The Unlikely Duo Behind Subway: A Physicist, a Teenager and a $1,000 Check

Peter Buck was a 35-year-old Yankee with a Ph.D. in physics. Fred Deluca was an Italian American teenager who grew up in a New York City housing project. They lived 40 miles apart. In 1965, they formed a business partnership that became Subway Restaurants.

The improbable pair started with a shop selling submarine sandwiches in Bridgeport, Conn., and ended up as billionaires. Subway became the world’s largest fast-food franchise. (Yes, Subway has more stores than McDonald’s.) From the outset, Fred DeLuca exhibited the traits that would define the company for decades: an unrelenting drive for growth and a fiercely insular, family-business style of management.

A Subway restaurant in Forestdale, Mass.

Subway’s Founders

Nothing in his background prepared Peter Buck for a fast-food partnership with a kid half his age, except for the fact that he grew vegetables and loved to eat Italian sandwiches from a Portland deli called Amato’s.

He was born in 1930 to Ervin and Lillian Draper Buck, who owned a large farm in South Portland, Maine. He and his brother David planted and harvested crops such as lettuce, squash, and celery. His mother later went to work as a journalist for the Portland Press Herald.

Peter studied economics and science at Bowdoin College and then went on to earn a doctorate in physics at Columbia University. He married Haydee Piñero, the daughter of the first native-born governor of Puerto Rico, and they had three children. In 1957, General Electric hired him to work on atomic power plants for the Navy in Schenectady, N.Y.

The Start of Subway

Fred’s father, Sal DeLuca, was a high school dropout, who worked as a plant foreman for Empire Devices. He and his wife, Carmela, lived in public housing in the Bronx with Fred and his sister, Suzanne. When Empire moved its manufacturing operations to Schenectady, the DeLuca family moved to an apartment in nearby Amsterdam.

It was there that Pete Buck befriended Sal DeLuca. Fred explained the two men enjoyed bow hunting together.

But Empire moved again, this time to Bridgeport, Conn., and the DeLucas followed. Then, within a year, Pete Buck moved 40 miles away to Armonk, N.Y., working for United Nuclear Corporation in White Plains. One day, he invited the DeLuca family to a barbecue at his home.

The Buck home was a far cry from the DeLucas’ small apartment in Bridgeport. As Sal DeLuca drove up the driveway, Fred noticed the large white house, the wide lawn and the two garages with cars in them.

Fred DeLuca

Fred was 17 and had just graduated from high school. He wanted to study medicine at the University of Bridgeport, but his family couldn’t afford tuition. Maybe, he thought, Pete would lend him the money.

Fred waited for his chance att he barbecue. Finally he approached Pete and asked him if he had any ideas for how he could get the money to pay for college. Pete, to his surprise, suggested he open a submarine sandwich shop. He then wrote Fred a check for $1,000.

A few days later, Buck drove DeLuca to Portland to taste an Italian sandwich from Amato’s to give him an idea of what he thought would sell. The pair then set a goal of opening 32 shops in 10 years.

Subway Struggles Early On

DeLuca found a vacant storefront at 3851 Main St. in Bridgeport. His mother helped him buy bread, paper goods, meat, vegetables and cheese. A friend helped with carpentry, and Buck donated his kitchen table. Pete’s Super Submarine Sandwiches opened two weeks after Buck wrote the $1,000 check. On the first day, they sold 312 foot-long submarine sandwiches. The most expensive sandwich cost 69 cents.

But DeLuca had chosen a poor location, and sales didn’t repeat their inaugural success. But within a year, Buck and DeLuca opened another shop in Fairfield anyway— “to give the illusion of success.” Both stores lost money, though they did pay for DeLuca’s college tuition.

DeLuca opened a third shop in Stratford – without telling Buck, he later wrote. That one made money.

But it would take more than 10 years to open 32 shops, and it would take 15 years before the company turned a profit.

A Name Change

They began to advertise on radio in the New York area, pitching “Pete’s Submarine Sandwiches” as a healthy alternative to burgers and fries. But “Pete’s Submarine” sounded like “Pizza Marine.” So, they changed the name, eventually dropping “Pete” and morphing into Subway.

DeLuca took more and more control of the company. Subway never went public and has always kept information close to the vest, so it’s hard to tell exactly what happened. .

