It was up to Joan’s coexecutors, Dick Starmann, the former McDonald’s executive who had long served as her advisor, and Nancy Trestick, her longtime assistant, to enact her final wishes. This involved fending off crass, curious callers who wondered if they’d been “remembered” in her will; closing up her home to protect it and its contents; asking the court to seal the names of those listed in her trust, to protect beneficiaries from predators; informing the charities that had been recipients of her final gifts; and routing the money where she intended it to go.
A major part of their work included summoning Commissioner Linda Bond, who left behind Salvation Army business in Oregon to go to California to attend the urgent meeting. When she arrived in San Diego, she was driven to Joan’s office building in La Jolla. Lunch was brought in. As they dispensed with pleasantries and ate out of Styrofoam containers, a copy of the trust was slid across the table for her review.
Joan not only had willed Montagna de la Paloma to the Salvation Army, as she’d hinted, but had left instructions that Bond was to convey the enormous news to the rest of her flock: The church was to receive the bulk of her fortune and use it to replicate the center that had been built in San Diego. The sum was $1.5 billion, give or take several hundred million dollars, depending on the economic condition of the markets at the time the money was delivered. It was the largest philanthropic gift ever made by an individual in the United States.
Top Army brass called it a “gift from God,” but the major windfall presented a bewitching challenge. Senior church leaders prayed about whether they could accept the gift, which tasked them specifically with building more centers like the one in Rolando—a major undertaking outside of the Army’s usual area of expertise. There was fear that the enormous donation would discourage others from giving—“donor creep,” it was called in fund-raising. The church only formally agreed to accept the sum just before it was revealed to the public, in January 2004, after the Christmas bell-ringing season. (Wiring the money into the account proved a banking challenge: too many zeroes.)
The plan was firm, but loose: The Army would have to figure out how to enact her wishes. Half of her gift, Joan had stipulated, was to go toward building Kroc Centers, from scratch; retrofitting old buildings was not permitted. The other half would be deposited in an endowment to keep the centers running. The money was to be divided across the four quadrants that split the United States.
Despite the enormity of the gift, it would not be enough to sustain the centers. That left local chapters of the group with the challenge of raising money for this specific purpose. Bids were called for from cities across the country, and locals had to prove they could build and sustain and fund-raise to support their own Kroc Center. In several communities, like Detroit and Long Beach, California, goals went unmet and centers were never built.
Today, twenty-six Ray and Joan Kroc Community Corps Centers have been opened, from Hawaii to Puerto Rico, where kids skate and swim and play after school; where adults lift weights, sweat in exercise classes, and hold meetings—and anyone who wants to participate can worship in “Kroc Churches,” even though recruiting converts to the religion wasn’t the intention of Joan’s gift.
The year after the gift was announced, Bond suddenly resigned her position in the church. She returned to service a year later. In 2011, she was elected to its highest office, General—only the third time a woman had been named its international leader. Two years later, she retired abruptly and vanished from public life.
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Kevin Klose received his news via telephone in his office at NPR’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “Are you sitting down?” asked coexecutor Starmann. Then he commanded the executive to pick up a pen and start writing down zeroes. Six of them. Klose had once said he hoped Joan might make a donation to NPR at the elite $25,000 level. In fact, Starmann told him, Joan had left the network approximately $220 million. It was the money that had been earmarked for the Four Flowers. (The sum reached $236 million by the time the gift was delivered.) “Is that the silver club or the gold club?” Starmann quipped.
This was more than twice the network’s annual budget and the largest gift NPR had ever received. The quinoa- and kale-eating public radio employees brought in Big Macs at lunch the day the gift was announced in November 2003. One vice president, Jay Kernis, remarked that it was like Christmas and the lottery, all rolled into one. The emerita network host Susan Stamberg joked she was changing her name to “McStamberg.”
The bulk of the gift, about $190 million, was earmarked for the network’s endowment, which, until Joan’s beneficence, only contained $35 million. Interest alone now would amount to $10 million a year. The remaining $20 million plus went directly to NPR’s operational costs.
As the Salvation Army leaders had been, top NPR brass was befuddled by the windfall. Would it dissuade devoted listeners from opening their pocketbooks to give to member stations? How would station personnel feel? They were perennially in fund-raising mode, paying the network handsome fees for programming. It was they who were on the front lines of the muddled identity between network and affiliates; they would have to explain to listeners that this Kroc windfall didn’t trickle down directly into their coffers. And what about the cranks who routinely criticized the network for receiving government funding? (In truth, NPR got a tiny portion of its funds from the government, but this myth was pervasive among the network’s detractors.)
By the next year, NPR administrators had hatched a plan: To flesh out news coverage worldwide, seventy new staff positions would be added, along with an internship program named for Joan. Fees paid to the network by member stations were temporarily lowered. Joan’s landmark contribution was acknowledged in the lobby of NPR’s grand new $200 million headquarters that opened in 2013, and she’s thanked on the air each day.
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One by one, other gifts were revealed and announced with pride and fanfare. Sixty million dollars to be spread among the 120 Ronald McDonald Houses that had been formed in the United States since that seed fund created back in 1977 in honor of Ray. Fifty million dollars apiece to each of the two peace centers Joan had built. Twenty million dollars to San Diego Hospice. Ten million each to the Zoo and the opera she’d once walked out on. Five million to KPBS. A million to Crazy Horse. Half a million dollars each to two groups in San Diego that helped AIDS patients: Mama’s Kitchen, a meal delivery service for those with the disease, and Auntie Helen’s Fluff n Fold, a laundry service for the afflicted.
