Santa Barbara is famously the birthplace of the modern environmental movement as well as McDonald’s Egg McMuffin. These disparate game-changing developments may in fact be less jarringly discordant than they immediately seem. Santa Barbara illustrator and sculptor Bud Bottoms cofounded the group Get Oil Out! (GOO) in response to Santa Barbara’s oil spill of 1969. He also claims to have designed the original “Golden Arches” logo for McDonald’s back in 1952.
As Bottoms tells it, he was working at the time as an illustrator for the Robert Palmer public relations company, then headquartered at 812 Anacapa Street (also listed as 812 Presidio Avenue). Working out of neighboring offices were a couple of “semi-portly middle-aged men” who wore suits. They’d walk past Bottoms’s window and wave. He’d wave back. They were Richard James and Maurice James McDonald — who went by the names Dick and Mac, respectively — then owners of a fledging hamburger franchise called McDonald’s.
One day, Bottoms recalled, the two brothers invited him to their offices. “There was a huge map of the United States on the wall with all kinds of pushpins,” he said. They needed a logo, something to do with the letter M. Bottoms cranked out three sketches and gave them to the pair the next day. He can’t recall exactly how much they paid, but not much. That was the end of it. Not long after, Bottoms saw his handiwork in the flesh from the freeway while driving south with his family. When he noted this, he said, he was greeted with skepticism.
