“What’s wrong with us?” Nancy asked Bree when they were back at the clubhouse. “Everybody else is making money.”
    Bree was sprawled on the beanbag chair. “We just have to figure out what we’re great at that nobody else is.”
                           from Nancy Clancy Seeks a Fortune
                                         written by Jane O’Connor
                             illustrations by Robin Preiss Glasser
                                        Harper/HarperCollins, 2016

    Although Daddy surprised us kids one time with a Perry Como 45 record and a brand-new hi-fi to spin it on, he was not what anyone would reasonably call spontaneous. He was thoughtful and considerate, which is not always the opposite of spontaneity.  
    That is to say, what happened next was not typical “Daddy behavior.” He came home from work one day in September, 1960, and piled us all into the car to try out a new restaurant. He must have told Mom or she would have been in the middle of serving a home-cooked meal as he pulled in at 6:00. 
    It was not only Daddy’s new idea about dinner, it was a whole new concept in eating. Fast Food. McDonald’s, it was. After the Golden Arches were added, but before Ronald made his marketing appearance. So off we all went for the 30 minute drive.
    There was only one hitch. Mom didn’t like ketchup. Her burger had to be special-ordered which took longer. The point was fast, and Mom’s burger was not fast. “But it’s fresh,” she never failed to mention. And maybe it was.
    Okay, two hitches. Daddy liked to keep his car clean. We did not eat in his car. Indoor seating was not a wide-spread McDonald’s “thing” until 1968, so we ate at a picnic table in front of the building.
    The first drive-thru was added in 1975. When a decline in sales (prompted by an Army rule stating that soldiers had to stay in their cars or on base while wearing fatigues) an enterprising franchisee designed a sliding drive-up window. The idea caught on fast. A drive-thru in the Oklahoma City restaurant netted a 40% increase in sales.
    Between the popularity of two-car families and people spending more time in their cars, the fast food business grew, well, fast. 
    To the detriment of our health, we Americans are the #1 consumers of fast food in the world at an average of 18 meals per month. According to All About Burgers, “[t]he average American consumes about 3 burgers per week. McDonald’s serves around 75 million burgers daily, which accounts for a significant portion of the 50 billion burgers eaten each year in America.”
    Now backtrack to 1954. Ray Kroc, a milkshake machine salesman, approached the McDonald’s brothers, who were running a successful BBQ joint in California. He brought his Multimixer and a full load of energy, and sold them not only the Multimixer, but himself, as well.
    Kroc became their franchise agent in 1955 and opened his own McDonald’s, the first one east of the Mississippi River, in 1955, too. 
    In 1961, the McDonald brothers sold their company to Kroc for $2.7 million. 
    Ray kept the name, but focused on uniformity and streamlined the menu. He standardized all procedures for every task from product (McDonald’s only uses Russet Burbank potatoes from Idaho for their fries, everywhere in the world) to prepping, cooking, serving, and cleaning up.
    When he died in 1984, Ray Kroc left his $500 million fortune to his wife, Joan. By the time of her own death in 2003, she had grown the fortune to $3 billion. 
    And she was a philanthropist’s philanthropist. 
    Over $200 million went to NPR who set up the Joan B. Kroc Legacy Society to manage the largest bequest in public radio history.
    The Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies located on the campus of the University of Notre Dame, supports about 400 colleges and universities around the world that offer peace study programs of one kind or another. From its website “[p]eace studies [is a recognized discipline which] has a literature (books and journals), an active base of scholars, an established curriculum, and a pedagogical tradition that includes classroom teaching, experiential learning, internships, and international study…Kroc Institute faculty are experts in a variety of disciplines and can speak engagingly on diverse topics related to conflict, violence and strategic peacebuilding efforts.”
    The Salvation Army was Joan’s largest beneficiary, almost half of her fortune. In 2023, twenty years after her death, “26 grand, state-of-the-art Kroc centers have opened” throughout the US and our territories. AP News reports “1.2 million people belong to Kroc fitness centers, and over 3 million people annually are served through a wide variety of other programs, including job training, theatrical performances, and afterschool care.”
    While the McDonald’s Corporation does not continue to support Joan’s philanthropic agencies directly, and Franchisees are not obliged to contribute to them, either, Joan’s legacy includes not only the funds she donated, but her example of “giving big” as a lesson to all of us.
    The McDonald's Corporation supports Animal Welfare, Climate Action, Eliminating Deforestation, Providing Sustainable Packaging, and “reducing by 90%” the amount of “conventional virgin plastic” in their Happy Meal toys. (info from McDonald’s Corporation website here and here.)
    All that “giving back” makes me feel good about McDonald’s Corporation’s leadership role in causes I also believe in. But I still won’t buy their food. Well, maybe a milkshake now and then.
​
I just finished reading When Tomorrow Burns by Tae Keller (Random House Books for Young Readers/Random House Children’s Books, 2026), a story of three friends who found a book of prophecies. Told in alternating points of view, including a tree, the friends grow apart, make bad decisions, and live with the consequences that ultimately bring new understanding of themselves and reconnection to each other. Recommended.
                          -—Be curious! (and give yourself a break
                                               today. You deserve it!)

