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c KEN BECKER^ .......£ Canadian Press Toronto1 Canada’s King of the Golden k. Arches paces the floor of a ! carpeted conference room in his ; stocking feet.» “This (interview) has been real-!;ly good for me,” says George '-Cohon, the head of McDonald’s Canada, famed for launching a ► Mac Attack on Moscow. k He explains he was preoccupied I with the latest bulletins from Tor-; onto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, where ^ his 91-year-old father-in-law lay it stricken with a stroke.Y “It’s good to get it off my mind P for a while,” says Cohon (pro-nounced co-HAWN), 53, wearing a t patterned sweater over a blue shirt i and dark slacks.C In the glass-enclosed C boardroom of the seven-storey . McDonald’s Place building, he has - spent a couple of hours of a winter weekday talking about his life.The anecdotes come easily and ' with a clear sense of time and place.Cohon beams when retelling the ; circumstances that brought him to Canada from the United States ■ with borrowed money more than 20 ■I years ago as a pioneer in the fast-food field r Now he has millions of dollars t and a home with an indoor swim-\ ming pool and nine bathrooms. He* has been married for 30 years to his* school-days sweetheart. They have* two grown and successful sons.^ But Cohon sounds equally proud f when he speaks about his adopted £ country.t “I’m a Canadian now. I live jj- here. I’m an immigrant.”I His grandfather, a baker, wras also an immigrant who fled the po-l groms that preyed on Jews in I czarist Russia at the turn of the i century. George’s father Jack was* six months old when the family* reached the United States from theUkrainian city now called Dnepropetrovsk.The late Jack Cohon and the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev were born in the same year in the same town.“If my dad would have stayed and Brezhnev would have left, you wouldn’t be in the shape you’re in now,” George Cohon was quoted as telling the local people of Dnepropetrovsk during an emotional visit last spring.Jack Cohon was a lawyer in Chi cago. His wife, Carolyn, an immigrant from Latvia, took care of the home — a two-bedroom apartment with one bathroom — and the two children.George, born in 1937, shared a bedroom with his older sister,Sandy.On a recent trip to Chicago, Cohon went to the old apartment block and stopped a man going into the building.“He was a black truck driver and I talked to him a while and the guy invited me in.” The man lived in the same apartrm nt the Cohonshad called home until 1958.Cohon walked from room to room and saw it as it had been. “Iremembered it by heart.”As a youth, Cohon played tackle on his high school football team he was six-feet tall, 230 pounds in those days (he’s considerably trim mer now) — and got decent grades.“I was smart when 1 had to be,” he says.After graduating from law school at Northwestern University in Chicago, Cohon joined his father’s law firm.His most important client was one who came to him in 1967 and asked: “Do you know' anyone at McDonald’s?”The man was looking to acquire rights for McDonald’s franchises in Hawaii. Cohon found out Hawaii was taken but Ontario was up for grabs.1“He came up and looked around and said it was too cold.” So Cohon borrowed from his family to raise the $70,0(X) needed for the rights to build Golden Arches across Ontario and eastward — and make Me Millions.On Nov. 11, 1968, Cohon opened his first McDonald’s restaurant, in London, Ont. On the same day, the company’s founder, Ray Kroc, offered $1 million to buy back the franchise rights for Eastern Canada.Less than two years later, Cohon sold Kroc the rights — for $6million.Cohon stayed on as president of McDonald’s Canada as the U.S. parent regained control of all its licences in Canada. He built an empire that is the seventh-largest private employer in Canada, with more than 60,000 workers at 600 restaurants.Cohon also spent 14 years on the project to put McDonald’s in Moscow, fulfilling that goal last January when the restaurant opened at the corner of Gorky Street and Pushkin Square.It was a moment of triumph for McDonald’s Canada — and Cohon insists on emphasizing the name of the country that gave him the Order of Canada in 1988.After all, on the day he became a Canadian citizen in 1977, he went home and told his wife, Sue: “If there’s one thing we Canadians don’t want is you Americans giving us any crap.”Sue and his sons have since become dual citizens. Craig, 27, works for Coca-Cola in Moscow. Mark, 24, for a New York group promoting baseball internationally.Cohon interrupts the interview, slipping on his loafers, to return to his office to take a call from one ofhis sons.“It’s a rule I have,” he says. “I’m never too busy for my kids.”Canadian PressBIG MAC - George Cohon, shown here in a Soviet potato field, borrowed money 20 years ago and pioneered Canada's fast-food industry.
Newspaper Details
Brandon Sun
Brandon, Manitoba, CA
Thu, Jan 10, 1991
Page 23
Full Page
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USA 04 Nov 2019
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