Year: 2005

Jared has a last name, but like Michelangelo, Madonna, and Saddam, he doesn’t need one. When I say “Jared,” you know I’m not talking about actor Jared Leto or Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond. Those guys have their constituencies, but uninym status? There’s only one Jared who can make that claim: Jared the Subway Guy, the innovative weight-loss adventurer who, thanks to his ability to shed pounds while eating nothing but fast food, stands as the most improbably enduring icon this new millennium has produced.

Sisqo, we hardly knew ye. Crabby British lady from The Weakest Link—what was your catchphrase again? These days, celebrity is as ephemeral as a wrinkle on Joan Rivers’ brow. But six years after Jared’s first commercial aired nationally, in January 2000, his special brand of reduced-calorie charisma remains in high demand. “I’m on the road around two hundred days a year,” Jared told me over the phone recently. He was at the Denver airport, en route to Seattle to represent Subway at a Seahawks game. A few days earlier, he’d been in California with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, kicking off a campaign against childhood obesity. When he visited Washington, D.C., last April, as part of an American Medical Association lobbying effort on cardiovascular disease, Senator Barack Obama did a double-take in the halls of the Capitol, then called him over. (“He loves Subway’s new toasted subs,” Jared reports.) At a hotel buffet in Hawaii, Jerry Seinfeld got a little starstruck when he recognized the mythic sandwich pitchman in the omelet line. “This big smile spread across his face, and he said, ‘You’re Jared, right?’ ”

Such fame generally requires one to star in a few hit movies, or at least an unauthorized sex video with extensive Internet distribution. Lasting fame is even more elusive; like weight loss, it’s harder to maintain than achieve. But Jared has made it look exceedingly easy. He estimates that he’s shot around thirty-five to forty national commercials over the course of his career, including ten in 2005. (He also appeared in another two dozen or so regional ads.) Most of these commercials were thirty-second spots; some were only half as long. Add them all up, and you can’t help but think of the Warhol cliché: Jared’s fame is literally built on approximately fifteen minutes of exposure.

Of course, Jared’s commercials air thousands of times each year, at all hours of the day, across multiple channels. In today’s vast TV universe, shows like Yes, Dear can run forever without making a single cast member a household name, even in the households of CBS network executives. But unless your TV is a goldfish bowl, you’ve seen Jared holding up his old blue jeans and extolling the virtues of Subway. “We took a trip to the Arctic Circle,” he told me, recalling a journey through Alaska. “This one village we went to, the closest Subway was more than five hundred miles away. But because they get satellite TV, all the kids there knew who I was.”

Somewhere in Milford, Connecticut, where the Subway chain is based, there are men and women who literally get paid to market baloney. (Or, as they might put it, “bologna.”) In the late 1990s, they were, in the words of Subway co-founder Fred DeLuca, “firmly convinced that consumers were not interested in food that was low-fat.” And, indeed, even after exposés like Fast Food Nation and Supersize Me, fast food remains appealing specifically because it’s not low-fat—it’s greasy, salty fare that tastes like artery-clogging indulgence, not deprivation.

But as DeLuca explained in a 2002 interview with QSR, a fast-food trade journal, two things happened that helped Subway change its mind about the marketability of healthy fast food. First, a Houston franchisee started promoting the fact that Subway’s menu included seven sandwiches with fewer than six grams of fat. Then, after that franchise enjoyed a significant jump in sales, Subway incorporated the concept nationally. That’s when Jared, a twenty-year-old student at Indiana University, happened to notice a “seven under six” sign at his local Subway.

At that point, the business major was morbidly obese: 425 pounds and gaining. His knees and shoulders ached under the load of all that weight. There were courses he didn’t take because they were held in classrooms where the seats could not accommodate him. He required two parking spots for his car—unless he could open the driver’s door completely, he couldn’t get out.

