You Want Ties With That?

There is a straightforward reason why J.M. Owens lives in Cobb County.

“It was an easy decision,” he said.

In 1976, Owens and his wife, Jan, left Georgia for California. Jan’s family lived in Polk County.

“When I walked out the door of her house in Cedartown, I told her mother that I would bring her back.”

Eight years later, he did just that, “and her mother was quite surprised,” Owens said. They returned from the west coast after stops in Illinois, Colorado and Oklahoma, building careers as operators of McDonalds' restaurants along the way.

When they moved back here in 1984 they lived in a small apartment in Marietta. Since then they have owned as many as 15 McDonald's in the area, and now own eight, three in Cobb, four in Cherokee and one in Paulding.

Today they live in Marietta Country Club Estates. Golden Arches, indeed.

Their restaurant near the corner of Bells Ferry Road and Cobb Parkway in Marietta has been open for business in the same spot for 40 years. “That’s pretty good,” J.M. Owens said. “In the restaurant business it’s phenomenal.”

The Owens bought it in 1991. It’s been remodeled for this anniversary year with all the bells and whistles of what the company calls its “long-term re-investment to the city of Marietta.”

J.M. and Jan Owens are steeped in the local community in many ways, in no small part because of their successful businesses.

Jan Owens is on the board of Ronald McDonald House Charities Atlanta. Their company, Bound South Inc., is a member of the Greater Atlanta McDonald’s Operators Association (GAMOA), through which they contribute to local charities and schools.

“We tax ourselves,” J.M. Owen said. “For every pound of fries that we sell, at the distribution level, they tack on an extra two and a half cents. That money goes to McDonald’s charities.

“A lot of people talk about giving back. Our position is that we allocate funds every year and we try to put those funds to use in the most appropriate way we can in our communities. We do things as GAMOA and alone.”

This is all no big deal for J.M. Owens, who was born in Tennessee. He loves it here (and not just because of the promise he made his mother-in-law).

“We’ve been blessed,” he said.  “We’ve been able to travel and live in different areas. But we had to return to the South. It’s in your bones.  It’s different.”

The couple’s journey to Cobb County has been interesting. When asked how he met his wife, Owens starts his story with, “Well, I was a professor at Hamburger University …”

You don’t hear that every day.

J.M. Owen was a Marine in 1966, back in the U.S., stationed in Washington state.

“I went out and bought a new car,” Owens said. “I made the first payment and realized I had 35 more. I happened to pass a McDonald’s that was hiring. I asked the guy if I could go to work and he said yes.

“The management development program was different then. I was there about three or four weeks and the guy came to me and said, ‘You’re a sergeant in the Marine Corps, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ which impressed him. He said, ‘You’re used to telling folks what to do, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, I am.’ He said, ‘How’d you like to be a manager?’

“My next question was not ‘what are my responsibilities?’ My next question was ‘how much?’ At the time the minimum wage was a buck and a quarter. He immediately took me to two bucks. I was making more at McDonald’s than I was in the Marine Corps.”

So his career began while he was still a Marine and because he bought a hot car (“It was a 1966 Mustang convertible. I will tell you the speeding tickets and insurance were significantly more than the monthly payments.”)

Owens went to school while working as a McDonald’s manager and moved up the ranks until he got a job at the company’s headquarters in Chicago. One of the many things he did in a decade of work there was write lectures for management training on Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) regulations.

“When McDonald’s started out (in the 1950s) they were all males,” Owens said. “You never went into a McDonald’s and saw a female employee.” 

By the 1970s, when Owens began writing his EEOC lectures, “we had evolved. We had taken a very aggressive position in diversity, across the board. We were talking about creating more opportunities in the workforce.”

By coincidence, Jan Owens was at that time the first female McDonald’s manager in the Atlanta area. She was up in Chicago for training.

And how did they meet?

“Well,” J.M. Owens remembered, “I was a professor at Hamburger University. I met her there.”

Along with his government affairs work at company HQ, Owens trained managers on restaurant equipment.

“She (his wife) had a new piece of equipment in her store on Lower Roswell Road that had a problem with the gas-pressure regulator. It was a fryer.”

He told her how to fix it, and you know how romantic a conversation about french fries can be. They clicked.

Shortly thereafter, J.M. left on an assignment in Miami. “I was concerned about her fryer, of course, so I had to stop in Atlanta to make sure everything was all right.”

Two happy endings, Owens said.  The fryer on Lower Roswell was bubbling away and they got married.

And soon, saying goodbye to mom in Cedartown, off they went on their cross-country, fast-food journey.

Returning to Marietta in 1984, their diversity training was put to the test by the  controversial Georgia state flag. “I knew what a flashpoint that was at the time,”  J.M. Owens said.  “When we first got here, I sat down with management and said, ‘This is going to be a real big issue.’ Why would I want to irritate 35 percent of my guests before they even pull into the parking lot?”

Eventually, Owens said, company officials got it, and instead of what was once a standard three flagpoles outside McDonald’s restaurants, there is only one. It flies the American flag.

Today’s remodeling strategies deal with “dual-point technology” for indoor and drive-through ordering, Wi-Fi in restaurants and getting just the right amount of  hot water into the breakfast oatmeal (Owens is high on a new measuring cup that gets it just right).

In his 40-year-old restaurant on Bells Ferry Road, Owens also recently added a wall mural that includes photographs of Marietta landmarks – Glover Park, scenes from the Marietta Square, Kennesaw Mountain and church steeples.

But something’s missing.

“I drew the line,” Owens said, “at the Big Chicken.”