1st Subway Employee Changed Lives

When Dick Pilchen walked into a basement in 1976 to check out Don Fertman’s upstart band, Fertman didn’t know he was about to get a a hit jingle, and a 30-year career as an executive at one of the world’s largest franchise companies.

Fertman was a fresh-eyed college graduate at the time trying to break into the music scene with his band The Geoffrey Crayon Gentlemen.

Pilchen was the first employee of the Subway chain, its jack of all trades, and the genius behind the marketing that catapulted it from a sandwich shop in Bridgeport to one of the world’s most recognizable chains.

As he did for countless other people, Pilchen ended up giving Fertman life-changing opportunities.

Some of those people have been recalling those opportunities, after Richard ​“Dick” Pilchen, a longtime Hamden resident, died on Halloween after a long illness. He was 80 years old.

Fertman stood in the Beecher and Bennett Funeral Home in Hamden on a recent Saturday afternoon surrounded by photographs of Pilchen. A square portrait, taken later in Pilchen’s life, floated above a smattering of flowers framed by two lit candles in red glass cylinders.

Stretching the length of the wall on either side, and a few yards along the connecting walls as well, were boards of framed photographs: Dick Pilchen, sitting on a couch with a group of friends. Dick Pilchen at the Taj Mahal. Dick Pilchen with Arnold Schwarzenegger. A young Adam Sandler with a golf club leaning over his shoulder, the Subway logo peeping out from his open plaid shirt.

Scattered throughout the room were the friends whose lives he’d stumbled into, and transformed, and whom he had always made a point of keeping in his life. Many of them he had hired, starting what they did not know at the time would be their life’s career.

“Dick gave people opportunities,” Fertman said. He gestured at the other mourners. ​“Everybody in this room. There are very few people that you’ll ever meet that will have that kind of impact on that many people. Dick was larger than life.”

From Pete’s Super Submarines To Adam Sandler

Pilchen, born in 1940, grew up in Amsterdam, N.Y. He worked in radio before getting a job at Singer, the sewing machine company. In 1963, he moved with the company to Connecticut.

In 1965, he was working at Singer with a man named Sal DeLuca. As the legend goes, DeLuca’s neighbor Peter Buck was at a gathering in the DeLucas’ backyard. DeLuca’s son Fred asked Buck how he could make some money to help put himself through school. Buck told him to open a sandwich shop.

With a $1,000 loan from Buck, Fred DeLuca opened Pete’s Super Submarine Sandwiches in Bridgeport. It was the first sub shop of what would become one of the world’s largest chains, with over 42,000 franchises worldwide.

But before it got there, it needed a sign.

Fred DeLuca told the story in a 2013 promotional video about the beginnings of Subway.

“There was a sign board above the store, and I said, ​‘Dad, what do you think I should do? I have to get the sign painted.’ And he said ​‘Well, you know, there’s a guy at work. Dick Pilchen. Why don’t we get him?” DeLuca recalls in the short film.

The screen switches to Pilchen: ​“He said, ​‘Oh, Dick, we’re going to need your help, because you know everything about advertising.’ Of course, I wasn’t going to deny that, so I said, ​‘Oh, yeah.’”

Pilchen was the first person Subway hired. He designed a sign for the new sub shop.

Soon the store was looking to expand. Together Pilchen and DeLuca came up with the name ​“Subway.” Pilchen put his marketing mind to work.

“I said ​‘Well that’s good, we can make the ​‘Sub’ one color and make the ​‘way’ another color.’ I said, ​‘Oh, wait a minute, we could call it Subway and then, you know, it goes uptown, and it goes downtown.’”

In the promotional film, Pilchen traces his hands through the air as if tracking a train snaking through the tunnels beneath New York City on its way up to the Bronx or down to Brooklyn.

That was how Pilchen got the idea for the arrows in the iconic Subway logo. The company still uses Pilchen’s design.

At first, Pilchen was a part-time employee. Soon he started working for Subway full time, doing everything from marketing to franchising to public relations.

Pilchen retired from Subway 50 years after he designed that first sign above a new sub shop in Bridgeport — in 2015, the same year Fred DeLuca died.

“Subway was his family. Subway was his life,” said his friend and former franchise partner Paul Stavropulos. (In addition to working in the headquarters, Pilchen also managed his own franchises,)

Pilchen helped the company grow from a single shop to a small chain in Connecticut to a global franchise. Though he served in a number of roles, his passion was for marketing, friends and former colleagues said. Over the years, he thought up a myriad of clever marketing gimmicks and partnerships, and picked up a few major film product placements, thousands of records and films, and an ever-growing circle of friends.

The producers of the 1996 cult classic Happy Gilmore were scrambling to find a chain to do product placement in the film when they asked Subway. They had had an advertising deal with another company, but it fell through at the last minute. Filming was already underway, and they needed a company to step in fast.

They asked Subway, and Pilchen agreed. ​“The next thing you knew, Subway was throughout that film,” said Fertman.

