It’s National Cheeseburger Day, and here’s the story of the guy who brought us one of the world’s most massive and massively popular burgers: Jim Delligatti, the inventor of the Big Mac.
Deligatti was born in 1918 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
After serving in World War II, he started working in the restaurant business.
In 1955 he met Ray Kroc, the man who was turning McDonald’s into a fast food giant.
He went on to open his own chain of McDonald’s restaurants, 48 of them at his peak.
Delligatti noticed that other chains sold really big burgers along with their standard ones.
Burger King was, of course, the home of the Whopper, and Big Boy had a double-decker burger on the menu.
Delligatti wanted to create and sell his own, and McDonald’s HQ said that was fine, as long as he used ingredients that were already on the menu.
With the exception of the extra large sesame seed buns, he did what they asked, putting together two burgers with lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, plus a “special sauce” based on Thousand Island dressing.
When he put the new sandwich on the menu at one of his restaurants, overall sales jumped 12 percent, and the burgers sold really well at his other locations too.
In 1968 McDonald’s rolled out the sandwich nationwide; it sold for 49 cents.
At first it was sold under names like The Aristocrat or the Blue Ribbon Burger.
Officially, a worker in the McDonald’s ad office, Esther Glickstein Rose, gets credit for the name Big Mac, though Delligatti’s family says he came up with the name after deciding that the name “Big Mc” didn’t sound quite right.
Wherever the name came from, the sandwich was a massive success.
Delligatti didn’t get any extra royalties for inventing what is now McDonald’s signature sandwich, though he did get a plaque for his efforts.
He made sure to have a Big Mac once a week every week for the rest of his life.
And he lived to be 98, so that’s a lot of burgers.
A designer in Belgium, Mathilde Wittock, has just come up with a way to upcycle used tennis balls instead of sending them to landfills: turn them into furniture.
She’s designed a series of lounge chairs and benches that use old tennis balls as cushions.
So if you sit down really fast, do you bounce back up?
Michael “Jim” Delligatti, Big Mac creator, dead at 98 (CBS News)
Artist Makes Furniture Out of Tennis Balls That Otherwise Would Take 400 Years to Decompose in Landfills (Good News Network)
Back this show on Patreon for less than the cost of a Big Mac a month
Photo by Elliot via Flickr/Creative Commons
