At the ‘Jared Subway,’ it’s business as usual

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Some time during Danny Thomas’ freshman year at Indiana University, somebody pointed to the Subway on the corner of Atwater and Woodlawn and said, “That’s the Jared Subway.”

It was the actual restaurant the now-disgraced pitchman frequented while an undergrad at Indiana University on his way to both massive weight loss and massive celebrity.

Jared Fogle was by then the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. He’d been mocked on “South Park” and “Saturday Night Live.” He got by with just one name, like Cher.

Thomas, a 25-year-old pre-med student from South Bend, recalled a sort of thrill upon learning that he lived near Jared’s Ground Zero.

“I thought, ‘Neat, great,’ ” Thomas said, “because look how well-known Jared is, and look how small this place is, and in Bloomington, Ind.”

Now Thomas, like most people, is repulsed by Fogle.

But he does not hold Subway responsible and, in fact, slung his invective — “horrid, disgusting, reprehensible” — while eating a foot-long salami-and-pepperoni sandwich in the Jared Subway.

It’s the same for Meredith Baker, a junior from Elkhart who lives nearby.

“It used to be, ‘Oh, cool, we had a celebrity in our area,’ ” she said. “Now it’s, ‘ew.’ ”

Still, Baker ate at the Jared Subway last week and plans to eat there again soon.

Even without the Jared provenance, it’s an unusual Subway, a college town’s version. You enter through a narrow, hall-like room that houses the sandwich assembly line and not much else. Past the cashier, you climb three steps to the dining room, which has just six tables.

The restaurant is tucked into the corner of a small apartment building, the building where Fogle lived while a grossly overweight IU student in the late 1990s. The building’s owner, reached by phone, confirmed Fogle was a tenant and that he paid his rent on time, but he asked not to be identified for publication and he refused to have anything more to do with this story.

The Subway franchisee also was uneasy being interviewed and referred a reporter to Subway corporate, which said in an email: “We have already ended our relationship with Jared and have no further comment.”

Nobody interviewed seemed to think the fact that Fogle agreed Wednesday to plead guilty to possessing child pornography and other charges reflected poorly on Subway, or on Indiana University.

Jim Hendrickson, who teaches math at IU, said the Jared Subway would become just a strange, creepy footnote in the local lore.

Several years ago, while weighing grad schools, Hendrickson visited the University of Michigan, where, in the 1960s, Ted Kaczynski had received his Ph.D. in math. “Want to see the Unabomber’s apartment?” Hendrickson’s hosts asked.

“This,” he said, nodding around at the Jared Subway where he stood after ordering his sandwich, “is less weird than that.”

Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.