Word: mcdonaldization
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...Lace Curtain. On Nov. 22, 1902, the night David McDonald was born in Pittsburgh's Hazelwood section, his father was walking a picket line as a member of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers. David McDonald Sr. had been a union man since he arrived in the U.S. from Wales, was hustled out of Springfield, Ill. for union activity there. Dave's mother, Mary Kelly McDonald, was the daughter of an officer of the Sons of Vulcan, an early union for iron craftsmen. Both her brothers were union men. After a brief, unsuccessful interlude...
Workmen's compensation laws had not yet been passed in Pennsylvania. With McDonald's wages halted, the family looked for means of support. Mary McDonald took in washing and baked bread. David and his younger brother Joseph delivered papers. No matter how low their funds got, Mary McDonald insisted they remember one thing: they were lace-curtain Irish, not shanty Irish. Accordingly, she sent the boys off to St. Stephen's parochial school to get all the education they could. Their clothes were patched but clean. At St. Stephen's, David was a top student...
...life was turned by a street-corner meeting. One evening in September 1923, when he was lounging outside a drugstore, a friend, Mark Stanton, sauntered up. Stanton remarked he had just turned down a promising job as secretary to a young labor leader named Phil Murray. Asked McDonald: "Who is Phil Murray?" Even when he found out, he was more taken by the salary−$225 a month, three times his current earnings. Through a friend who knew Murray, David set up a job interview, hurried home to brush up on his shorthand. His mother read articles...
...days of practice, young Dave set out for the Columbia Bank Building, found the office of the United Mine Workers, introduced himself to Vice President Murray. Murray was impressed by the youth's speed on the typewriter. A Roman Catholic himself, Murray was equally impressed when McDonald told him he had organized the Holy Cross High School Alumni Association, was busy organizing the Pittsburgh Catholic Alumni Association. McDonald was hired. Two days later he reported for work, found himself with Murray on a train headed for a New York conference of mine union officials. In a hotel lobby...
Today the McDonalds live in a seven-room, three-bath fieldstone house in Mt. Lebanon, eight miles south of the Golden Triangle. They live unpretentiously, do little formal entertaining. But informal callers, mostly union men, are constant. At his office, McDonald exercises a prodigious memory, is a stickler for detail. His office furniture includes a dial-studded electric massage chair into which he sinks to be vibrated when he gets fatigued. His staff boasts that he "can work 35 men to exhaustion, but he irritates union wives by insisting that aides stay at home Sundays to be on call...