Authentic vintage 1975 Sadlack’s Teeshirt
Wow! Sadlack’s is officially history!
Back in 1975 when Dr. Frank Sadlack took possession of a quintessential Southern Mom-and-Pop corner cafe equipped with little round stools in front of a black laminate counter with snap on metal trim where the Sheriff came for coffee and sticky buns, a real sandwich shop was quite the innovation for Raleigh.
Raleigh was still a pretty sleepy place where the streets rolled up at sunset and Edwards Grocery Store at the corner of Oberlin and Hillsborough had enough foot traffic from NC State students to make a decent income from the sale of canned goods and fresh fruit and toothpaste.
In those days restaurants were few and far between in Wake county and health inspectors had enough time to come around to inspect each individually once a month.
Food scraps were dumped into a 55 gallon trash can and collected by a local hog farmer to feed his livestock.
Frank Sadlack thought Hillsborough Street was ready for a full fledged sandwich shop to serve the students and clerical staff over on campus and by gosh was he ever right! With fresh bread baked daily at Cameron Village Bakery to his super secret proprietary specification and cold cut meats sliced super thin deli style onsite in the back room his Submarine Sandwich was the talk of the town. Assembled while you waited with fresh lettuce, tomatos, onions, a squirt of mayonnaise or mustard, and sprinkled with a pepper can filled with an eclectic mixture of spices his sandwiches caught the imagination of administrator and undergraduate alike!
Soon there were two separate phone lines at the end of the counter used to take delivery orders to campus dormitories. State workers from downtown would pick up lunch orders for their entire office.
Visitors who stayed at the John Yancy Motel had but to cross the street to get a good hearty sandwich which they could eat in their room or outside the shop under the stars at one of half a dozen concrete picnic tables.
Then came Frank’s next idea- bagels. Fresh from New Yawk City some guy in a big vintage Cadillac filled his trunk with bags of bagels when he made a business trip every week. Bagels and cream cheese, who the heck had ever eaten anything like that? They weren’t donuts and they weren’t sandwiches. They were something completely different.
And THEN came cheese cake. $1.25 per thin slice back in 1975! Baked by a wild cat entrepreneur who rented pizza ovens from a pizza shop down the street at 4 AM these cheesecakes were the real deal. Real Philadelphia Cream Cheese, real butter, real graham cracker crust, there was nothing else like it in the city or probably even the State.
Sure, nowadays a fella can go to Subway or Quisno’s or Which Wich and get fine fare of the sandwich variety but Frank was the first in Raleigh and he was a genuine original.
Hasta la vista Sadlack’s Heroes!
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