On May 15, 1940, brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald opened a barbecue drive-in restaurant at 1398 North E Street in San Bernardino, California, initially serving a full menu of barbecue sandwiches and other items to the automobile-oriented customers of Southern California. The San Bernardino location positioned the restaurant within the region's emerging car culture, where drive-in dining was becoming a significant social phenomenon. Though this original McDonald's was still a conventional drive-in, it established the brand and location from which the fast food revolution would emerge eight years later when the brothers radically redesigned their operation.

The San Bernardino McDonald's originated in the same Southern California landscape that would shape the poetry of Charles Bukowski, who wrote extensively about the region's cheap diners, drive-ins, and fast food culture as backdrops for poems about marginal lives. Southern California's car-culture dining, epitomized by the original McDonald's, created a poetic geography of parking lots, neon signs, and hamburger stands that became central to the West Coast literary imagination, influencing poets from Bukowski to Joan Didion's prose poetry about the region's ephemeral landscapes.