To date there are more than 38,000 Subway restaurants around the world in 100 countries, give-or-take. It got going in 1965 in a little place in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The world headquarters is in Milford. Two partners, Peter Buck and Fred DeLuca built it.

At the ripe ole age of 17, DeLuca borrowed $1,000 from Buck.

I asked Deluca what the very early days were like.

“The easy day was I would get up and go to school and mom would go and open the store maybe at 11 o’clock.” Eeverybody got paid, even Mom,” Deluca replied. “We got paid, sometime we had to put it on account, but we all got paid, mimimum wage, working in the store, and then maybe I’d come after school and I’d work a few hours, sometimes an employee would work and mom wouldn’t have to work, sometimes I wouldn’t have to work, those were the easy days. A hard day would be getting up really early, maybe 4 o’clock in the morning, driving down to the vegetable market in New York, buying vegetable, bringing them back, delivering them to all the stores, then going off to school, then coming back and working lunch hour, and this continues until late at night when I’d just go to sleep.”

Deluca told me he would just work, because that’s what he did. He went to school and worked on the business and slowly figured things out. He says if you keep at something long enough and you keep on trying to solve the challenges, you figure out how to solve most everything.”

Indeed he did figure it out, as he is one of the richest men in the United States.