And a college kid named Chris Kan was mailing out Subway T‑shirts to Hollywood on his first day as an intern at Subway. Kan, still at the company, became a close friend of Pilchen.

In the film, Sandler’s character is sponsored by Subway, and does a commercial for the company.

A wooden hand was lying on a table among other artifacts from Pilchen’s career at his memorial. It was the hand the character Chubbs (Carl Weathers) used in the actual film. After the film was shot, the producers gave it to Pilchen as a souvenir.

Pilchen was also responsible for Subway product placement in Terminator 2 and Lethal Weapon 2. Through the former, he met Arnold Schwarzenegger. At his memorial, the walls were adorned with a few photos of Pilchen posing with the movie-star-turned-politician.

Lethal Weapon 2 includes an iconic scene in which a Subway drive-through messes up Joe Pesci’s character’s order, and gives him a tuna sandwich, which he is adamant he will not eat. He goes on a rant, shouting that ​“they fuck you at the drive-through.”

As Fertman recalled, at the time, none of Subway’s restaurants in California had drive-throughs. They had to build a fake drive-through on an existing location for the filming.

“Great Day For A Subway”

When Pilchen walked into a basement in 1976 and met Don Fertman, he was there to check out the band. Before his Subway career, Pilchen had done programming for a radio station in Amsterdam, N.Y. He had always loved music. In 1976 when he met Fertman, he had his own small record label called F. M. – Future Music Inc.

The Geoffrey Crayon Gentlemen took its name from an obscure reference to the Washington Irving story and essay collection that includes ​“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and ​“Rip Van Winkle.”

Pilchen decided to give the band a chance, and became their promoter.

“He said ​‘Geoffrey Crayon Gentlemen… what the heck am I going to do with that?’” recalled Fertman. Pilchen came up with the band’s first advertisement: ​“Geoffrey Crayon Gentlemen. A difficult name to remember. A hard act to follow.”

The band picked up momentum and changed its name to ​“The Crayons.” For the change, Pilchen helped it rebrand. The new poster showed the band members sitting around a naked woman, who is facing away from the camera. ​“The Crayons; they’re not gentlemen anymore,” read the slogan. The band was a success, and began touring the Northeast.

Pilchen’s career advertising Subway and his passion for music were never separate. He always used one to promote the other. That was how The Crayons got their biggest hit. It wasn’t a song, exactly. It was a jingle used in Subway commercials up and down the coast with the simple lyrics: ​“It’s a great day for a Subway.”

When the band showed up at clubs, Fertman recalled, that jingle was their biggest hit. They would finish a song in their set and the crowd would shout ​“play the Subway song!”

Eventually, Fertman was kicked out of the band due to drug and alcohol addiction, and Pilchen stopped promoting The Crayons.

Pilchen knew Fertman could write. He hired him at Subway in 1981 to sell franchises, do public relations, edit the company publications, and be the company photographer.

Fertman’s addictions persisted, though, and Pilchen was there when he had a ​“public meltdown.” Finally, Fertman went to rehab.

“When I got out of rehab, Dick took me back and gave me a second chance. Or I guess a third chance,” Fertman said. He has been sober since. He is now chief development officer for Subway. When he retires in a few months, he will have been at the company for 30 years.

The Crayons were just one of the many ways Pilchen used music to promote Subway and vice versa. Fertman was one of many friends he made in the process.

In 1970, Dick Kalt moved to New Haven to work at the AM radio station WAVZ. After a few years, he left to help start WPLR, a startup FM station that played the most modern music and went on to be one of the region’s major stations. When he was starting the station, he met DeLuca, who agreed to partner with WPLR.

“He introduced me to Dick Pilchen, and we became fast friends,” he said.

Pilchen became a familiar face in the WPLR office, where he and Kalt would think up advertising ideas together.

In one, called ​“the great Subway rally,” customers could pick up a card in any Subway in Connecticut that they had to get punched at every other Subway in the state. If they made it to all of the stores within the promotion time frame, they got a free sub.

Through Subway, with the help of WPLR, Pilchen also became a national music critic. He published a four-page magazine called The Scene. He and Fertman wrote columns in it, which they published under different names. It included news about concerts in the area (different in each state). Many of those, in Connecticut, were WPLR events.

Pilchen distributed The Scene in every Subway restaurant. Since it had such a wide circulation, record labels started sending free records to Pilchen. Over the years, he collected thousands and thousands of album. His collection grew so large that eventually it forced him to move out of his apartment on Mix Avenue into a larger house.

Kalt stayed friends with Pilchen even after he left WPLR.

“He’s just one of those kinds of people,” Kalt said. ​“I mean, I never met anybody that had a negative thing to say about him. I don’t know of a gentler, more enthusiastic and more real person that I could call a friend any more so than Dick Pilchen. And that’s the truth.”

At WPLR, Pilchen met Paula Schneider (pictured above), also a Hamden resident who became a lifelong friend. Schneider showed up to Pilchen’s memorial. She, Pilchen, and two other friends would get together every month and go to a different pizza restaurant. Though he lived in Hamden, Pilchen didn’t actually like New Haven-style pizza. But that didn’t matter. It was about the friendship and the tradition.

