It’s fair to assume that most people know Ray A. Kroc was a huge part of McDonald’s and the San Diego Padres, but he also had some important La Jolla connections.

During his life from 1902 to 1984, the Oak Park, Ill., native became a partner in the McDonald’s fast-food chain, which at the time included eight southern California locations with the chain’s founders Richard and Maurice McDonald in 1954.

Born in Illinois in 1902 to Czech parents, Ray A. Kroc was an American entrepreneur best known for taking McDonald’s from a local chain to the world’s most profitable restaurant franchise operation.

Besides being part of burger history, Kroc who died of heart failure in January 1984, and his wife, Joan, a major philanthropist were a powerhouse couple.

RAY A. KROC

Operating the famous hamburger chain, Ray Kroc sold restaurant franchises around the country but also maintained 1.9% of each store’s gross receipts for himself.

By 1961, the McDonald brothers sold their interest in the company to Kroc for $2.7 million, but the brothers kept ownership of the chain’s first outlet in San Bernadino at 1398 North E. St. (14th and E).

Kroc wrote in his autobiography, “Grinding It Out,” “What a godd-mn rotten trick … I opened a McDonald’s across the street from that store, which they had renamed The Big M, and it ran them out of business.”

In reality, Kroc’s store was a block north, but the Big M closed two years later. Kroc would step down as McDonald’s CEO in 1974, then became chairman, and then, in 1977, senior chairman.

On retiring, Ray Kroc was so wealthy he bought the San Diego Padres baseball team for $12 million the same year and the successful businessman once said, “If my competitor were drowning, I’d stick a hose in his mouth and turn on the water.”

JOAN B. KROC

As for his wife, Joan B. Kroc, who lived from 1928 to 2003, after Ray died, she became a billionaire widow, inherited the Padres in 1984, and later sold the team in 1990 for $75 million.

She was born Joan Beverly Mansfield in St. Pail, Minn., and married Ray, who was her second husband, in 1969.

Joan was known for being a tremendous humanitarian and advocate of world peace and nuclear disarmament.

Her first big philanthropic project was Operation Cork (Kroc spelled backward), a La Jolla-based alcoholism educational program in 1976.

In 1985, she gifted $3.3 million to the San Diego Zoo and donated $25 million to start the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at UCSD in 1991.

Of course, one major milestone in her life was when she got older and donated $87 million to the Salvation Army to create the Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center for arts and recreation in east San Diego.

The center opened in 2002 and has an indoor ice skating rink, three swimming pools, a library, and a $15 million theater.

Ray, too, was a supporter of the Salvation Army and as kroccenter.org said: “During the 1950s and ’60s, Ray volunteered as a bellringer and used to deliver hot coffee and hamburgers from his Golden Arches restaurant to bell-ringers along Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago.”

After his death, she bequeathed $200 million in her will to National Public Radio, including $5 million for local NPR station KPBS.

Nicknamed “St. Joan of the Arches” , Adrienne Finley who worked with Joan during the construction of the Salvation Army Ray and Joan Kroc Center in San Diego, shared that Joan Kroc “had the grace of a ballerina, so poised, with perfect posture,” according to Legacy.com

At the time, Finley said, according to the article, “She was so beautiful and had so much life and so much fun,” the director of development for the Sierra del Mar division of the Salvation Army. “We never would have suspected that she wasn’t going to be around forever.”

Joan Kroc donated $40 million for the construction of the San Diego center and another $40 million for an endowment.

Today there are Kroc centers around the country, including one in Puerto Rico, and all are financed with Joan’s posthumous gift.

Born in 1929, Joan’s dad was a railway worker, her mother a violinist and they made sure there were always funds for her piano lessons. Later, Joan would have a career as a music teacher and would meet Ray Kroc in 1957 while playing the organ at a St. Paul supper club.

At the time, Joan and Ray were already married to other people and according to the website, “Ray Kroc, who had opened his first McDonald’s two years earlier, later wrote in his autobiography, ‘I was stunned by her blond beauty.’”

FINALLY, TOGETHER

In 1969, they met up again and were married; his third, her second.

Ray would go on to establish the Kroc Foundation, which supported research on diabetes, arthritis, and multiple sclerosis. He suggested franchisees get involved in their communities thus he created the charitable enterprise the Ronald McDonald Houses, which house families for free while their children receive medical treatment.

Some more Kroc stories found while researching:

After listening to the University of Notre Dame president talk against nuclear war in 1987, Joan gifted the school $6 million to begin a peace studies program. She later helped start a similar institute at the University of San Diego.

After an ill hummingbird came into her backyard and was treated at the San Diego Zoo, Joan donated $100,000 to the zoo’s hummingbird area. Later, she donated a $3.3 million gift for another zoo exhibit.

While traveling from San Diego to the Midwest, Joan sat next to a doctor and they talked throughout the flight. Joan later gave the doctor an $18.5 million gift to fulfill her dream of building a hospice in the city. Once it was built, Joan visited with flowers for patients.

LEAVING LEGACIES

Ray, died at age 81 in 1984 in La Jolla and Joan died of cancer at her Rancho Santa Fe home, at age 75 in 2003. They are buried together in El Camino Memorial Park’s Mausoleum of the Bells Terrace Sunset Couches area, section D, bay 2.

It appears that both Ray and Joan Kroc were giving people who finally married, created their legacies, and will be forever remembered in history for their many contributions.