Few, if anyone, recognized the smaller version of Paul Rogers when he returned to the restaurant business in Pittsfield.
Then came the catchphrase. His catchphrase. The one his customers once loved, a simple two-word expression – ‘my friend’ – that mixed with other words and made his local clientele feel right at home.
“Thank you, my friend.”
“What can I get you, my friend?”
“Have a great day, my friend.”
That’s when they knew that this slender person was half the man he used to be, down from 300 pounds to 150.
“Even now people don’t recognize me, because I’ve lost so much weight,” Rogers, the owner of Jitters Cafe, told me during a lull at his restaurant. “So many times people will come in and say, ‘Oh, are you Paul’s brother?’ Or they’ll say they don’t recognize me until I say, ‘Thank you, my friend.’ That’s when they say, ‘Oh my God.’ ”
They’re shocked, beyond the fact that a medical problem caused Rogers to lose so much weight, a condition he says is now under control. He’s back in town after a 2½-year layoff, a period in which this jack of all trades chose to sell Jitters, focus on his salon and real estate businesses, and care for his six dogs. He also once owned a video store, before technology boarded that up.
But he’s Pittsfield all the way, a 1986 graduate of the high school, cutting hair in his salon just down Main Street from his restaurant, where he’s greeting and baking and warming, just like the old days.
Rogers opened Jitters at 32 Main Street in 2008 and moved to 44 Main, where his video store used to be, six years later.
“I’ve always been a waiter or something in the food industry,” Rogers told me. “I worked for the Weathervane, I worked for Howard Johnson’s.”
He was the boss and he said he did well financially. He sold the place in 2016 to a senior couple from Chichester, citing his health as the main reason it was time to get out.
They struggled and sold it to a Massachusetts woman, who turned out to be an absentee owner. The restaurant went dark, the business up for sale.
Something, apparently, was missing from Rogers’s time there, and, after hearing about his rich background and investment in the town, and his genuine-sounding ‘my friend’ line, it was easy to figure out what.
Easy to prove, too. Rogers bought the restaurant last December, slowly building back his base. Seated behind us were Art and Renee Morse, a widower and widow, now husband and wife, both with stories that told The story.
Art, for instance, grew up in town, went to school in town, and his kids did, too. “My children went to high school with Paul,” Art said. “They were classmates.”
When Renee’s husband was dying from colon cancer, Rogers’s presence was felt at her home.
“He treats everyone like family,” Renee said. “He called probably once a week to check on me and my son and asked if we needed anything and how my husband was doing. The times (my husband) was hospitalized, he made meals for us.”
He did more than that. After Art and Renee had lost their spouses, guess who traded in his spatula for Cupid’s bow and arrow?
“He fixed up me and Art,” Renee said.
“Yeah, he pushed us together,” said Art, who was returning to the dating scene after a 48-year marriage to his high school sweetheart.
“I had never had any experience,” Art said. “It took me three months to ask her out.”
But he did, and such is the impact of a homegrown business opened by a hometown person. The building was dark and silent for a few months before Rogers bought it back almost one year to the date.
Meanwhile, his former customers are gradually learning that Rogers is back serving food on Main Street. There’s just a little less of him. Physically, that is.
“The only thing people said was the atmosphere had changed because it wasn’t you,” Rogers said. “They would say others don’t have your same enthusiasm.”
Renee, for one, had heard Rogers was returning, but she hadn’t seen this slimmed-down version.
“It was a little bit of a shock,” she said. “It was like, ‘Wow, you’ve lost half of yourself.’ ”
These days, some former customers continue to express surprise over what they see, a slim man with a gregarious personality. They see a fireplace with a gas flame, Teddy Bears and flowers from yet another of Rogers’s former businesses, and Christmas stuff.
Rogers recently offered to allow the Make a Wish Foundation to use his restaurant for an event. He sealed the deal with a Make a Wish representative, who later confided in others that she worried a stranger had finalized the deal, not Rogers.
“We even shook hands on it,” Rogers said. “She knew me very well, but she did not know that was me.”
At least not until that catchphrase surfaced. The one that clearly and definitively lets people know that Rogers is back in town, serving and greeting.
I heard several variations, all with the familiar ring, including on my way out.
“Thanks for coming, my friend,” he said.