Chaotic Philanthropy: Saint Joan of the Golden Arches [from Very Special Episodes]

24:55She asked Father Hesburgh what he needed, and he said he needed a building. If he was going to have a peace program or a peace institute, he needed a building to house it in. And she looked at him and she said, I don't do buildings. And he said, well, he said, you asked me what I needed, and that's what I need.

25:13Dana Schwartz:In 1986, she donates$6 million to Notre Dame to establish the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Years later, at the University of San Diego, another major Kroc gift helps create the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, which launches in 2001. The name part took some convincing. One tenet of Joan's philanthropy is that it is largely done behind the scenes. She shies away from public proclamations of her generosity. Joan had other rules, too. It was three things. It was like a three-legged stool. There was the person, there was an organization, and there was a cause, what they wanted to do.

26:04You know, that was important to her. And over the years, they were, you know, big and small. I mean, big, obviously, you know, in the tens of millions of dollars, especially in her estate, but also small in the hundreds of thousands sometimes. It was, it just depended upon the organization, the people, you know, the organization's size and how she felt about it.

26:27Dana Schwartz:But if she avoids direct solicitations, how does she decide where the McMoney goes? Joan is a voracious news junkie. She reads newspapers, watches television, listens to the radio, and talks current events with friends. She had televisions everywhere, and she, of course, the computer age was coming on, especially in the 90s. And she was what I called a news nut. She loved listening to the news and knowing what was going on in the world. Oftentimes she'd hear something or see something. And if it interested her to a point where she wanted to find out more about it, she'd ask me to check it out.

27:11Dana Schwartz:Joan reads a story about a teacher trying to help a student in Tennessee confront prejudices over having AIDS, which was still heavily stigmatized. She's moved to write a check to their school district for$230 ,000. The sum helps balance their annual budget and prevents staff layoffs, including the teacher. A doctor researching AIDS is in a hotel room when a check arrives from Joan for$1 million. A homeless shelter struggling for funds soon receives$800 ,000. Some kind words from children's television host Fred Rogers sparks a friendship as well as donations to PBS. There's no gathering of advisors, no interviews, no oversized checks presented on behalf of television cameras.

28:10Dana Schwartz:It's whatever feels right. You know, sometimes I'd give her a recommendation and she'd listen to me and she'd go, okay, and then she'd do exactly the opposite, which was fine. I used to tell her it was her money. Joan would describe her approach as a, quote, maverick salvationist, one born, she said, of her woman's intuition. When Joan sees the San Diego Zoo is struggling financially, she writes a check for$3.3 million. Her personal connection? An injured hummingbird that lands in her yard, which she has transported to the zoo via private chauffeur for treatment. When the bird makes a full recovery, she writes another check, this time for$100 ,000 to fund their hummingbird enclosure.

29:04They loved to work with Joan Crack and she loved working with the zoo people. They used to even every once in a while bring an exotic animal up to her home to show her. Again, she just, she loved the zoo because of what they did and their care and love for animals, which she had.

29:20Dana Schwartz:Obstacles? Joan didn't believe in them. When she decides to repurpose a sprawling ranch once occupied by her and Ray in Santa Ynez, California, as a getaway camp for sick children, neighbors lodge complaints. So Joan sells the ranch and donates the proceeds to the Ronald McDonald House, a charitable arm of the company. Joan isn't without a sense of humor either. After she sees a story about a McDonald's customer who was denied extra pickles on his burger, she sends him a five-gallon jar with thousands of pickle slices. She had fun while she was giving away money, but she also had a little bit of the devil in her in a good way.

30:07She loved to surprise people. She liked to shock people in a positive way, most of the time to help them, obviously.

30:18Dana Schwartz:Getting Joan's attention could happen anywhere. She was once on a plane with a doctor named Doris Howell. The two struck up a conversation in which the doctor explained she was looking to open a hospice. Joan got back in touch with her, offering$18 million for the project. the first freestanding hospice in San Diego. Countless people with terminal diagnoses spent their remaining time there, including a man named Alan Bergsma. Before his death, Bergsma wrote to Joan to thank her. Seven days before he died, he wrote her this note telling her how grateful he was to be there. It was one of the most miserable times of his entire life, but he was pleasantly surprised at how caring and lovely it was.

31:11Dana Schwartz:That's Stephanie Bergsma, Alan's wife at the time. And they had a mailbox at the hospice, and he put his note to her in the mailbox. So about a day later, she called and asked to speak to him, and he wasn't in any condition to do that, so she spoke to me. I mean, I was sitting in the waiting room, and we talked briefly. And after that, I started having lunch with her. Joan and Stephanie become fast friends. Stephanie is executive director of KPBS, the local San Diego PBS affiliate. Joan, ever the newshound, believes public information is extremely valuable. So the checks start coming to the station.

