8pm
in conversation with Frank Buckley
Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
RSVP/PURCHASE TICKETS*
General Admission tickets are free – RSVP HERE
$30 Reserved Section Seat + a copy of Ray and Joan
$35 Two Reserved Section Seats + a copy of Ray and Joan
* This event is part of our Newer Voices Series with authors with one or two books. The first 50 tickets purchased are invited to a pre-reception, 6:30-7:30pm.
Lisa Napoli was among the first journalists to cover the digital age as a staff reporter and columnist for The New York Times and its CyberTimes. She then appeared as an on-air technology reporter and columnist for MSNBC and as a host and reporter for public radio’s Marketplace. Her first book, Radio Shangri-La, chronicles her time in and around the Kingdom of Bhutan, where she was invited to help start a radio station at the dawn of democratic rule. For four years, she covered arts and culture for the acclaimed public radio station KCRW. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she currently lives in Los Angeles, where she leads an award-winning cooking group for homeless women on Skid Row.
Ray and Joan is about many things: mid-20th century US cultural history; post-WW2 emergence of fast food culture; addiction and its impact on the family; addiction treatment (the early days of, in particular;) philanthropy that precedes the grandeur of Buffett and Gates; the no-nukes movement of the 80s; the San Diego Padres; the mass media’s influence on all of the above, and, most importantly of all, the complexity of marriage.
When Lisa went to cover the fate of a crumbling peace sculpture in front of the Santa Monica courthouse for radio station KCRW, she didn’t know she’d spend the next five years tracking down the story of Joan Kroc, one of the greatest and little known philanthropists of the twentieth century. The heiress to the McDonald’s fortune had anonymously funded the 26-foot tall mushroom cloud by Paul Conrad, titled Chain Reaction, at the height of the no-nukes movement. Lisa knew just two things about Joan: that she had given a landmark posthumous gift to NPR, and that at one point she’d run the baseball team she’d inherited from her late husband. But she found it curious that a woman who lived in San Diego would come to fund a polarizing artwork nowhere near her home. When Lisa went in search of a biography, she couldn’t find one—so she decided to write one. Soon, she disccovered: why no book yet existed about Joan; that writing about Joan meant writing about Ray, and learning about the roots of the fortune that the third wife of the founding chairman of McDonald’s ultimately gave away.
Frank Buckley is an anchor of KTLA Morning News. Frank joined KTLA in June 2005 from CNN where he had been a national correspondent. Frank is also host of the “Frank Buckley Interviews” podcast.
Frank’s reporting experiences have taken him around the world and have included assignments covering the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, politics for CNN, frequent reporting from the White House during George W. Bush’s presidency, natural disasters in Japan, the Los Angeles riots, the Hong Kong handover, the OJ Simpson trial and countless other stories in Southern California and across the U.S.
Prior to KTLA and CNN, Frank reported for Los Angeles station KCAL-TV, WXII-TV in Winston-Salem, N.C., and at KESQ-TV in Palm Springs. He has also written for the Los Angeles Times and the Detroit News.