Then, like Roald Dahl's chocolate-loving Charlie, young Scotty noticed a sudden flash. Even better to him than gold, it was shiny and black—a record! Scotty ran for his AM/FM turntable. It was the very first record he could call his own.

On a cold February day in Galax in 1989, a 13-year-old boy named Scotty Landreth was rifling through a stack of newspapers looking to start a fire in his family’s wood stove—the same stove used to heat the house and to cook skillet cornbread, vegetables from the garden, and animals hunted in the Appalachian hills around.

“I figured we might have won a car or free meals — either way it would have been good to me,” Scotty said. “I never, ever, could have thought that it’d be a million dollars.”

He put the vinyl on, dropped the needle, and a song began to play. When it ended, a voice came on and prompted Scotty to call a number to claim his prize.

Scotty shows me the wood stove where he found the $1 million winning flexi. Photo by the author

But the McDonald’s promotion had a true Charlie and the Chocolate Factory twist: one of the 80 million records entitled the person who found it to a $1 million prize.

And in the 1980s, fast food loved the flexi. At one point, every kids meal from Burger King came with one of several flexi recordings by Alf. (Check out “Melmac Girls” and “Take Me, ALF, to the Ballgame.” ) And then, McDonald’s seriously upped the ante, printing 80 million flexis of its “Menu Song” in one go—the equivalent of an 80-times-platinum record. That number dwarfs the sales of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the best-selling album of all time, which has sold 66 million copies.

A flexi-disc is any thin piece of vinyl or vinyl-coated paper you can play like a record. Often promotional in nature, flexis come in all shapes and sizes. When turntables were ubiquitous in family homes, flexis were often attached to the spines of magazines by a perforated edge, mailed out as postcards, and even ripped off of the back of cereal boxes. (See Kiss Krunch and Post Cereal’s Jackson Five campaign.)

Scotty’s first record was actually a flexi-disc, one of 80 million produced by McDonald’s in the late 1980s.

If you were sentient and in America in the 1980s, and especially if you were a kid, you knew the McDonald’s “Menu Song.” It was the centerpiece of a massive ad campaign of national television ads. I personally know several people in their 30s who can sing the song by heart. One of them learned it in an elementary school class.

The “Menu Song” lyrics are a full recitation of every item McDonald’s sold at the time. On the flexis, you hear a “class” trying—and failing—to learn the song. But on one record, the winning record, it’s sung correctly all the way through.

That was Scotty’s first record.

A million dollars couldn’t have meant more anywhere than in Galax, Scotty told me over a Quarter Pounder meal at the Galax McDonald’s.

“Before that, it was working every day for a small paycheck, it was digging in change,” Scotty said. “Keeping enough food in the house for everybody.”

As a kid, Scotty didn’t even have enough money to eat more than occasionally at his favorite restaurant, McDonald’s.

“Once that record came about, all the worrying went away,” he said.