In the spring of 1960, just after he turned 16, Chuck Stout went to work as a “garbage boy” at a McDonald’s in Toledo, Ohio. For 85 cents an hour, he swept and mopped the floors, kept the drive-in lot tidy, filled the shake machine, and washed dishes. Chuck loved the job. It was an escape—somewhere to go that wasn’t the Weiler Homes public housing complex, where he lived with his mother and sister. They were barely scraping by. “My mom drank so much,” he says, “she didn’t know what I was doing.”

Not only did Chuck love his job, the job loved him. He went from garbage boy to french fry maker to burger cook to cashier. He became a manager, then a supervisor, then a field consultant, then a professor at Hamburger University, where McDonald’s trains new franchise owners and managers. By 1976, Chuck was serving as a director of product development for the entire corporation. The next year, he was on the team that brought ice cream sundaes to the chain’s menu. For the effort, Chuck was rewarded with a handsome bonus and a personal letter from founder Ray Kroc, whose wisdom Chuck was fond of quoting from memory.

Chuck eventually got fed up with corporate culture and told his superiors he wanted to go back out “in the field.” When two planes hit the World Trade Center in 2001, he was 57 and running his own McDonald’s franchise in Columbia, Pennsylvania. He rushed to Manhattan, where for three days he loaded up Egg McMuffins, hash browns, and coffee, first onto a luggage trolley, then a golf cart, and hauled them down to the debris pit to feed rescuers. The experience felt like the capstone of Chuck’s more than 40 years with the company. It was, he believed, the most worthwhile thing he’d ever done.

Chuck retired from McDonald’s in 2002. Not long after that, he lost his wife of 25 years to cancer. And so at age 60, Chuck found himself starting over. He moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and bought a two-bedroom cottage with a hot tub on the 10th green of a golf course in a gated community. To stave off restlessness, he took a job leading open-air jeep tours of the Carolina Lowcountry. He began having dinner with a fellow guide named Barbara Gatti, then going bowling with her, then going to the local Unity church with her. In 2007 she moved in with him, and they started their own company, Carolina Adventure Tours. Chuck led most of the excursions. Barb, a church music director, gave lessons on the side. They were happy. They were not prepared.

Chuck still remembers the call from Wells Fargo that brought the 2008 financial crisis crashing down on his head. He had invested his $250,000 nest egg in a fund that supposedly guaranteed him $4,000 a month to live on. “You have no more money,” he recalls his banker saying flatly. “What do you want us to do?” Unable to think of a better answer, Chuck told him, “Well, shove your foot up your ass.” Then he hung up.

Barb had lost her savings too, some $200,000 in investments. And with the travel industry flattened by the Great Recession, bookings at Carolina Adventure Tours dwindled. By the time Barb and Chuck got married in 2009, they were upside down on their mortgage and grappling with credit card debt.

The couple was facing bankruptcy, which scared Chuck to death. It brought back the terror of growing up poor—the pervasive insecurity he’d stamped out by going to work at 16. But by 2012, they had run out of options.