Success

M ATTHEW KABONG glides his ’83 Buick LeSabre through the streets of Pueblo, Colorado, at night, looking for a trailer park called Meadowbrook. Two Little Caesars pizzas and a bag of Crazy Bread sit in the back seat. “Welcome to my office,” he says, reaching down, turning up the radio, playing some mellow rhythm and blues. Kabong was born in Nigeria and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He studies electrical engineering at a local college, hopes to own a Radio Shack some day, and delivers pizzas for Little Caesars four or five nights a week. He earns the minimum wage, plus a dollar for each delivery, plus tips. On a good night he makes about fifty bucks. We cruise past block after block of humble little houses, whitewashed and stucco, built decades ago, with pickup trucks in the driveways and children’s toys on the lawns. Pueblo is the southernmost city along the Front Range, forty miles from Colorado Springs, but for generations a world apart, largely working class and Latino, a town with steel mills that was never hip like Boulder, bustling like Denver, or aristocratic like Colorado Springs. Nobody ever built a polo field in Pueblo, and snobs up north still call it “the asshole of Colorado.”

We turn a corner and find Meadowbrook. All the trailers look the same, slightly ragged around the edges, lined up in neat rows. Kabong parks the car, and when the radio and the headlights shut off, the street suddenly feels empty and dark. Then somewhere a dog barks, the door of a nearby trailer opens, and light spills onto the gravel driveway. A little white girl with blonde hair, about seven years old, smiles at this big Nigerian bringing pizza, hands him fifteen dollars, takes the food, and tells him to keep the change. Behind her there’s movement in the trailer, a brief glimpse of someone else’s life, a tidy kitchen, the flickering shadows of a TV. The door closes, and Kabong heads back to the Buick, his office, beneath a huge sky full of stars. He has a $1.76 tip in his pocket, the biggest tip so far tonight.

The wide gulf between Colorado Springs and Pueblo – a long‑standing social, cultural, political, and economic division – is starting to narrow. As you drive through the streets of Pueblo, you can feel the change coming, something palpable in the air. During the 1980s, the city’s unemployment rate hovered at about 12 percent, and not much was built. New things now seem to appear every month, new roads around the Pueblo Mall, new movie theaters, a new Applebee’s, an Olive Garden, a Home Depot, a great big Marriott. Subdivisions are creeping south from Colorado Springs along I‑25, turning cattle ranches into street after street of ranch‑style homes. Pueblo has not boomed yet; it seems ready, right on the verge, about to become more like the rest.

The Little Caesars where Kabong works is in the Belmont section of town, across the street from a Dunkin’ Donuts, not far from the University of Southern Colorado campus. The small square building the Little Caesars occupies used to house a Godfather’s Pizza and before that, a Dairy Bar. The restaurant has half a dozen brown Formica tables, red brick walls, a gumball machine near the counter, white‑and‑brown flecked linoleum floors. The place is clean but has not been redecorated for a while. The customers who drop by or call for pizza are college students, ordinary working people, people with large families, and the poor. Little Caesars pizzas are big and inexpensive, often providing enough food for more than one meal.

Five crew members work in the kitchen, putting toppings on pizzas, putting the pizzas in the oven, getting drinks, taking orders over the phone. Julio, a nineteen‑year‑old kid with two kids of his own, slides a pizza off the old Blodgett oven’s conveyer belt. He makes $6.50 an hour. He enjoys making pizza. The ovens have been automated at Little Caesars and at the other pizza chains, but the pizzas are still handmade. They’re not just pulled out of a freezer. Scott, another driver, waits for his next delivery. He wears a yellow Little Caesars shirt that says, “Think Big!” He’s working here to pay off student loans and the $4,000 debt on his 1988 Jeep. He goes to the University of Southern Colorado and wants to attend law school, then join the FBI. Dave Feamster, the owner of the restaurant, is completely at ease behind the counter, hanging out with his Latino employees and customers – but at the same time seems completely out of place.

Feamster was born and raised in a working‑class neighborhood of Detroit. He grew up playing in youth hockey leagues and later attended college in Colorado Springs on an athletic scholarship. He was an All‑American during his senior year, a defenseman picked by the Chicago Black Hawks in the college draft. After graduating from Colorado College with a degree in business, Feamster played in the National Hockey League, a childhood dream come true. The Black Hawks reached the playoffs during his first three years on the team, and Feamster got to compete against some of his idols, against Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier. Feamster was not a big star, but he loved the game, earned a good income, and traveled all over the country; not bad for a blue‑collar kid from Detroit.

On March 14, 1984, Feamster was struck from behind by Paul Holmgren during a game with the Minnesota North Stars. Feamster never saw the hit coming and slammed into the boards head first. He felt dazed, but played out the rest of the game. Later, in the shower, his back started to hurt. An x‑ray revealed a stress fracture of a bone near the base of his spine. For the next three months Feamster wore a brace that extended from his chest to his waist. The cracked bone didn’t heal. At practice sessions the following autumn, he didn’t feel right. The Black Hawks wanted him to play, but a physician at the Mayo Clinic examined him and said, “If you were my son, I’d say, find another job; move on.” Feamster worked out for hours at the gym every day, trying to strengthen his back. He lived with two other Black Hawk players. Every morning the three of them would eat breakfast together, then his friends would leave for practice, and Feamster would find himself just sitting there at the table.

The Black Hawks never gave him a good‑bye handshake or wished him good luck. He wasn’t even invited to the team Christmas party. They paid off the remainder of his contract, and that was it. He floundered for a year, feeling lost. He had a business degree, but had spent most of his time in college playing hockey. He didn’t know anything about business. He enrolled in a course to become a travel agent. He was the only man in a classroom full of eighteen‑ and nineteen‑year‑old women. After three weeks, the teacher asked to see him after class. He went to her office, and she said, “What are you doing here? You seem like a sharp guy. This isn’t for you.” He dropped out of travel agent school that day, then drove around aimlessly for hours, listening to Bruce Springsteen and wondering what the hell to do.

At a college reunion in Colorado Springs, an old friend suggested that Feamster become a Little Caesars franchisee. Feamster had played on youth hockey teams in Detroit with the sons of the company’s founder, Mike Ilitch. He was too embarrassed to call the Ilitch family and ask for help. His friend dialed the phone. Within weeks, Feamster was washing dishes and making pizzas at Little Caesars restaurants in Chicago and Denver. It felt a long, long way from the NHL. Before gaining the chance to own a franchise, he had to spend months learning every aspect of the business. He was trained like any other assistant manager and earned $300 a week. At first he wondered if this was a good idea. The Little Caesars franchise fee was $15,000, almost all the money he had left in the bank.