In the beginning, Buck and DeLuca met weekly in Sal and Carmela’s apartment to talk business over Carmela’s spaghetti and meatballs. In the early 1970s, they had only 16 stores and realized they wouldn’t reach 32 by 1975. So the decision was made to franchise. When DeLuca opened a corporate headquarters in Milford, a Bridgeport suburb, Buck asked DeLuca where his office was. DeLuca told him he didn’t have one. Buck never did get an office.

A Family Affair

By then, DeLuca had graduated from the University of Bridgeport and married his college sweetheart, Elisabeth, a nurse. In 1973, a friend of theirs bought the first franchise in Wallingford, Conn. Elisabeth became a company officer, and so did Carmela DeLuca. Fred hired his Aunt Lucy DeLuca as secretary. His sister Suzanne ran research and operations.

Then they expanded outside of Connecticut when Deluca’s brother-in-law opened a Subway franchise in Springfield, Mass. His aunt and uncle, Tony and Louise Scotti, opened one on Staten Island.

Franchising paid off, putting them on the path to explosive growth. By 1981, Subway had 5,000 restaurants; by 1997, it added 10,000 more.

DeLuca was everywhere, a hands-on manager involved in all aspects of the business. He drove around the country in an old Lincoln inspecting stores.

One former employee told Business Insider that workers “were swimming in a fountain of Fred.”

“He was very smart and hardworking, but one of the problems was that he ran the franchise when we had 30,000 stores as if we had a hundred stores,” the employee said.

By then, Peter Buck seemed to have faded into the background. He shunned the media, drove an old car, and started a new family. Buck had a passion for conservation, and he quietly bought up huge tracts of timberland in his native Maine. He did eat Subway sandwiches five days a week. But for years, people asked Buck about Subway and he’d simply say, “Talk to Fred.”

The Secret to Success

A key reason for Subway’s extraordinary growth was that its franchises were easy to open. They cost a fraction of a McDonald’s franchise, though Subway franchisees had to turn over a higher percentage of revenue to corporate. Most franchisees were first-generation Americans, and 30 to 50 percent were immigrants. Many had poor English and math skills, which led to criticism that Subway took advantage of its franchisees.

“Development agents,” usually franchisees, were responsible for opening new franchises and inspecting them regularly. That led to a potential conflict of interest—development agents could find fault with franchises they wanted to buy themselves.

Nevertheless, the number of Subway stores tripled from 1998 to 2011.

The company attributed half to a third of that growth to a wildly successful advertising campaign. It featured a college graduate from Indiana named Jared Fogle, who claimed to have lost a massive amount of weight by eating Subway sandwiches.

Jared Fogle

Jared Fogle

Fogle had ballooned to 425 pounds in college. Then he went on the Subway diet. Every day he ate one small turkey sub, one large veggie sub, baked potato chips and diet soda– a 1,000-calorie-a-day diet. Between 1998 and 1999, he lost 245 pounds. A dormmate wrote a story about him in the Indiana Daily Student, and Men’s Health magazine picked up the story, calling it “Stupid Diets … that Work.” Subway franchises in Chicago then approached the company’s advertising agency about Jared.

From there, Jared Fogle appeared in 300 Subway commercials. South Park devoted an entire episode to him. He appeared in an Adam Sandler film, started the Jared Foundation and donated his old 62-inch pants to a museum.

At the end of 2010, Subway became the largest fast food chain worldwide — with 33,749 restaurants, 1,012 more than McDonald’s.

Then in 2015, the FBI and Indiana State Police raided Fogle’s home and arrested him for child pornography and abuse. Subway that day announced it had suspended its relationship with Jared. Fogle went to federal prison, where as of 2025 he was serving out a 15-and-a-half-year sentence.

Two years earlier, Fred DeLuca announced he had leukemia. He named his sister Suzanne CEO in January 2015 before he died that September.

Subway began to close hundreds of restaurants. Then in 2019, a non-family member took charge for the first time when John Chidsey became CEO. Four years later, Subway announced that private equity firm Roark Capital bought the company for $9.6 billion.

Peter Buck devoted his later years to charity. He formed the Peter and Carmen Lucia Foundation with his second wife and contributed millions to expand Danbury Hospital. When his wife died, he donated a 23.1-carat ruby named after her to the gem collection at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. When he died in 2021, he was worth an estimated $1.7 billion. The seventh-largest landowner in the United States, he owned a total of 1.2 million acres of timberland in Maine.

Fred DeLuca started a charitable foundation during his lifetime as well. When he died, his obituary read that he was survived by his wife, Elisabeth; his son, Jonathan; his granddaughter, nieces and nephews; and “the thousands of team members that make up the Subway brand all over the world.”

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