31:56Dana Schwartz:Not because Stephanie asks, but because she doesn't. Many years ago, I had lunch with the woman who was then running her foundation, which subsequently was disbanded. And she said to me, you can never ask her for money. It's a kiss of death. So we never asked for money.

32:19Dana Schwartz:In 1997, Joan sees another opportunity to help. Devastating floods ravage Grand Forks in North Dakota, displacing thousands of families. The area is close to where she once lived with her first husband. Her donation of$15 million means each family receives about$2 ,000 while the community rebuilds. Joan's only disappointment is that she's unable to do it anonymously. An intrepid reporter makes note of her private plane flying in and reveals her identity. But Joan refuses to accept a plaque bearing her name and maid in her honor. Bear in mind, Joan's wealth correlates with the success of McDonald's.

33:09Dana Schwartz:As their stock rises, so does hers. By the end of the 1990s, Joan's fortune is in the billions. It's a massive sum and one that Joan is not looking to keep. but she's about to get news that will force her to make quick decisions on what to do with it all.

33:53memories with the people who matter most. Start today at applevacations.com or contact your trusted travel advisor. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming.

34:32Dana Schwartz:I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Olympic champ Shawn Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

35:06American soccer is exploding. The knockout rounds are here. The U.S. won their group, and now every match is win or go home. Score!

35:17USA! I'm Tad Ramos. And I'm Tom Bogert. On our podcast, Inside American Soccer, we'll talk about the real storylines. I'm not worried about Pulisic. I'm not worried about Balogun. I'm not worried about McKinney. My only concern is what happens in the back. And give you the truth about the U.S. national team from inside the program. It wouldn't be a huge surprise if our team ends up in the quarterfinals or potentially a great run into the semifinals. Whether you're a lifelong fan or this is your first World Cup, we've got you covered. Listen to Inside American Soccer with Tom Bogart and Tab Ramos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

36:05Dana Schwartz:In 1997, Joan and her friend, former San Diego Mayor Maureen O 'Connor, take a drive through an underprivileged area of the city while being escorted by the chief of police. The blight is considerable. This isn't the San Diego someone with Joan's wealth typically sees. Here's Lisa Napoli again. She saw these kids playing in the street and thought, it would be so great if we could start a recreation center for kids to go to. So she makes a decision, one that will reverberate for decades to come. Joan donates$93 million to the Salvation Army for a sprawling 195 ,000-square-foot community center in San Diego.

36:56Dana Schwartz:The idea itself is, like many of Joan's decisions, slightly out of left field. She's not a churchgoer, while the Salvation Army makes faith a core tenet of their activities. But Joan believes in the Army for a good reason. As a kid, she had seen the organization render aid to people, and she believes they have one key asset. They operate economically, with none of the waste found in other charitable organizations.

37:30Dana Schwartz:As the Salvation Army begins to break ground on the rec center, which will come to be known as the Kroc Center, Joan gets some news. One of the few people she confides in is Dick Starman. She went to the doctor just for a quick MRI, and, you know, she got this terrible news that she had glioblastoma, and she had a short time to live. She was given like three, four months to live because of the aggressive growth of apparently those tumors in the head. Time is beginning to run short. Suddenly, questions of what to do with her fortune, which she's been dealing with on a case-by-case basis, are taking on a new urgency.

38:16She said, I've got a lot of work to do, and we've got a short time to do it. And so I jumped on a plane and went to San Diego. And I was there about 15 or 16 trips that summer, back and forth, because we had a lot of business to do. And she had a pretty good idea what her estate plan looked like. But she wanted to finalize things and make sure everything was right.

38:37Dana Schwartz:Patience, never Joan's virtue, has become a rare commodity. Because of her friendship with Stephanie Bergsma and her affection for public radio, she reaches out to PBS to discuss the possibility of a massive, massive donation. But PBS fumbles it. Well, the story is that someone in her organization was supposed to contact PBS and couldn't get a live person on the phone that got recordings. and after a day or two of getting recordings and not being able to get through to somebody, apparently she said to hell with it and that was it. As a result, no one from PBS gets an invite to a party held at her house in 2003.

39:27Dana Schwartz:Unbeknownst to the attendees, many are going to be the beneficiaries of Joan's wealth. It's as though she wants to look them in the eyes one last time. To get one more jolt of excitement from knowing her money is going to make someone's life better. Here's Lisa Napoli. They all had been summoned because she cared about them. And what they would find out basically just several months later is that they'd been summoned because they were going to be the recipients of her. Last wishes. In 2003, despite her illness, Joan is able to tour the Kroc Center in San Diego in a wheelchair, hoping her sunglasses will help preserve some of the anonymity she prefers.

