Terry Lee plans to trade his Olde World Sandwhich Shoppe for a life of retirement

ALBANY — After nearly 40 years feeding the hungry citizens of Albany, the lure of the open road and months spent basking in the tropical sun has proven too great for restaurateur Terry Lee.

Since announcing his intent to close Terry Lee’s Olde World Sandwich Shoppe after 39 years in Albany, Lee has gone about making plans for a retirement split between cruising the highways and byways of America and relaxing on the beach in Belize.

“Belize is calling me,” said Lee. “Our plans are to spend six months in Belize every year and then six months driving. There’s lots and lots of stuff here to see. We’re just going to drive until we’re tired and then pull over.”

In fact, Lee can so clearly see his retirement plans, the vision has formed how he’d like to see things come to an end.

“December 19,” Lee said with a smile. “If I sell it, fine. If I don’t, I’m still retiring December 19. It’s very firm. I hope to sell it. And you know what I want for it? A new car. That’s it, about a $40,000 car. I’m selling it for a new car. Not even a fancy car, it’s a Prius 5. It gets about 50 miles to the gallon, 44 in town. I already went and picked it out. As soon as somebody says they want to buy the sandwich shop, I’ll say, ‘Well you go out there and you talk to this girl and bring me the receipt and the title and you are in business. We’ll set you up.’”

Even at nearly the end of his long career as a restaurateur, Lee’s trademark style of humorous banter, which helped him build a loyal customer base over nearly four decades, comes through. Even when asked who the “we” is that he is referring to, his answer is laced with humor.

“My wife,” laughs Lee. “I tried to go without her, but a friend of mine told her my plans so she’s going with me.”

As his career winds down, Lee seems to be enjoying himself even more, alternately looking ahead and looking fondly back on his long career spreading the joy of food and laughter.

Lee started in the restaurant business after graduating at Berry College, which he attended thanks to the GI Bill and five years in the Marine Corps.

After a suggestion from a friend of his who worked at a bank and owned a sideline business running a sandwich shop catering to lunch crowds, Lee quickly decided that, despite his lack of formal business training or restaurant experience, he should use a personal asset and go into business for himself.

“I majored in personnel management, and at that time a personnel manager started off at around $17,000 a year,” remembered Lee fondly. “Well, I was making that going to college, so that didn’t make any sense. I had a friend, a guy at the bank, and he had a little sandwich shop downtown and he said, ‘Well I’m making, you know, $40,000 a year out of this little place.’ I had a Jaguar sedan, and I sold it for enough money to open the first sandwich shop. The day I opened it, I had made two sandwiches and eaten one.”

From that humble beginning, Lee immediately found success as a restaurant owner in Albany, quickly expanding his operation to include catering and some satellite locations. While that rapid expansion demonstrated he could be successful, it also taught him a valuable lesson about being prosperous for the long haul.

“There was nobody else here in town when we started, plus hardly anyone in the catering either,” Lee said. “When I was downtown I was making, way back then, about $100,000 a year, which was a bad mistake. I thought if I was making that there, I’ll open up one in Macon, Milledgeville and I’ll make $100,000 each. Wrong! The big thing they taught me in school that I forgot was the KISS formula: keep it simple stupid. So I found out that that didn’t work out.”

What did work, though, was a tireless work ethic that once included working 18-hour days, seven days a week for more than 20 years until he moved the sandwich shop to its fourth, current and final location in Brooks Plaza 19 years ago.

“This has been like a vacation: 8 to 3:30, five days a week,” Lee said. “This is really like a three-hour-a-day place. For the past five years or so, I’ve cut the catering back, too. I mean, if I can do it in the daytime I will, but if it involves nights and weekends I’ve gotten old, fat and lazy.”

That level of catering is a far cry from when Lee once regularly catered sit-down events for Merck Chemical, Firestone, Cooper Tire and the Albany Civic Center.

