For a McGeneration or three of McDonald's owners, a menu change

The Dukart men will not be celebrating Father's Day at McDonald's. They spend up to 12 hours a day, six days a week, under the Golden Arches, eating lots and lots of fries, burgers, and Chicken McNuggets.

"We're already what you call super-heavy users," Joel Dukart said, explaining why he and brother Michael will treat their father, Les, to something other than a Happy Meal on Sunday.

All three, plus Les' brother Alan, are principals in Dukart Management Corp., licensed operators of 11 Mickey D's throughout Pennsylvania and Delaware, with about 625 employees.

As the only third-generation owner/operators in the Philadelphia area, they are a McDonald's rarity, and a rare breed in the business world in general. Fewer than two-thirds of family businesses survive the second generation, according to industry studies.

Big change is on the menu for the Dukarts, though - perhaps more seismic than the recent introduction of all-day breakfast and the return of the classic Egg McMuffin. Twelve years after founder Len Dukart's death in 2004, his company - started with the March 15, 1960, opening of a McDonald's in Newark, Del. - is on the verge of another leadership shift, one that will put the third generation in the majority.

Les Dukart, who joined his father's fast-food business in 1973, when a Burger King opened nearby and hurt sales, said he plans to retire at the end of the year. He will turn 70 in November.

"It's really a young person's business," Les said last week at the family's restaurant in Morrisville, Bucks County.

He was flanked by sons Joel, 38, of Philadelphia, and Michael, 41, of Glen Mills, Delaware County, and his youngest brother, Alan, 59, of Garnet Valley, Delaware County.

Les' grandson Eli was there, too. But he's only 6 and has not decided whether he's ready to commit a fourth generation of Dukarts to the McDonald's business.

"Maybe," Eli said with a shrug. "I don't know."

This empire built on Americans' love affair with fast food was born of a family illness.

Nothing serious. One of Len's four sons had a virus, and his wife, Dora, sent him and the rest of the boys out of their Chicago-area house for dinner.

It was 1958. Len, a World War II vet who was working in the men's clothing business, took his sons to something new, a McDonald's. He was instantly impressed. But McDonald's did not instantly give him a restaurant franchise.

The company required substantial training, which Len Dukart did on evenings and weekends while holding down the clothing job during the day.

He turned down ownership opportunities in Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa before finally agreeing to one in Newark, Del. - he was familiar with the state because his wife's brother went to graduate school there.

Franchise buy-in was $96,000 for a location passed by 12 cars an hour, Les Dukart said.

In three years, the restaurant was in the top 100 in sales in the country, and the top 10 in New Castle County, said Les, who started working in his father's restaurant when he was 13, "because that was the only chance to see him."

But when graduation from high school neared, his father "convinced me I shouldn't be in the business, it's too hard," Les recalled. So he enrolled at the University of Bridgeport (Conn.), where he majored in history, graduating in 1968.

He taught elementary school in northern New Jersey until 1974, when his father said he was thinking of selling the Newark McDonald's because of the heartburn Burger King was causing him.

"I said, 'Don't,' and I came back," Les said. "I convinced him we needed another restaurant."

Len Dukart obliged, buying into a McDonald's in Concordville, Delaware County, and putting Les in charge of it. (The Dukarts don't own any of the sites. As franchisees, they pay McDonald's Corp. a rental fee, which neither would disclose.)

His brother Alan, 10 years his junior, was a high school student at the time but worked there on weekends until he went to Ithaca College, attracted by its communications school and the prospect of a career in sports reporting.

That plan changed on graduation in 1979, when Alan joined the family business.

"McDonald's operators are people born with ketchup in their veins," he said. "Every time I came home, I realized how much I missed it."

While Alan was still away at school, the family's first restaurant was destroyed by a gas explosion in December 1976 - which prompted McDonald's to move heating and air-conditioning systems from the basement of restaurants to the roof, and to change required insurance to full-replacement value.

It would not be the only setback. In January 1989, a manager and a maintenance man at a restaurant the Duckarts owned in West Chester were killed during a robbery. Distraught, the Dukarts sold their franchise rights to the restaurant that summer.

Michael Dukart, a 1996 graduate of the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, joined the family business after a brief stint in the hospitality industry, to run a new restaurant in Middletown, Del., and help with additional expansions, including three Bucks County restaurants.

Joel Dukart, a graduate of Cornell's hotel school in 1999, could not resist the pull of the family business, either, even after nine thrilling years as a producer for CBS Sports, covering football, basketball and golf and an Emmy for coverage of the 2004 Masters Tournament.

In 2007, when Dukart Management expanded into Bucks County, Les told his son the time was ideal to join the company, sweetening the offer by giving up his ownership percentage. Joel took the deal.

Now, with their father planning to retire in six months, and Uncle Alan talking of scaling back because "I'm still working a few too many hours," Michael and Joel Dukart are anticipating a future that might include more restaurants "if the right opportunity comes along," Michael said.

It also will likely require more technology-enabled, off-premises ordering options, which will reduce important relationship-building chances with customers, he said. In the meantime, competition has grown beyond other fast-food outlets, to convenience and grocery stores and so-called fast-casual restaurants.

Joel said future success will depend, in part, on attracting health-conscious "people who are our age that have this impression McDonald's is not where they would go and bring their kids."

Speaking of kids, it's not too early for the Dukarts to begin "building good will and relationships" between the business and young Eli, said Mary Nicoletti, director of St. Joseph University's Initiative for Family Business and Entrepreneurship.

"Family businesses that offer age-appropriate ways for the youngest generation to interact with the business in a fun and meaningful way help to build positive feelings toward the family business and provide an emotional return," she said.

For now, that might mean a steady diet of Eli's favorite: cheeseburgers.

dmastrull@phillynews.com

215-854-2466

@dmastrull

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14,000

Total McDonald's restaurants in the United States.

90%

McDonald's U.S. restaurants that are owned independently.

1.9M

People employed by McDonald's.

SOURCE: McDonald'sEndText

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The Dukarts' 11 McDonald's restaurants are throughout the Philadelphia suburbs and Delaware:

Morrisville, Bucks County

Levittown, Bucks County

Concordville, Delaware County

Boothwyn, Delaware County

Wilmington

Newark, Del. (2)

Glasgow, New Castle County, Del.

Bear, New Castle County

Middletown, New Castle County (2)

SOURCE: Dukart Management Corp.EndText