40:19I mean, when she was dying of glioblastoma, of brain cancer, the last few months of her life, she would go down to the Ray and Joan Kroc Community Center in San Diego, and she'd sit in a wheelchair and kind of have sunglasses on so nobody'd recognize her. And she'd sit and watch the children and adults ice skate in the ice rink. I mean, she loved being there and seeing people in the community enjoy it. And of course, it turned out to be a rip-roaring success in terms of people in the community being welcomed there. One of the requirements that she had was that nobody would ever be denied admission to it and that it was for the community.

41:04Dana Schwartz:Just a few weeks later, on October 12, 2003, Joan Kroc dies at the age of 75. Tributes about her philanthropy come pouring in, especially in her native San Diego. But the actual extent of her generosity isn't yet fully understood. After Joan's death, Dick Starman begins making calls. Among the first is to National Public Radio and Kevin Close, the NPR president whom Joan had befriended. After Mrs. Crack passed away, I called him about three days later. I told him, I said, Kevin, get out a pencil and paper. He did, and I said, write these numbers down. And I said, two, three. And then I said, let's start adding zeros.

41:57Anyway, we added zeros until we got to$23 million. And then I told him, I said, just what the heck, add another zero.

42:07Dana Schwartz:In the end, NPR receives well over$200 million for operating expenses, roughly twice their annual operating budget. It's funding and interest that pays for an expanding news staff and even employee bonuses. KPBS, the San Diego PBS affiliate, which Stephanie Bergsma ran for decades, receives another$5 million. But NPR isn't the biggest beneficiary of Joan's estate. The San Diego Kroc Center was a kind of proof of concept. Once it was open and Joan realized the Salvation Army could realize her ambitions, one of her final wishes was for the group to open dozens of croc centers in communities around the country.

42:59Dana Schwartz:To do that, Joan leaves the Army what is, at the time, the largest single gift ever given to a charity. $1.5 billion, almost her entire cheeseburger-fueled fortune for construction costs and endowments. But it wasn't all good news. You know, the Salvation Army was not set up to build recreation centers all around the country. That wasn't their mission. That isn't their mission. It's become part of their mission because of Joan Kroc. But they were broadsided by this bequest and this sort of instruction from Joan about how to execute it. And I was told that perhaps they might have turned down that gift because they literally, it was such an enormous task to build dozens of these recreation centers.

43:58And if you've never seen one, it's really hard to imagine. Imagine the very fanciest YMCA health club that you've ever seen. They're not just places with a couple of, you know, gym equipment and a pool. They're really spectacular places. And that was the goal behind them is that they're really spectacular places and that they're available to everybody in that community. And they were built in communities that really needed it. And doing that is an incredibly complicated task.

44:26Dana Schwartz:The Salvation Army struggles at first, concerned the ongoing operating costs might prove too challenging for some communities, or that the gift might make a frugal charity seem too flush. Just four centers open in the next six years. After some early hiccups, the Army winds up opening 26 croc centers in cities like Philadelphia, Memphis, Los Angeles, and others, all of them collectively assisting over 3 million people. Today, the San Diego Croc Center sits on 12.5 acres and serves the community in a variety of ways, from childcare to arts programs. It's what Joan envisioned, a place for people to come and be nourished psychologically and emotionally.

45:23Dana Schwartz:A monument to community solidarity, the same kind of community Joan relied on in her Depression-era youth. The centers also create what economists call a halo effect. Building them means jobs in construction, in spending, and in the center itself, while lowering costs for things like health care, thanks to fitness programs. There were other gifts, many of them. In addition to an unknown sum left to her daughter from her first marriage, more money went to the San Diego Zoo, hospice, opera, Special Olympics, totaling in the tens of millions. It took Dick eight years to fully execute Joan's estate.

46:14Dana Schwartz:In compiling her book on Joan and Ray Kroc, Lisa Napoli created a long list of Joan's many donations. It goes on for pages. But in fact, it's likely we'll never know the full extent of her generosity. There are countless stories of anonymous giving, of tips small and large to those experiencing homelessness and even to workers handing her a fish-a-fil-a at her local McDonald's drive-thru window. Here's Dick Starman. And she always looked at Ray Krak's money that she inherited from him, and she inherited his estate. She called herself a caretaker, and she was a caretaker of his money to give it away.

47:00And she loved it. She had fun with it, And it was interesting to her. And she loved surprising people or surprising organizations and doing things for them.

47:16Dana Schwartz:It's probably a little too easy to cast Joan and Ray in stereotypical roles. Ray, the corporate mercenary, more concerned with the hum of a food assembly line, and Joan, the more empathetic. Ray was generous, too, and Joan was prone to quoting him in interviews. Asked about her giving, she said that Ray told her to remember one thing. He had never seen a hearse followed by a Brinks truck. No, no, I mean, I think everything we do all the time influences everything we do next in our lives, no matter who we are. And so, yes, I think she was wired to be compassionate because she knew what it was like not to have a lot.

