It was sad to read of the death, at 89, of Richard McDonald - one of two brothers associated with the best-known fast food chain in the world. Richard was the man who, some 50 years ago, first drew the yellow arches of McDonalds which now effectively span the entire world - some 23,000 restaurants in over 100 countries.
We are going to be snobby about McDonalds today, I can hear you thinking. We are going to make fun of fast food and mock those who consume it from paper plates with plastic cutlery.
Not at all. This is just a matter of getting something straight.
The real development of McDonalds began with the late Roy Kroc, a travelling salesman in kitchen equipment, and a part-time pianist. Roy discovered that most of his milkshake machines had been bought for a small number of successful restaurants run by brothers Richard (Dick) and his brother Maurice McDonald. He quickly saw their potential, bought the US rights for $2.7 million and later the world rights.
That, basically, is the story of McDonalds. But its origins date back to the small southern Californian desert town of San Bernardino, where Dick and Maurice opened their first restaurant.
As a young man who got my first management job there, I remember it well. The restaurant was nothing out of the ordinary, except for one thing: as Richard's obituary writers have noted, its most famously innovative feature was the car-hop: "a young woman, often dressed in a short skirt, who brought customers their orders after they had parked their cars in the forecourt".
Ah, Alicia.
Yes: the arguments will long continue over Dick McDonald or Roy Kroc being the real "father of fast food", but it was I who came up with the car-hop concept, and Alicia was the original. And she deserved to be. Alicia is a mature woman now, with four grown children and three ex-husbands, I understand (unfortunately we no longer keep in touch), but in her day she was quite a girl. Years later, Roy Kroc used to say that Dick McDonald got the idea for his famous yellow arches sign not from the "M", but from seeing Alicia lying on her back sun-bathing in a canary-yellow bikini on her free afternoon, out on the restaurant porch. Well, that was Roy's sense of humour, and who's to know, maybe he could even be right.
Certainly, as a car-hop, Alicia was a big hit from day one. I saw plenty of young guys pull into the restaurant forecourt in their soft-top Buicks and zippy little Mustangs and forget what they were going to order when they locked onto Alicia in her little white skirt sashaying towards them with her notepad.
There was a lot of spilt CocaCola, that's for sure. And a lot of girlfriends who didn't like the attention Alicia got from their boys.
I got Alicia's attention myself for a while, but in my heart I knew it could never last. Still, we were together for a little longer than it takes to finish two chocolate milkshakes, as the saying was in San Bernardino in those days.
From the start, Alicia was making more on tips than her regular pay. And one day she came to tell me she was taking off for a couple of weeks to New York. Once her mind was made up, there was no point in trying to change it, and 20 minutes later she hopped into her pink convertible Ford Impala, blew me a final kiss and hit the road.
A week later I got a postcard. Alicia was staying at a new hotel called the Holiday Inn, a small establishment set up on a derelict Manhattan site by a part-time clarinettist and travelling shoe salesman, Joe Holiday. By this stage everyone knew that to get on in business in America, you had to have a concept, and Joe Holiday's great breakthrough concept was the bell-hop: the young man who responds to the receptionist's bell in the hotel lobby. Today there are bell-hops in hotels all over the world, but the very first bell-hop, and by all accounts the best, was the Holiday Inn's Jimmy Ring.
You can guess the rest. The carhop and the bell-hop were made for each other: Alicia and Jimmy hit it off first thing. The next time the hotel lobby bell rang, Jimmy just wasn't there. And when the automobiles on our little restaurant forecourt in San Bernardino pipped their horns to welcome Alicia back a week later, Alicia didn't turn up either. Fast food had arrived but Alicia had left. Everything was getting faster in those days, and Alicia was never going to be left behind.