Ironically enough, the local Subway, which was literally on the other side of a wall of Jared’s apartment, was part of the problem. It was open till three a.m., and he used to feast there on steak sandwiches with extra cheese. But when he saw the “seven under six” sign, he decided to forsake such treats for healthier choices: a small turkey sandwich (no cheese or mayo) for lunch, and a large veggie sandwich for dinner. About one year and seven hundred Subway sandwiches later, he’d lost 245 pounds. Subway franchisees in the Chicago area learned about his success via a brief mention in Men’s Health magazine and produced a TV ad for the local market. “The national people never bought into it until they saw that it was interesting to consumers,” DeLuca told QSR.

Indeed, while Jared’s star was rising over Chicago, Subway’s national team was focused on a campaign featuring Billy Blanks, the fitness trainer who masterminded the Tae Bo craze by mixing ballet, boxing, martial arts, and hip-hop. When it came to selling hoagies to couch potatoes, though, the former superheavyweight kicked the former karate champion’s perfectly toned butt. Fan mail flooded corporate headquarters. The Oprah Winfrey Show, Today, and Good Morning America supersized Jared’s renown. In the first year that Subway broadcast its Jared commercials, sales rose by nineteen percent.

Jared is fairly circumspect about what Subway pays him. A couple of years ago, in a Washington Post article, he said his earnings would make him a “future millionaire.” All he would tell me with regard to his salary was, “They treat me very well.” No matter how much he’s earning, though, it’s likely that he’s underpaid. Consider that Advertising Age reported in July 2005 that “Subway executives have said when ads featuring [Jared] stop running, sales dropped as much as ten percent,” and that Subway’s revenue for 2004 topped $6 billion. This suggests that Jared is worth as much as $600 million a year to the chain. So it’s no surprise that Subway remains committed to him. What is curious is the public’s enduring interest in the guy.

Let’s face it—in the canon of commercial pitchmen, Jared doesn’t exactly leap out at you. Hell, in the canon of guys hanging out at your local Best Buy, Jared doesn’t exactly leap out at you. He lacks, for example, Ronald McDonald’s sartorial daring. He has none of the Pillsbury Doughboy’s infectious joie de vivre, or Mr. Whipple’s riveting psychosexual turmoil. Unlike Jimmy Dean, there’s no music career, however dimly recalled, bolstering his reputation. What Jared does offer is a dramatic and inspiring personal story, one with a touch of irony, too: Not only did he lose 245 pounds in just eleven months, but there were no sit-ups involved, no steamed broccoli or soy-protein smoothies—just fast food, pure and simple! It’s diet porn with a punch line, an urban myth that’s actually true.

But as irresistible as that story may be, it’s a short one, and it’s been going on now for six years. Where’s the sequel? Or even a single plot twist? Jared 2006 is essentially the same as Jared 2000. His is not an Oprah-esque saga involving the loss and gain and reloss of, cumulatively speaking, hundreds of pounds. He hasn’t slapped an ex-con Harley Davidson salesman in the face at an airport, à là Richard Simmons. He’s never even changed the style of his glasses.

Jared himself attributes his enduring popularity to his authenticity. “I’m not an actor,” he said. “People know what I did was real. When I look back and ask why am I still doing this six years later, that’s one of the only reasons I can think of.” But there’s more to it than that. This is the age of reality TV, after all; prime time is infested with real people scratching and clawing their way into our consciousness. They’re as subtle as silent movie stars, spewing their neuroses all over your flat-screen.

Jared, on the other hand, evokes an old-fashioned TV professionalism. He’s calm, informal, never hurried. He’s never had a snappy catchphrase, and thus, people have never tired of his snappy catchphrase. He’s also so demographically limber his parents ought to get some kind of advertising award for concocting him. While he grew up in Indianapolis, he seems at home anywhere there is a mall and a Subway. Which is to say, everywhere.

Those tiny wire-rim glasses of his? Definitely blue-state. The fact that he once weighed 425 pounds? You can’t get any more red-state than that! Women like him, but not in a way that makes their boyfriends or husbands jealous. At twenty-seven, he’s youthful, but there’s something sort of middle-aged about him, too. He knows how to play to schoolkids, politicians, whoever. When he holds up those old size-60 blue jeans—they’re so big, they look like a shower curtain with legs—everyone responds.