48:05And so once she did have a lot, she delighted in the idea of giving it away to places and people and causes that she found interesting and important.

48:17Dana Schwartz:Is the why even important? Joan grew up during one of the most impoverished decades in American history. Years later, she was among the world's wealthiest people. Was she insecure? Did she feel unworthy? Or did she simply have the innate human urge to help however she could? It's a really important American business story. But more interesting is that this woman found herself with this vast fortune and did what we would hope any good human would do. Oh, and as for the San Diego Padres, despite not being much of a baseball fan, Joan did retain ownership of the franchise through 1990. When she decided to put it in other hands, Major League Baseball refused to permit her to follow through on her original plan.

49:15Dana Schwartz:She wanted to donate the team to the city of San Diego, a major sports franchise. The kind of asset that today is worth billions is something she would have happily given away for free. That's just, that's how Joan rolled.

49:38Okay, Zarin, I would love for this to be a movie. Did you happen to cast St. Joan's Story? I did. For Ray Kroc, already Michael Keaton has portrayed him very well, so I had to leave him out. And so now I'm also out there stuck chasing greatness. So I decided, let me go with Bob Hoskins, because they seem to have a similar chaotic glint in their eye, kind of lookalike, right? And then for Joan Kroc, ideally it would be like a 50-plus-year-old Doris Day. But going with modern casting, I went with Maggie Gyllenhaal. I think she would nail it.

50:10Dana Schwartz:Maggie Gyllenhaal is a great pull. Right? I thought they kind of favor each other. I think she can pull off the range that Joan Kroc represents. I thought it was kind of a slam dunk. And then for Dick Starman, the conciliary, I went with kind of an interesting choice, I thought. Sean Bean. They kind of look alike. And for once, Sean Bean wouldn't have to die before the film ends. I love that. I never would have thought of Sean Bean, but he's also a great pick. Right? He's just a great actor. And I thought, once again, they favor each other. And I started thinking about it more and more. I was like, he would eat up a conciliary role.

50:45Dana Schwartz:Yeah, he's great. He's underutilized. Oh, 100 % agree. Now, as far as the name Joan Kroc goes, I mean, what PBS watcher doesn't know and thank the Ray and Joan Kroc Foundation for their longtime support? But to learn how much more she did, I was blown away. I have to say, before we get to very special characters, I feel like the very special character I want to shout out is whoever fumbled that call when she was going to donate all of her money. Right? That was the best. That was one of the best moments. I totally related to that. Because if I was like, just me, I would totally do exactly that.

51:19I'm like, I keep calling. I get voicemail. To hell with this. Yeah. A very special character. I think I want to give it collectively to Joan and the entourage. So the mayor, throw Dick in there. I think just them. I want to be in that entourage for whoever today's Joan Kroc is. Well, I think it's Mackenzie Scott. It sounds like it, right? Yeah.

51:39Dana Schwartz:You know who the other very special, I will say, like, very special villain is? That guy? Is whoever didn't let her just donate the Padres to the city of San Diego. Yes, the city! Why is the MLB just not letting her donate a baseball team to a city? That would be great. The MLB is always going to make a choice. it's gonna make you scratch your head. You're always like, come on, MLB. This is right there. It's a slam dunk. Just give the team to the city. They already have the stadium. Yeah. You know, Green Bay owns the Packers. Yeah. If anyone's on YouTube and wants to look up, we reference when Ray berates the fans in a possibly drunken rant.

52:15That is good content. That's available. I'm totally looking that up.

52:19Dana Schwartz:I know. I was like, I can't believe I didn't even think to Google that. For my very special character, I went with, of course, the sweater-beclad Fred Rogers for the win. I mean, like, how great is it that he just goes and, like, wins money for PBS, but also just a spark of friendship that then leads to all these donations. I mean, Fred Rogers, once again, boom. He never misses. No. He's like Larry Bird. He's a shooter. Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people. This show is hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zarin Burnett, and Jason English. Our senior producer is Josh Fisher. Today's episode was written by Jake Rossum Editing and sound design by Chris Childs Additional editing by Mary Du Mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher Original music by Elise McCoy Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla Executive producer is Jason English Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcast Dana Zarin and I are going to take a little summer break here while we get ahead on our fall episodes got a few things planned for this feed in the meantime hope everyone is doing something memorable this summer if you run into any amazing stories or legends on vacation hit us up you can email us at very special episodes at gmail.com on instagram dana is dana schwartz with three z's zarin is zarin three just the one z and i'm jason english nine no z's

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56:10I'm Akilah Hughes, and Rebel Spirit Season 2 is about both of those things. As I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.