“Life Is A Banquet”

At Pilchen’s memorial, along one wall of the softly lit blue-carpeted room was a small table. On top of it sat a holder with business-card sized laminated portraits of Pilchen above the quotation, ​“Life is a banquet. Live, live, live, and give, give, give.”

The quotation was one of Pilchen’s favorites. It was derived from a line in his favorite Broadway show, Auntie Mame.

In the play (and book and movie), Mame is a free spirit whose main aim is to live life to the fullest. At one point, she exclaims: ​“Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!”

As all of his friends said, Pilchen’s version of the quotation was his motto. He lived his life as he wanted, in as extravagant a way as he pleased. And for him, extravagance always involved friendship and generosity.

Pilchen discovered Broadway as a teenager. His aunt used to take his cousin Mary Jane Skarzynski into the city. One year, she brought Pilchen along as well. When he heard his aunt was going to take them to a show, he thought that meant a movie.

“He said, ​‘What movies are we going to see?’ She said, ​‘No movies. Plays.’ And that was when he discovered New York and Broadway,” Skarzynski recalled.

That trip began a lifelong love of Broadway musicals and of New York City, which he always said was his favorite place in the world. As an adult, he would take friends to New York to see shows — plays, not movies — as often as twice a month. His favorite musicals he would see four or five times.

Pilchen never married. Instead, he spent every moment he could with the many people he met throughout his life. He traveled the world, both for work and for leisure. He always took friends along with him.

Wherever he went, he would meet people and charm them.

Brian Adams was one of the many friends with whom Pilchen traveled the world. They were on a trip in Portugal once, Adams recalled, and Pilchen was in a bad mood. They stopped into a shop, and Pilchen started chatting with the shop keeper. An hour later when he left, the frown was completely wiped from his face, and he had a new Facebook friend.

“He could change somebody’s life by having a conversation with them,” Adams said. ​“People that had contact with him for five minutes 50 years ago will never forget him.”

Many of his friends echoed that sentiment.

Pilchen hired Ralph Piselli in 1984 to work as a franchise representative. ​“People follow the person, then the plan,” Piselli said. ​“They followed him. That passion passed down to you because if you saw that this person was so passionate, so dedicated, there must be something there.”

When Chris Kan started, he said he felt the same way about Pilchen. His first assignment was to send T‑shirts out to Hollywood for Happy Gilmore. He started as a college intern in 1996, and stayed on as an intern as he finished school. After two years, Subway hired him for a fulltime position. He still works with the company.

“If it weren’t for him I probably wouldn’t have stayed on,” he said.

He had ​“just that lively personality,” he said. ​“I’ve never met anyone like him. I know that’s the kind of thing you say to a reporter, but it’s true. Like a third grandfather.”

Kan became a close friend of Pilchen. He and his wife were the two other friends who had pizza every month with Schneider and Pilchen. He would also help Pilchen for the various extravagant parties he would throw.

After moving out of his Mix Avenue apartment, Pilchen lived in a condo on the northern end of town. He got two cocker spaniels, but the condo association would not allow residents to have two dogs. Instead of getting rid of one dog, he got rid of the house.

He moved back down to the Mix Avenue area and had a house built so his dogs could live happily together. His new house reflected his entertainer’s spirit. It had a movie theater in the basement. The kitchen featured a hibachi. He would invite friends over for ​“Dickihana”-themed dinners (a riff on the hibachi chain Benihana) and cook for them.

Kan would help him park cars for his Oscar parties, which he would host every year. Every guest would leave with a small Oscar statue.

Pilchen would also hire Kan to categorize his vast collection of records, VHS tapes, and DVDs, always to Pilchen’s exacting standards. Sometimes, Kan said, it seemed Pilchen would just have people help him out with those kinds of tasks because he wanted people around.

When it came to any house improvements or fixes, his ​“savior” was there to help.

“I was his savior. That’s what he called me,” said Jesús Barajas (pictured above with Claudia Sandoval) as he sat in a chair looking around the room at Pilchen’s memorial. ​“Because my name is Jesus, he called me his savior, so he called me for everything. Internal, external, I was there.”

Barajas said he painted, redid two bathrooms, worked on the stable, did electric work, and landscaped for Pilchen.

Kan said that in Pilchen’s later years, he would see him about twice a week. He would get a text from Pilchen asking if he had had dinner yet. If he hadn’t, Kan would stop somewhere on his way back from work to see his friend, sometimes letting Pilchen treat him, sometimes treating Pilchen to the meal.

A few years ago, Kan and a few friends wanted to get him a gift. For a man who has everything, that’s hard, he said. So, they printed and framed one of their favorite photos of Pilchen — him standing at the box office of the Goodspeed Opera House, his back to the camera. Pilchen loved it, Kan said.

In the days after Pilchen’s passing, Kan said he was joking with a few of his friends. Perhaps Pilchen was waiting in line at the box office to get tickets into heaven.