But perhaps what’s most extraordinary about him is his willingness to remain average. The first rule of accidental fame, after all, is that you must try to exploit and extend your celebrity, however possible. But Jared has not only not gone Hollywood, he hasn’t even gone Planet Hollywood. He lives in an Indianapolis suburb with his wife, Elizabeth. If he’s ever had a desire to pursue a career in Rob Schneider movies or go on a drunken bender with Nicole Richie, he’s successfully resisted it. He hasn’t remodeled his face à là Paula Jones, or tried to establish himself as a makeover show host or infomercial fitness equipment guru. He’s simply stuck with what made him famous in the first place: low-key, matter-of-fact commercials for Subway. Year after year, he remains on message, as stalwart as the Nike swoosh or the McDonald’s arches, a logo made flesh.

And certainly his mission is far from over. Because of the public’s response to Jared and his ads, Subway went from halfheartedly pointing out that some of its sandwiches happened to be low in fat to fervently promoting health as a key part of its identity. It developed additional low-fat sandwiches, and added salads and other health-oriented menu items, such as a line of products for carb-counting customers. It also helped for customers to keep track of how many calories they were consuming, right down to each slice of cheese. And perhaps the most significant sign of success with this approach was that other fast-food chains began adding healthier choices to their menus.

Nonetheless, all those salads with dressing on the side have yet to have an impact on the nation’s collective waistline. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about two out of every three adults in the U.S. are overweight or obese. It also estimates that fifteen percent of six- to nineteen-year-olds are overweight. “Obesity is a bigger problem now than it was six years ago,” said Jared. “So I think that keeps my story relevant.” And unlike a lot of celebrities, Jared actually wants to be a role model. “I see how keeping my weight off, and staying on the road and talking to kids, inspires other people,” he said. “When I was at my heaviest, my self-esteem was so low. I never expected to be able to give hope to somebody. It’s such a fantastic feeling.”

In TV years, Jared is a mere toddler compared to other average-guy advertising icons. The six years and sixty to seventy national and regional commercials he’s got under his (size 34) belt are still no match for Dick Wilson, aka Mr. Whipple, who shot 504 ads for Charmin toilet paper between 1965 and 1989. Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s, appeared in more than eight hundred spots for his hamburger chain. Jared’s life expectancy on TV, however, looks promising. “We expect he’ll be with us for a while,” said Subway PR specialist Mack Bridenbaker.

Indeed, Jared is more than a corporate pitchman now, and more than an evangelist for healthier eating. He’s transcended those roles to become a living symbol of change, a vivid reminder that people can radically transform their bodies, and, along with that, their lives. In a way, he’s a contemporary version of Charles Atlas, the entrepreneurial bodybuilder who, via his “dynamic tension” system, promised spectacular transformation. At a time when America was a land of hungry young immigrants eager to bulk up and prove their strength, the target audience was ninety-seven-pound weaklings who were tired of getting sand kicked in their faces. Now, in the land of supersized plenty, the audience is three-hundred-pound endomorphs who, instead of longing for pecs the size of Big Macs, would settle for being able to see their feet again. To them, Jared offers regular, thirty-second glimmers of hope. Charles Atlas’ first ads appeared in 1929; his image is still today used to sell his system. Perhaps, after six years, Jared is just getting started.

The other day, the Minnesota State High School League decided the public is ready for instant replay at some high school basketball and hockey games. High schools using television replay to fact-check the referees is unheard of, yet at their meeting last week, Minnesota coaches, officials, and athletic directors all patted each other on the bottom for a good idea, well done. That should show you just how seriously we adults take our children’s sports. But it may also indicate a problem worse than bad calls—the unhealthy obsession we all have with the most outward sign of athletic achievement: winning. Then again, if truth is the ultimate goal, and a humble admission of human fallibility is truth’s collateral damage, well, then, this could be one of those teaching moments coaches everywhere are so fond of.

