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Evans, Bob (30 May 1918–21 June 2007), founder of Bob Evans Farms, was born on May 30, 1918, the son of Stanley and Elizabeth Lewis Evans, grocers, near Sugar Ridge (Wood County) in Northwestern Ohio. In 1924, when Bob was five, the Evans' moved to the Ohio River town of Gallipolis (Gallia County) in Southeastern Ohio where the parents had relatives. Evans' parents were products of a Welsh immigrant community that prospered in the region. Along with an older brother, Stanley Evans established the Evans Grocery Store, which grew into a chain of sixteen outlets in the area. The Evans brothers established the first Evans Grocery Store in Gallipolis in 1924. In 1929, the brothers opened a second store in Point Pleasant West Virginia. Four other stores were established in Southeastern Ohio by 1941, at the same time, the family established another store in the Charleston region of West Virginia. In 1960, the Evans Grocery Store ceased operation. Before its run ended, the Evans brothers operated a total of sixteen stores in Southeastern Ohio....

Rosenberg, William (10 June 1916–20 September 2002), entrepreneur and founder of the Dunkin' Donuts restaurant chain, was born in the Dorchester section of Boston, one of the four children of Nathan and Phoebe Swart Rosenberg, who operated a neighborhood grocery. Growing up in one of only a few Jewish families in the tough, working‐class district, as a child Rosenberg was sometimes the target of anti‐Semitic verbal abuse and physical attacks. He left school after eighth grade to work in the family business, and after the failure of the business during the Great Depression he found jobs delivering telegrams for Western Union and driving a horse‐drawn delivery truck for Hood Dairy. Rosenberg's reputation as a tenacious worker won him a wholesale delivery route with the Jack and Jill Ice Cream Company, a pioneer in the use of refrigeration trucks, vending machine sales, and other innovations. His success in developing new business along the route brought him an office position at Jack and Jill, and Harry Winokur, the company accountant, became a mentor, teaching him formal business methods and facilitating his promotion, at age twenty‐one, to national sales manager....

Thomas, Dave (02 July 1932–08 January 2002), restaurateur and philanthropist, was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the son of an unwed mother. He was adopted at the age of six weeks by Rex Thomas, a construction worker, and Auleva Sinclair of Kalamazoo, Michigan. He never met his birth parents, and his adoptive mother died when he was five years old, later replaced by three subsequent wives of his adoptive father. Thomas went to schools in many cities in the Midwest and the South as his father moved around looking for work, and he spent his summers with his maternal grandmother in Kalamazoo. He attended high school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but left before finishing the tenth grade, at the age of fifteen. The many after-school jobs he held began with that of counterboy at Walgreen's Drug Store in Knoxville, Tennessee, when he was twelve, and included stints in several restaurants. In 1947 he took a job as a busboy at Hobby House, a family restaurant in Fort Wayne, where he remained, living at the YMCA, when his adoptive family moved on. Three years later he joined the army and, because of his experience in restaurant work, was given the chance to sign up for Cook and Bakers School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Thomas reached the rank of staff sergeant and was made the manager of an enlisted men's club, serving as many as two thousand people a day, in Germany. He was the youngest ever to hold that position....