The PR man who gave Ronald to Mcdonald’s

In 1955, Al Golin stumbled across an advertisement for a new restaurant in Chicago, offering 15-cent hamburgers, ample free parking and “speedee service”. Impressed, the 28-yearold PR man telephoned its owner to make a pitch for his business. The restaurant was Mcdonald’s, said The New York Times, and its owner was Ray Kroc. Golin duly won the business – a PR account he would hold on to for the next 60 years, as Mcdonald’s grew from a three-franchise operation (established by the Mcdonald brothers in 1948) into a global monolith. “We never would have made it without your help,” wrote Kroc in a telegram in 1977. In the meantime, his own firm, Golin, flourished too: it is now one of the world’s top ten PR firms, with 1,200 employees in more than 50 offices.

Golin’s big idea was trust: years before companies started talking about corporate responsibility, he persuaded Kroc that Mcdonald’s should present itself as a business that cared. One of his first PR initiatives was to hand out free burgers to Salvation Army workers – a story he managed to get placed on the front page of the local paper. PR was cheaper than advertising, he explained, and good deeds generated positive headlines that would help create a “trust bank”. It was Golin who came up with the character Ronald Mcdonald, and Golin who was credited with using the term “hamburger university” to describe Mcdonald’s management training centres. He also encouraged the corporation to sponsor various charitable ventures, including the Ronald Mcdonald houses for children with life-threatening illnesses. All of this, he explained, created reserves of goodwill that the firm could draw on when it needed public support.

Golin grew up in Chicago, where his parents – who were of Polish and Lithuanian descent – ran a number of cinemas. As a young man, he aspired to be a movie producer, and his first job was doing publicity for MGM, but he decided to stick with PR. He’d always been persuasive. Once, he spotted Ernest Hemingway in a bar in Havana, and persuaded the often truculent writer to pose for a photo with him. Later, he knocked on Norman Rockwell’s door, and convinced him to paint a picture for the cover of a Mcdonald’s annual report. Yet he was, by all accounts, a rather quiet, modest man, married to his wife, June, for more than 55 years. At a party to celebrate his firm’s 60th anniversary, Golin told his assembled friends and colleagues: “Someone once asked me, ‘Was the call to Ray Kroc the most important call you ever made in your life?’ And I said, ‘No, it was really the second most important call. The first one was asking my wife, June, out for our first date.’”