 

If only life itself had instant replay, a sort of TiVo for reality. The death of Eugene McCarthy on December 10 took us back months, years, decades. The honorable U.S. senator from Watkins, Minnesota, is remembered for engineering one of the most tumultuous moments in modern political history. He was an early and loud opponent of the Vietnam War who, in 1968, electrified the anti-war movement at a time when rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans alike were withering in the public eye for their sheepish support of an unwinnable ideological war on a distant continent. McCarthy splintered the Democratic Party and, in the process, foiled President Lyndon Johnson’s hopes of re-election. Hubert Humphrey won the party’s nomination, was defeated by Richard Nixon in the general election, and the rest is a lamentable tale of criminal misdemeanors at the highest levels of government. Those events also ushered in a long-term identity crisis on the left. McCarthy’s life in the years since became a sort of repeating leitmotif; he was the poet-philosopher who traded political influence for truth. It was a childish truth—war is wrong—yet childish truths are usually the most inarguable.

 

President Bush has got his dander up lately. He is accusing his critics and “antiwar protesters” of “rewriting history.” Naturally, he’s irritated that certain critics are saying the administration spun intelligence reports and facts in a way that justified a predetermined course of action. In other words, the president’s adversaries contend, the White House conformed the facts to their hawkish plans. We don’t need instant replay to remember that the international community did not support those plans, and that the “facts” were in dispute from the beginning. (And for good reason; they were false.) Nor do we need to reconsider the near-unanimous view that pre-emptive war ought to be initiated for only the most solemn, irrefutable, and righteous reasons. What we would like to revisit, though, is precisely why so many latter-day congressional critics were cowed into following, when they should have been leading.

 

We frequently refresh our screens at MNSpeak.com, a companionable Twin Cities blog. Its headmaster, Rex Sorgatz, recently realized that the photos adorning the site’s masthead were out of season—lush midsummer shots of uptown tiger lilies, the downtown skyline on a sultry August afternoon, and a view across the Stone Arch Bridge on a spring morning. Here in the deep of winter, Sorgatz said he found those images “oppressive,” and he invited readers to submit something a bit more seasonal. Last we checked, readers remained firmly and comfortably planted in the oppressive past.

Like a Homeric hero, our old friend Will Steger has returned to Ithaca. His particular life cycle took him on a fifty-year odyssey to both the North and South Poles, but last month he moved back to the Twin Cities. He assures us he is here only “for a couple years”—to raise awareness that the climate is warming much faster than anyone thought possible—the results of which he witnessed, to his horror, on his expedition through the Arctic last winter. The people up north don’t need to be told; they can see the evidence for themselves. It is the people in the cities (particularly one city: Washington, D.C.) who seem to require infinite repetition on the subject of global warming.

This is the time of year when we look forward. It’s good to make resolutions for the next twelve months. But we think a part of the tradition ought to be a quick look in the rear-view mirror, and a trip back in the time machine. We are an amnesiac nation, so those few who actually learn something from the past may be doomed to repeat themselves, until the rest of us get the call right.

In 1978, Joe Franken had a day job consulting for the Johnson Printing Company of Minneapolis. He also moonlighted as an actor, a model, and a copy writer. Back in the seventies and eighties, his work in TV commercials made him a familiar face to many Twin Citizens.

Before he got into advertising and printing, however, Franken worked in his father-in-law’s textile business. Originally based in New York, the company, Simon Kunst and Co., moved to Albert Lea in the early sixties. When the company pulled up stakes, it brought along the Franken family: Joe and Phoebe and their two young sons, Al and Owen.

Albert Lea was a nice town, but Joe and Phoebe Franken were unhappy there. Back in New York, they’d been passionate about theater. Joe had performed in high school, college, and community theater, and Phoebe had been a professional actress. I spoke with Joe in 1978, and he ruefully remembered that Albert Lea’s dramatic offerings didn’t qualify even as off-off-Broadway. “The only theaters they had were two movie houses, which only played on weekends. One played Ma and Pa Kettle and the other … cowboy movies.”

