there, we chose the link to the official web site of the company. We clicked the Information link on the front page and were pleased to find a History section on the site. We clicked through and started reading. Unfortunately, the history wasn't as complete as we would have liked. It describes how
milkshake-machine salesman Ray Kroc heard about a little hamburger stand in California run by Dick and Mac McDonald. Ray headed out to the golden state to find the golden arches and sell some milkshake machines, but when all was said and done, he ended up opening up the first McDonald's franchise in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955. This was all very interesting, but the exact location of the first McDonald's stand was never pinpointed. We decided it was time to head back to the front page of Yahoo!, where we entered "first McDonald's" into the search box. Once again, the results were less than satisfactory. We did, however, pick up another interesting McFact
for your consumption -- the first McDonald's drive-through window opened in 1975 in Sierra Vista, Arizona. After scratching our heads, we tried again. This time we entered "McDonalds hamburger stand." One of the matches, a page from a site devoted to the infamous Route 66, waxed nostalgic about cruising the original hamburger stand of the McDonald brothers. It lists the location of the stand as the intersection of Fourteenth and E Streets in "San Berdo." Thinking this was some small city in California we had never heard of, we typed "San Berdo" into the Yahoo! search box.
We soon learned that it's actually a nickname for San Bernardino, a city outside of L.A. So there you have it -- the very first McDonald's hamburger stand was established in San Bernardino, California. For more information about the original hamburger stand and the McDonald brothers, visit this great web page from the San Bernardino Route 66 Museum. Or next time you're in the neighborhood, stop by and pay homage at the museum itself, located on the site of the original stand.
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