Ray & Joan Kroc

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Marc Levinson, Charity: The Ultimate Luxury; Joan Kroc gave $225 million to National Public Radio at her death even though she hadn’t been a devoted listener or regular donor. Wall Street Journal, Nov 16, 2016.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/char ... e-luxury-1479254027
(book review on Lisa Napoli, Ray & Joan; The man who made the McDonald's fortune and the woman who gave it all away. Dutton, 2016)

Note:
(a)
(i) The  Italian surname Napoli means "city of Naples, now the third largest city in Italy. The place name, Italian Napoli, Latin Neapolis [hence in English: the inhabitant and adjective of that city is Neapolitan], is from Greek nea 'new' + polis 'city.' It was an ancient Greek colony taken over by the Romans in the 4th century BC."
(ii) Italy's largest cities by population: Rome (2.6m)> Milan (1,3m) > Naples (1m)

(b) "Back in the 1950s, when television pictures were mostly black and white and the console set in the living room weighed 100 pounds, a [real] character named John Beresford Tipton made a weekly appearance across America."
(i) console (n): "a television, phonograph, or radio cabinet designed to stand on the floor rather than on a table or shelf"
Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc 2016
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/console

Not surprisingly, you see different designs when googling this term.
(ii) The Millionaire (TV series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_(TV_series)
(CBS 1955 - 1960; section 4 The beneficiaries)

Tax code in US requires a donor, not donee, pays the gift tax.

(c) "Neither Joan nor Ray was to the manor born. Ray Kroc, the son of Czech immigrants, was an inveterate salesman. After a long career hawking paper cups [for the Lily Tulip Company on and off for nearly twenty years], underwater lots [ie, real estates] in Florida and malted-milk mixers, in 1954 he convinced brothers Maurice and Dick McDonald to make him the franchising agent for their tiny chain of hamburger stands. Joan, 26 years younger, was the daughter of a railroad worker. What the two had in common was a love of music: In the 1920s, Ray supplemented his income by playing piano live on the radio, while Joan supplied background music at bars and restaurants. They met around 1957, when Ray saw the alluring—and married—blonde playing the piano at a St Paul, Minn, restaurant. Joan was smitten not just with Ray but with the opportunity he represented. Ray Kroc made sure that Joan’s husband soon won a franchise in Rapid City, SD, giving her an entrée into middle-class life.  Ray Kroc found many excuses to visit Rapid City, but it took a dozen years and multiple divorces before the two were wed in 1969. By then Kroc and his associates had transformed McDonald’s from an overleveraged speculation to the darling of the New York Stock Exchange."
(i) For "to the manor born," see "to the manner born"
www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/to-the-manner-born.html

Both phrases nowadays have the same meaning, and indeed "to the manor born" is more common.
(ii) Ray Kroc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kroc
(1902 – 1984; His previous marriages, to Ethel Fleming ([years of marriage] 1922–1961) and Jane Dobbins Green (1963–1968), ended in divorce)
(iii) underwater (adj): "having, relating to, or being a mortgage loan for which more is owed than the property securing the loan is worth"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/underwater
(iv) McDonald's
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald's
(began in 1940, with a restaurant opened by brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald in San Bernardino, California; "Ray Kroc joined the company as a franchise agent in 1955 and subsequently purchased the chain from the McDonald brothers. Based in Oak Brook, Illinois, McDonald's confirmed plans to move its global headquarters to Chicago by early 2018"/ McDonald's opened the first "franchised restaurant by businessman Ray Kroc in Des Plaines, Illinois" in 1955)
(v) "hawking * * * and malted-milk mixers"

"In 1941 he started his own business, the Prince Castle Multimixer Company. Manufacturing a mixer capable of making five milkshakes at once, the company prospered until the early 1950s, when the growing popularity of soft-ice-cream stands signaled the decline of the drugstore soda fountain and the classic malted milkshake."
Ray Kroc. In Kenneth T Jackson (ed), The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Thematic Series: The 1960s. Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003.
http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/bic1/ ... eaed5fb362e7ed0684a
(vi) Joan Kroc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Kroc
(1928 – 2003; née Mansfield; third wife of McDonald's CEO Ray Kroc; section 2 Marriage and family: met Ray in 1957 [she was 29, he 55] and married him in 1969 [she 41, he 67])
(vi) Rapid City, South Dakota
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_City,_South_Dakota
(is the second-largest city in South Dakota (after Sioux Falls); Named after Rapid Creek [86 miles long])

(d) "She began in 1976 by creating Operation Cork—Kroc spelled backward—to support scientific research on alcoholism. The Ray A Kroc Foundation was transformed into the Joan B. Kroc Foundation, and after Ray died in early 1984 she took full charge."

Alright, you may stop here. To me, the review is not interesting any more after this.