Read time: 4 min.

Most people drive past the McDonald’s at Charles and Madison in Muncie without giving it a second thought. After all, it’s just another fast-food restaurant. Look just to the left, though, and you’ll find one of Indiana’s most remarkable surviving roadside landmarks: a giant neon sign from 1958 featuring a grinning mascot with a hamburger-shaped head! Long before Ronald McDonald and supersized meals, this downtown corner marked the arrival of a fast-food revolution in Muncie.

Muncie’s Charles Street McDonald’s was the area’s first. Opened on January 18, 1958, it was billed as “Muncie’s most spectacular, self-service drive-in¹!” The joint was owned by “hamburger impresarios²” Charles and Robert Terhune, who converted their root beer stand into the new destination³. The Terhunes came from a family that’d been in the food business since 1914, beginning with a restaurant and confectionary at 219 South Walnut Street⁴. 

On opening day, Muncie’s McDonald’s offered shakes for twenty cents, hamburgers for fifteen, cheeseburgers for nineteen, and fries for a dime⁵. Business was so brisk, the new McDonald’s only needed a year to sell a million hamburgers⁶!  The walk-up burger stand was expanded into a shop with interior seating the following year. A drive-thru was aded in 1982. 

The first restaurant was torn down in 2001, but a new building was erected on the same site⁷. Later, the structure’s old mansard roof style gave way to its present bland appearance sometime before 2018. That said, not all was lost: the landmark sign at the corner of Madison and Charles downtown dates to opening day.

Muncie’s McDonald’s sign incorporates a single arch, a claim of more than ninety-nine billion sold, and Speedee, a happy chef and early mascot that predated Ronald McDonald who features kind of a burger-shaped head. I don’t know the exact number of the signs that remain like Muncie’s, but it must be only a handful. Muncie’s sign was repainted and repaired in 1993⁸, then repainted and rewired anew in 2006. At that point, the landmark was one of fewer than a dozen left⁹. 

2013 saw the old sign refurbished, repainted, and rebuilt on top of a new base thanks to the efforts of Advanced Signs and Graphics¹⁰. Today, it remains a landmark! That’s a good thing. Muncie has lost countless pieces of its roadside history over the decades, from drive-ins and motels to neon signs that once defined the city’s commercial landscape. The old McDonald’s sign survives as a reminder of an era when fast food was still a novelty, hamburgers cost fifteen cents, and a cheerful mascot named Speedee welcomed customers to town. More than sixty-eight years after it first lit up the corner of Charles and Madison, the sign continues doing exactly what it was built to do: catching people’s attention and inviting them to stop for a closer look. The Terhunes have done a fantastic job of keeping Muncie’s McDonald’s history alive.

Sources Cited
1 Gala Opening (1958, January 18).  The Muncie Star. p. 7. 
2 McDonald’s Drive-In Opens Today at Charles, Madison (1958, January 18). The Muncie Star. p. 6. 
3 Gibson, R. (2013, May 21). McDonald’s sign is back in place. The Muncie Star Press. p. A2. 
4 (See footnote 2). 
5 (See footnote 1). 
6 Gibson, R. (2013, February 15). Piece of history gets makeover. The Muncie Star Press. p. A1. 
7 (See footnote 6). 
8 Landmark renovation (1993, April 16). The Muncie Star. p. 8. 
9 Roysdon, K. (2006, September 29). Historic McDonald’s sign to be relit. The Muncie Star Press. p. 15. 
10 Gibson, R. (2013, May 21). McDonald’s sign is back in place. The Muncie Star Press. p. A2.