Ray Kroc was born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 5th, 1902. He grew up in a age of great builders such as Henry Ford and William Durant. Early in his life, he took his chances and lied about his age to become a ambulance driver for the Red Cross. As he grew older, he decided to drop out of school and become a salesman. He originally sold paper cups but when he met Earl Prince, the inventor of the multimixer, Ray Kroc persuaded him to let him sell the mixers. As he sold his mixers throught the country, he realized that his biggest buyer was the Mc Donald brothers. Ray Kroc then convinced them that he could become their "agent". In 1954 Ray Kroc opened his own McDonald's drive-in in Des Plaines, Illinois. He officially established the McDonald's Corporation. As his life slowly went by, difficult times began to break. He soon started to suffer from diabetes and arthritis. However, he kept going. Eventually in 1961, Ray Kroc paid $2.7 million to buy the Mc Donald's company. Ray Kroc decided to go global and had Mc Donalds in over 65 different countries.In 1974, he purchased the San Diego Padres baseball team and prevented them from moving to Washington, D.C. Sadly, Ray Kroc passed away from old age in January 1984, at the age of eighty-one, just the ten months before McDonalds sold fifty billion burgers.