The slaughterhouse town in southern Minnesota represented quite a culture shock for Joe and Phoebe. They kept their interest alive by subscribing to the American Theater Guild and traveling to the Twin Cities whenever the troupe came to perform. “Every time we came,” Joe said, “there was a snowstorm.”

The perils of attending the theater and being caught in a blizzard one hundred miles from home ended when Mr. Kunst, Joe’s father-in-law, moved the business to St. Paul. Joe was pleased with the new location, but the business was beginning to wear on him. “I still didn’t like it,” he said, “so I finally quit.”

He enjoyed being a Minnesotan, though, and his new job at Johnson Printing. Most of all he liked the culture scene of the Twin Cities.

Some of their friends tried to interest the Frankens in Theatre in the Round, but when Joe heard it was community theater, he said, “Oh, that means amateur. I want no part of it.”

You couldn’t blame their friends for tricking them into seeing their first performance at that community playhouse. Then as now, Theatre in the Round’s reputation was superb.

“We enjoyed it so much that during intermission we signed up as season members. We were hooked, both of us,” said Joe. The Frankens not only graced the theater’s auditorium, they went on to perform on its stage. The entire Franken family was cast in a 1963 production of Life with Mother.

Joe played dozens of roles. One performance inspired an ad man named Sid Rich to cast him in his first television commercial, riding a Toro lawn mower. From riding mowers he went on to describe the virtues of Home brand peanut butter. Joe Franken was especially good at portraying clerks, insurance men, accountants, and bank presidents. He had a broad forehead, kind eyes, and a sonorous, deep voice with just a trace of a New York accent. “A lot of people are afraid that a low voice like mine is hard to understand,” he told me, “and other people think it’s just fine.” Joe said the slight New York accent was liked by some and disliked by others. “The funny thing is, when I go back to New York, they say, ‘Oh, you sound like a dumb Midwesterner.’ ”

Joe Franken’s face was just as expressive as his voice, and he became a popular model among print advertisers. He portrayed a miserly landlord in an ad for condominiums (“Instead of paying the landlord, pay yourself!”). In an ad for a commercial photo printer called Pako, he played an old codger in a rocking chair, illustrating their motto, “You don’t grow old waiting for Pako.”

Owen Franken eventually became a photographer and lives today in France. His work has appeared in such publications as Time magazine and the New York Times. Everyone knows what became of Al. At the time I interviewed his father, twenty-five years ago, Al was writing and performing with the original cast of Saturday Night Live.

Through the seventies, Joe and Phoebe never missed their son’s performances. They often invited friends into their St. Louis Park home to watch Saturday Night Live. In December of 1977, they traveled to New York and became part of the act. In a classic SNL moment, Al sang a song to them and presented each with a photograph, signed, “To my greatest fans.” When Al asked them how they felt, Phoebe said she hadn’t been so nervous since his eighth-grade teacher called to tell her he’d wet his pants. Joe Franken died in December 1993. Ten years later, Phoebe Franken passed away.

—Dean Potter

Every winter you encounter them in the news, Minnesota’s perverse answer to Sports Illustrated swimsuit models: pale, shivering people taking part in polar plunges for charity. Huddled like doomed, featherless penguins, their ample pink flesh turning blue, they suddenly rush past the camera men and on-site ambulances to flail briefly in the water of some local lake, then are swaddled and rushed away to warmth. All the while they are oblivious to the fact that what the charities really need is their money, not their sense of shame.

There is a different kind of ice swimmer, though, a more solitary and humble figure who typically operates in the evening, and who jumps into the frigid water not for attention or duty, but because he actually wants to. Such people are the discipline’s true devotees, freezing their buns off for the sheer love of it. Seeking to understand this demented behavior, I decided to engage in it.

Thus I found myself on a February night, with the temperature near zero and a brittle moon overhead, exiting a sauna and strolling nearly naked onto Lake Gegoka, near Isabella, Minnesota. A stone’s throw away, the square hole on the lake’s white surface was ominously black, a beckoning invitation to hypothermia. I moved toward it like a zombie—an especially quick zombie.