They’ll make a route from here to there
with careful planning everywhere.
The team will build it, load by load:
A SUPERHIGHWAY, MEGA ROAD!
              Construction Site: Road Crew, Coming Through! 
                               written by Sherri Duskey Rinker 
                                           illustrated by AG Ford
                                           Chronicle Books, 2021

    On Tuesday, October 24, 2017, my husband and I started out on a 5,825 mile trip to the Southwest US. We were gone 19 days. (I’m counting the last day because we arrived back home at 8:21 pm.)
    We started out with a full tank, a load of curiosity, and an empty journal, and headed for Route 66, the best way to discover the nebulous “West.”
    After meeting old friends for breakfast in St. Louis, our first stop was the Gateway Arch, conveniently located on the Mother Road, herself.. We worked our way from there to the Rte 66 museum housed in a new library in Lebanon, Missouri. We found dinner in Stroud, Oklahoma, at Tammy’s Roadside Roundup Cafe. 
    Across the Texas panhandle to Amarillo then Sante Fe., New Mexico. Except for the Georgia O’Keefe museum, everything was cotton and cattle. 
    Oil rigs next to silos and a 10-mile wide wind farm that included at least 100 windmills. Then Taos. We visited an Earthship community in Tres Piedras, NM. It’s a self-contained community that generates its own electricity, water, food, and companionship. Click the link to see Earth and her Earthlings enjoying each other.
    Cottonwood after cottonwood after cottonwood tree glowed gold at the bottom of Rio Grande del Norte, a gorge just a little smaller than the Grand Canyon.
    Viewed ancient petroglyphs in Petrified Forest National Park.
    Speechless with the wonder of beauty at Grand Canyon. 
    Flagstaff and Sedona with their breathtaking views of mountains at 7,000 feet of elevation.
    At the Phoenix Botanical Garden we learned that both Gila and gilded woodpeckers carve holes in saguaro cacti 15 to 25 feet high for their nests. The nest holes don’t hurt the cacti. The plants ooze out a liquid resin that hardens to protect themselves while providing a firm base for the nests. 
    Cacti mature at about 40 feet and don’t start growing arms till they’re at least 50 years old.
    We crossed the Carefree Highway on our way to the Hoover Dam and Lake Meade, then found Rte 93, the Joshua Tree Parkway. The trees are ubiquitous along the roadsides for miles.
    A switchback road took us to Oatman, AZ and back to Rte 66. Oatman was a mining town: copper and silver, mostly. Now it’s famous for its burros. The ones roaming the streets today are descendants of the working burros that pulled miner’s equipment. They eat hay you can buy from the general store. One dollar for a lunchbag sized package. The town holds a naming contest each Spring when new babies are born,. (They all looked alike to me!)
    Stayed in Boulder City, NV, just outside Las Vegas. Walked around the town and saw lots of statues commemorating Hoover Dam. 
    Finally, 3,373 miles from home, we arrived at Zion National Park. Walked several easy trails before heading to Bryce Canyon. 
    At 7,777 feet, we woke up near Bryce Canyon to 39 degrees and frost. By the time we saw the Hoodoos, the weather was warm and sunny.
    We took the loooong way to Moab, Utah, and had to stop for two cows in the road.
    Arches National Park might be the most beautiful place on Earth. 
    Every bend of the road delivered an astonishing view. 
    Zion. All in Utah. 
    November 9. After traveling 4006 miles, we turned toward home. 
    Mesa Verde’s Cliff Dwelling tours closed for the season the day before we arrived, so we  explored the area where the Ancestral Puebloans lived before they moved into the cliffs, and viewed the cliff dwellings with binoculars across a canyon. A good reason to return.
    Lots of snow as we crossed the Continental Divide in Colorado.
    After a night at the  Wigwam Motel, incredibly shaped like a cement wigwam, (not much room to move around and the bathroom mirror was on a slant to accommodate the inside wall), our home called a little louder.
    We blew past the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, the Oz Museum in Wamego, Kansas, and Harry S. Truman’s Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri.
    Whew! Home, 19 days and 5,825 miles later.
    Legislation for building public highways was first introduced in Congress in 1916, but it wasn’t until 1925 that road construction finally began. In summer of 1926, the road received its official numerical designation. The planners intended U.S. 66 to move southwest to connect Chicago to Los Angeles, “a principle east-west artery.” The road would connect main streets of rural communities to urban communities providing much needed “access to a major national thoroughfare.”
    The road was used by farmers to transport grain and produce to the big cities, and by 1930 truck traffic rivaled the rails. Called the Mother Road by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath (1939 novel, made into a film in 1940), the name stuck. Over 200,000 people migrated from Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl years (1933 to 1939) earning Route 66 its symbol as the “road to opportunity.”
    Young Army captain, Dwight D. Eisenhower, saw the need for improved roads as the world ramped up to World War II. Between 1941 and 1945 the US government invested about $70 billion to build new military training bases out West, primarily around LA and San Diego, and move soldiers there.
    After the War, store owners, motel managers, and gas station attendants rose to the challenge of meeting the needs of growing numbers of travelers and people re-locating from the cold winters of the North to the “barbecue culture” of California. And in 1946, Nat King Cole released “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” written by former pianist with Tommy Dorsey and ex-Marine captain, after he moved from Harrisburg, PA to California, Bobby Troup.
    Under Eisenhower’s direction, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 provided the finances needed to pay for our Interstate Highway System.
    By 1970, nearly all of Rte 66 was bypassed by modern four-lanes, and by 1984, the final section was bypassed by I-40 at Williams, Arizona. (See National Historic Route 66 Federation for more history of our Mother Road.) 
    Although we were not on Rte 66 our entire trip, lots of the road passed under our tires. 
    What a beautiful country!
I just finished reading Whale Eyes: a Memoir About Seeing and Being Seen written by James Robinson with illustrations by Brian Rea (Penguin Workshop/Penguin Random House, 2025). It’s the fascinating story of a boy whose distorted vision turned him into a documentary filmmaker. His inspirational journey was guided by his mother and his own determination, grit, and curiosity about how the world really works. Recommended.
                          --Stay Curious! (and travel by armchair
                                   till the price of gas goes down)

Good morning!
I'm a new poll worker and heading out to work! so no blog post today.
Please vote. Primaries are important, too!
​See you next week.