Opens a Restaurant with Joe Rogers

Tom: We lived just two doors apart, so we got to be good buddies. He’d leave town on Monday morning, come back on Friday afternoon. Then he was home Saturday and Sunday.

He had a family, he had… one, two, three… he had four kids. And, but we just kind of hit it off real good. And he was with Toddle House, so I tried to get him to build a Toddle House around Avondale somewhere. He said “no, that’s not a Toddle House location.” I said “well, we need a restaurant.” He said “I didn’t say that, I just said it wasn’t a Toddle House location.” I said “well, what do you mean by that?” He said “You build a restaurant, I’ll show you how to run it.” I said “Alright.” He said “but I would suggest that instead of Avondale, let’s go somewhere between Avondale and Decatur, and we’ll catch people going both ways.”

So next week I had a site, and he didn’t like that site, but I had a second site the next week. He liked that one and that’s where we built on it. I said “there’s the lot, where’s the plan.” He said “I got the plan.” I said “well, I’ve got the builder, I’ve got my brother to build it.” I got John, I said “how about building this building and renting it to us.” He said “ok.”

All within a matter of a month, I guess.

So he built the Waffle House and Joe made sure that the equipment fit the plans. And part of his territory was around Avondale and around Atlanta, he had Toddle House in Atlanta. So every Friday he was through for the weekend, and he would make sure everything got built right, and we opened the first one.

Joe could walk through the front door of a Waffle House, just look left, right, kind of walk out the back door, and he’d have twenty things he wanted straightened out.

Well, they found out about it and told him that he had to make a decision. So he said to me “I got to be honest with the Toddle House. I got to either close it, or sell out to me.” I said “well, if you sell out to me what am I going to do?” He said “well, I’ll show you how to run it if you want to keep it.” I said “well, it looks like it’s doing alright to me if you can give me somebody that knows how to run it.” He said “well, I can do that, but I got to clear out of it totally, I’ll have no interest in it whatsoever.”

So he sold out just fair and square, totally.

And he’d come through each week, just doing his work. His division of Toddle House led all the other divisions by a lot, so he was just a good — to this day, probably a better operator than anybody I know. And he’d come through and straighten me out on about a dozen things I was doing wrong, then he’d go on out along his route and go.

We never discussed coming back until there was five units, and if I’d pick out a site, he’d come up with the plan and show me just what to do, and then he’d kind of look at it as he’s coming through over the weekend.

What was going on — see, I had the real estate office, I had development going on, and I had, of course, these Waffle House processes, and I was just killing myself.

And I ended up in the hospital. I had ulcers, peptic ulcers, another kind of ulcers, high sugar count, and my doctor said “at the rate you’re going right now, you’re going to be dead in five years.” That’s his quoted words.

Well, I got up in the morning, I was gone enough from my kids, they said “we don’t ever see daddy.” But Martha took care of everything in good shape. But when the doctor told me what it did I said “I’m going to change that.”

So Joe came back through town and I said “Joe, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to make you a deal. We got seventeen hundred and fifty dollars profit at the bottom of the line. If you’re going to come back and run this thing totally, you take what’s at the bottom of the line, I’ll give you half interest, and I don’t ever go behind the counter.” And he said “I’ll do that.” So he went back, gave all the proper notice and everything else, and then he came back and took over. In the first month, he doubled what was at the bottom of the line and absorbed his own salary. That’s how much they were cheating me. [laughter]

I used to tell Dan Ham, the first manager, I said “Dan, I know you’re stealing from me but just leave me a little bit.” [laughter]

He knew how to run a unit. When he came in, I mean everybody had to toe the line. And that hasn’t changed to this day.

If a fellow tells me that something is white, I think it’s white; Joe would check up to see if it was white. [laughter]

We never had anything we had to put down in writing, we just agreed on something and that was it.

We had this kind of theory between us, the statement was: disagree on anything you want to but don’t be disagreeable. [laughter] And all through those years, we got a lot of things we didn’t agree on, but it never got to the point that if we disagreed we couldn’t go out that night to dinner. And that’s never changed.