Sometime in the year I was born, milkshake machine salesman Ray Kroc traveled to San Bernardino, California, to visit a restaurant that had purchased eight devices. 

Kroc was enamored by the place…yada yada yada… billions and billions of burgers served.

It might seem hard to believe that those of us born in 1954 predate McDonald’s – in fact, predate what we know as fast-food places.

But that’s what happened. If you told my parents there was a burger place they could go to anywhere in the United States – in fact, almost anywhere in the world – and get the exact same burger in every one, they would have been surprised.

And it wouldn’t just be McDonald’s, which really didn’t arrive in the New York metropolitan area until the mid-1970s. Chains of burger places sprang up from coast to coast. There were chains of chicken places, chains of sandwich places, chains of fish places, chains of taco places. 

There would be whole strips of highways with fast-food places along both sides. And when parking the car and getting a mostly premade meal wasn’t fast enough for you, you could drive in a special lane alongside the establishment and pick up your food at a window called a drivethru.

None of this existed when I was born. There were White Castles scattered in selected areas, and that’s about it.

Franchised food consisted of sit-down restaurants. Most prominent was Howard Johnson’s, a Boston-based chain famous for its ice cream, its fried clams and its notoriously slow service.

Howard Johnson’s dotted the nation’s service areas. You would pull off the New Jersey Turnpike or some other toll road and stop at HoJo’s to eat. Your kids – that would have been me – would nag you to take them there in order to get the comic book or the menu that turned into a paper hat.

McDonald’s and its fast-food brethren stole all that. They provided what people on a trip wanted more than a peppermint stick ice cream cone – a fast meal that got you back on the road pronto. And the kids kept demanding to go in order to get the toy inside a Happy Meal, often some incarnation of Ronald McDonald and other characters created to sell more burgers.

There certainly has been argument about whether fast food is a blessing – quick, easy and fun – or a curse – fattening, salty, banal. Adults couldn’t imagine those arguments in 1954.