BLOOMINGTON, ind. — For 15 years, they’ve asked Tim Wintsch, “Is this Jared’s Subway?” The store manager, who has made sandwiches here since 1999, would grin below his black visor and point to the receipts, which read: Jared’s Subway.
The customers would laugh. They’d snap photos. They wondered where he sat.
“One found out I used to serve Jared,” recalls Wintsch, 30. “He asked me to sign a napkin.”
The mood has darkened since Subway cut ties with the now-infamous pitchman, who, as legend goes, lived above this shop when he lost 245 pounds on a Subway diet.
Jared Fogle, known nationwide as “the Subway Guy,” agreed to a plea deal this month for possessing child pornography and crossing state lines to pay for sex with minors.
Last Sunday, Wintsch ran the cash register. He glanced out the window, grateful the news crews had moved on. Two young men in basketball shorts eyed the menu. One turned to his friend, snickering: “Is this Jared’s dungeon?”
The end of a prominent role model for children, a family man who traveled the United States lecturing to elementary school students about eating right, is felt most intimately in Indiana.
To the rest of the country, Fogle, 37, was the approachable everyman who appeared in 300 Subway commercials, often holding up a pair of size-60 jeans he said he used to wear.
But to Hoosiers, Fogle’s former classmates and neighbors, he was a local legend.
“It makes me sick,” Wintsch said, “the way he let us down.”
Fogle’s campaign, anchored by his wholesome image, proved successful. Between 2000 and 2006, Subway’s domestic sales doubled, from $3.8 billion to $7.7 billion. It ended abruptly in July after authorities raided Fogle’s home.
The lurid details surfaced in an Indianapolis courthouse. Subway promptly fired Fogle. “Jared’s Pants Dance,” an online game, vanished from the chain’s Subway Kids site. His wife announced plans for divorce.
Ken Ungar, president and founder of U/S Sports Advisors, a marketing agency in Indianapolis, has over the years worked with Fogle in his Subway role. Fogle’s star power was especially potent here.
“He was a local celeb,” said Ungar, 52. “People saw him at Pacers games, Colts games. People would shout out his name.”
His undoing shouldn’t tarnish Indiana’s reputation, however. “I don’t see anything he did in terms of helping the state,” Ungar said. “I’d heard of his work, his foundation — it seems now that was an illusion.”