In all, about $2.7 billion—the lion’s share of the fortune.
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Joan’s first husband, Rollie, preceded her in death by just three weeks. He was killed in a car accident on September 23, 2003. A recreation center, Smith Youth Sports Complex, stands in Whitefish, Montana, a gift made by his daughter before his passing.
As for the rat pack: Mercedes McCambridge died five months after Joan, on March 2, 2004. Helen died six months later, on August 25, 2004.
Newspaper reports pointed to these losses as a reason for the troubling decline of Mayor Mo. In 2013, Maureen O’Connor pleaded not guilty to a charge of money laundering and admitted to taking $2.1 million out of her late husband’s charitable foundation to support her gambling addiction, making more than a billion dollars in bets and losing around $13 million. She blamed the problem on a brain tumor. That her good friend Joan was herself a high roller was never mentioned. In exchange for having the charges dropped, Maureen promised to pay back the money.
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Mac McDonald died on December 11, 1971, in Palm Springs. In 1964, Dick McDonald married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy, and returned to their native New Hampshire. After Ray’s death launched a flurry of tributes to the “founder” of McDonald’s, Dick waged a campaign to ensure his and his brother’s contributions as the true founders were acknowledged. In August 1991, The Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined: “McDonald’s Pickle: He Began Fast Food but Gets No Credit. History according to Kroc Irks Dick McDonald, Who Rid the World of Carhops.” It spawned, as high-profile news articles often do, a flurry of interest and other interviews. It also inspired longtime PR man Al Golin to write an impassioned response in support of Ray’s legacy: “When a baby is left on a doorstep of a home—the true father is the one who raised and educated that baby to maturity. The McDonald’s Restaurant’s father is Ray Kroc.” Were that true, wags noted, the famous sandwich would be called not a “Big Mac” but a “Big Kroc.”
In 1993, Dick was awarded an honorary doctor of commerce degree from Bellevue University in Nebraska. He died in 1998.
Harry Sonneborn died in Alabama on September 21, 1992; June Martino, in Florida, on January 29, 2005. Her family asked that in lieu of flowers, gifts be given instead to Ronald McDonald House. Fred Turner died on January 7, 2013. Max Cooper passed away in August 2015 at the age of ninety-nine. At one point he owned more than forty McDonald’s outposts in Alabama. Harry had convinced him to get into the business there. Cooper also fulfilled his dream of producing plays on Broadway, for which he won two Tony Awards.
Songwriter Steve Vaus continued to use his musical talents to promote political and social messages, although in a different direction from Joan’s. A supporter of the Tea Party and a gun rights advocate, his hit “Wrong’s Not Right” was an indictment of Bill Clinton. Under the name Buck Howdy, he won a Grammy in 2010 for his children’s recordings. Vaus was elected mayor of Poway, California, in 2014.
As for the fate of several of Joan’s beneficiaries: San Diego Hospice declared bankruptcy in February 2013 and was acquired by a local hospital, Scripps. The San Diego Opera announced in 2014 that it was closing due to budget shortfalls, but was subsequently rescued.
Hazelden and Betty Ford merged their treatment centers in 2013. Operation Cork’s offshoot at Dartmouth, Project Cork, is in the process of donating its vast database of materials about addiction to Hazelden.
In South Dakota, the Ziolkowski family used its final bequest from Joan to commission a musical laser light show that, on summer nights, explodes onto the side of the mountain where Crazy Horse’s likeness continues to emerge. A credit to Joan is given at the end of the show. Joan’s gift of western art was not on display when I visited in November 2015. The sculpture of Ray still stands in the visitor center, a random diversion from the Native American art and artifacts that surround it.
What was left of Joan’s personal art collection was auctioned by Christie’s, along with her jewels.
The Chain Reaction sculpture by Paul Conrad funded anonymously by Joan and erected in 1991 was found to be in disrepair in late 2011. Given what they said would be the prohibitive cost of fixing it, the Santa Monica City Council considered the possibility of “deaccessioning” the work. Supporters, including the late artist’s son, Dave, and local activist Jerry Rubin, rallied a dedicated group that called itself the “Chain Gang” to raise $100,000 from a host of people, from schoolchildren to well-known figures like Norman Lear, Ed Asner, Martin Sheen, Tim Robbins, Ed Ruscha, and Dr. Helen Caldicott. They also got permission from Joan’s daughter, Linda, to remove the cloak of secrecy over the gift from Joan that made it possible for the sculpture to be built. The City Council voted six to one on February 25, 2014, to preserve the monument. It is currently being restored, and there are plans to surround it with a “peace park.” There’s also talk of a plaque to honor Joan’s gift, for making the work possible.
The nuclear mushroom cloud that the McDonald’s fortune built stands as one of the more unusual legacies of Joan’s inventive giving. It’s also one of the enduring reminders of the power of a chance encounter to change the course of a kaleidoscope of lives. Two brothers who migrated west; a salesman in search of a lucky break; a beautiful young woman who dreamed of a world beyond her own. Joan could never have imagined that night she met Ray in St. Paul just how big her life would become, or how many lives she’d touch—all because of the race to sell fast food.