“We did a lot of catering over the years,” he said. “We did a lot of catering at the Civic Center. We were doing four or five hundred people, sit-down meals with china and everything down there. It was big. We did a lot of concerts. At one time we did 80 percent of all the concerts there, which meant you had to go in and do breakfast, lunch and dinner to feed 40 to 60 people.”

Of course, in true Lee fashion, those Civic Center events provided some great fun and some great stories.

“You had to do the crew; you had separate dining rooms for the stars and you had to have what they wanted: certain color tablecloths, no brown M&Ms, all kinds of things,” Lee recalled. “We’d have to go to Tallahassee to find certain beer, whatever they wanted. I remember Tina Turner’s manager coming to me, and he said he wanted like 60 hand towels on the stage. I said we could do that, but he’d have to buy them and we’d charge him. He said, ‘Well, just rent them.’ I said, ‘You go out in the audience and try to pull that sweaty towel out of a fan’s hands. We’re not doing this. You buy them and she can wipe sweat on them and throw them wherever, but I’m not going back out there to try and find them.’

“Old Luther Vandross came and he wanted Cornish hens and a big dinner,” continued Lee. “We fixed it all up, and at the last minute he decided he really didn’t want that. We told him we could fix him anything he wanted, but he had to pay for both meals. You run into stuff like that.”

Of all of his memories of getting started — from running multiple locations, to once running an arcade/oyster bar/sandwich shop/ice cream shop/record store, to meeting celebrities — the memories that seem to matter most to him are the memories of his customers.

For most of his career, Lee has been front-and-center, making the sandwiches by hand and to order, right in front of the customers. And it is spending that time with his customers, many he considers friends, that has been the best part of his job.

“It’s been a lot of fun, a fun job,” said Lee. “The customers have been really good. We’ve had some really good, loyal customers. I’ve got some people that still eat with us that were eating with me 39 years ago. Of course, we’re all a lot older now. Some of those people were just kids.The good thing here is I get to talk to every single customer. I’m not back in the back there fixing your food or gone somewhere. I get to talk to every single customer, whether it’s good or bad.

“I added it up the other day, and being very, very conservative, I’ve made five million sandwiches since I’ve been here. And that’s what I made; I’m not counting the other locations, and the ones I didn’t make. Here I make 99.9 percent of every sandwich, and I talk with everybody because you can’t go down the line without talking to me.”

While he says he will miss that opportunity to make sandwiches and soups for his customers every day, he is looking forward to maybe getting to spend a little time with them without being behind the counter.

“We’ve started telling people the last month or so, and of course, they hope nothing will change if somebody buys it,” said Lee. “And there’s people, like I said, who’ve been with me 39 years who say, ‘Where are we going to go for lunch?’ And I say, ‘Well, I don’t have a clue ‘cause I haven’t had lunch out in 39 years, so I’ve got to go find a place, too. I’ll meet you wherever you go.’

As the December date slowly approaches, though, patrons will be able to find Lee where he usually is, bantering behind the counter while he whips up one of the shop’s specialties, like chicken salad or the club sandwich. It might even be cold enough before December to enjoy one of the many soups that Lee feels has become his niche over the years.

“The first 20 years I had vegetable soup and chili,” he said. “Now I have five soups every day. Our niche is soup. There aren’t any other restaurants in Albany that have that many soups at one time. January, February and March are our busiest months because of the soup. We’ll do 3oo cups at lunch. That’s a lot of soup.”

While Lee will be at the shop until the end, making sandwiches, he will also be doing his best to find a buyer for the place, which he believes will likely happen. In his mind, a $40,000 car is a pretty good bargain for a restaurant that has been in operation under the same owner longer than just about any other place in Albany.

“There’s very few places in town that can say they’ve been open as long as we have,” Lee said. “It’s established. Whoever buys it, they’ll get everything in here. They would get the van for delivering. They would get the menu, the phone number, the recipes, the name, everything. I would also stay on for 30 to 60 days to show them what to do and how to do it; break them in.”