Earlier in the evening, Mark Wendt, who owns the nearby National Forest Lodge, had shoveled snow from around the hole, cleared freshly formed ice with a chainsaw, propped a stepladder in the chest-high water, and stoked a fire in the sauna. An enthusiastic proponent of the ice-plunging ritual, Wendt takes pride in creating a quality experience for his guests at the lodge, most of whom are cross-country skiers.

The Finnish have a word for this business, avantouinti (“ice hole swimming”), and are some of its foremost practitioners. They’ve even got an Avantouinti Society that promotes the benefits of a bone-chilling bath, and Helsinki boasts several public avanto holes with dressing rooms and rubber-treaded steps. Its adherents claim health benefits that range from improved circulation to cold-fighting powers. But the most powerful lure is more fundamental.

“I’ve introduced lots of people to this, and I’ll ask them afterwards, ‘How are you feeling?’” Wendt said. “And they say, ‘Man, I’m just feeling great.’ And you do—all tingly, super-relaxed, but yet not dulled out. There is nothing like having a big day of outdoor activity in the cold, and then going down to that sauna, getting totally warm, and jumping in the lake a few times. You sleep like an absolute baby.”

Other ice-plunge veterans offer similarly gushing testimonials that take on a spiritual tone. But Wendt still has a hard sell on his hands, and considers it a high turnout if one-third of his guests on a given weekend actually jump into the icy water.

“A lot of people just can’t conceive of it,” he admits.

Merely going from the sauna out into the cold, or even rolling in the snow, are inferior substitutes, he says dismissively. And don’t even get him started on the hot tub, which has stolen some of the ice hole’s box office.

“It just doesn’t get you to the same place.”

Wendt stokes the sauna to 160 degrees or so. Thrill seekers might take it to 180, and push-it-to-the-limit types can send the needle to 200—but sauna etiquette eschews heat competitions. It’s a Finnish-style sauna, with dippers to pour water onto scalding rocks. The idea is to stay in as long as you can, sweating your brains out until you absolutely can’t stand it anymore. Then take the plunge, reheat, and repeat. Aficionados say at least three leaps are needed for maximum effect.

Science backs up some of these claims. Several medical studies have shown that ice swimming makes the hypothalamus release beta-endorphins, the morphine-like hormones behind the “runner’s high” and other feel-good effects of exercise. But other researchers are quite willing to throw cold water on other cherished beliefs.

“A sauna, even if you exclude the cold water part of it, is a working stress,” says Professor Larry Wittmers, director of the Hypothermia Laboratory of the University of Minnesota Duluth. “It dilates your peripheral vessels and it runs up your heart rate. It’s just like working.”

Combine this with an icy plunge, he says, and “There is a danger of kind of assaulting your cardiovascular system. You basically are in a situation in which you’re maximally vasodilated, and all of a sudden you hit the water, so you’re going to vasoconstrict, which is going to put a heavy load on your heart.”

Of course, naysayers like Wittmers were nowhere in sight as I prepared for my debut dip. I was surrounded in the sauna by several other eager ice plungers, and we all egged each other on, steaming ourselves to a state of near delirium. Then I stepped out for my first plunge. The frigid, piney air was enormously refreshing to my heat-wracked body, and my thoughts suddenly crispened in the cold as I took in the shimmering field of stars overhead. It seemed a lot like existential reverie, but it may have just been my nervous system’s dawning realization that I might soon freeze to death.

When my body hit the water, the shock was profound, but, thanks to my superheated body core, not a lot different from other cold-water dunkings I’ve endured. When I surfaced, I emitted a party whoop that carried an edge of panic. I paused before exiting, because I’d been told staying in the water briefly heightened the effects (though it’s called ice swimming, it’s really more like ice bobbing).

Back in the sauna, it took a good ten minutes to work back up to a rolling sweat. I repeated the process two more times, then headed for the shower. A warm one. At dinnertime, as advertised, I felt a swelling inner glow and an overwhelming physical calm, as if I’d just had a massage. Mark asked how I was doing. He’d heard my answer before, of course: “Great,” I said. “Just great.”

—Keith Goetzman