ABC Pizza, Johnson are Granby Institutions

Ralph Johnson, the 71-year-old former banker turned owner of in Granby, has a favorite quip when he talks about his surprising change in careers.

“I just changed the color of my dough from green to white,” Johnson said.

Anyway, Johnson, who has owned ABC since 1978, has what seems like an endless supply of one-liners, anecdotes and stories from his varied past.

Indeed, if Lori Love, the owner of , is the town’s Earth mother, then Johnson is Granby’s pater familias. So much so that it’s difficult to separate ABC Pizza - which opened in 1972, and is generally considered the first stand-alone pizza joint in Granby - as an institution from the goodwill that Johnson brought it.

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Stated another way, Granby residents look at you sideways when you ask them to imagine the town without ABC Pizza.

“We have five kids and we’ve been going to ABC with them for 30 years,” said James Yanosy in a telephone interview. “We took them there after baseball games, soccer games, basketball games. … We took them to ABC for team dinners.”

And while ABC has consistently served great food - basic fare such as pizza, grinders and calzones - at reasonable prices, much of the credit to the restaurant’s success is owed to Johnson himself.

“The thing that means the most to me is the friendship of Ralph,” Yanosy said. “We’d come in and he’d talk to me or one of my kids about what they were doing in sports or in school. It was always that willingness to talk to us that made it like a family meal at home.”

Johnson: Owner for 33 years

It’s hard to believe that when Johnson bought the business 33 years ago that he had no prior experience running a restaurant.

“Absolutely nothing. I didn’t know how to cook. I didn’t know how to boil water,” Johnson said. “My wife was not happy with me.”

All he knew was that he wanted out of the banking business - he worked for the Simsbury Bank & Trust for 18 years prior to purchasing his share of ABC Pizza with a partner, Frank Moulton, whom he subsequently bought out.

“I knew what the banking institution was like,” said Johnson, a Canton resident who still lives in the home where he was born. “I knew what it was coming to as you and I can see it today, where you are no longer a person, you are a number. I did not like that. The customer becomes a number.

“If you came in and said you wanted $1,000 for a car loan, you knew within 5 or 10 minutes whether you were going to get $1,000 for a car loan. You can’t do that any more. Now they send it off to someone where they’ll call you if you’re approved. I don’t go for that. I want to know and usually a customer wants to know if they can get that $1,000 now, because that car is sitting down the road. And it’s very important to them. If it’s important to them, then it’s more important to me.”

So Ralph took what he loved about the banking industry - interacting with people, helping them and delivering great service - and applied it to his newly purchased restaurant. It was, to say the least, a leap of faith.

“I could only hope the people who knew me would follow me here,” Johnson said. “You never know whether they’ll follow you or not follow you. But I’ve always said, ‘If you give the customer what they want, they’ll come back. If you’re nasty to the customer, they won’t come back.’”

True. And, yes, the food is good. The meatball grinders, for example, are the stuff of local legends (As one waitress put it, “You haven’t arrived in Granby yet until you’ve had one of our meatball grinders.”).

But, as Yanosy said, it’s Johnson’s ability to create a warm family atmosphere - for his employees as well as his customers - that has kept ABC going when others have opened and closed throughout the years.

A classroom in a pizzeria

Johnson has turned ABC Pizza into a classroom of sorts; he estimates that he has hired between 165 to 200 high school students to work in the restaurant since he took over.

“I consider this place a learning place,” Johnson said. “In a certain way, I find myself a teacher. I teach the kids not only how to work, because, after a while, anybody can make a pizza or a grinder or a salad. But they have to learn about themselves.”

One of the things they have to learn is to not burn themselves on the oven.

“When they first burn themselves, then they’re really an employee,” Johnson said.

But the learning experience comes from taking orders over the telephone, cashing someone out and making sure they do all their required responsibilities for the day.

“But most of all they’re learning about themselves,” Johnson said. “They can talk to people. They can work with people one on one. They can answer a phone in a polite manner. Things they never knew they could do. Things they never knew they’d have to do. They were told they would have to grow up. But the two years I get with these kids, they’re so much different between when they come in and when they leave.”

His employees, like his customers, swear by him.

His manager, Rob Stuart, has worked at ABC for 30 years (he took a break in the early '80s to work as Gary Burghoff’s personal assistant - Burghoff played Radar O’Reilly on M.A.S.H.).

“I love working here,” Stuart said. “I like the people I work with; I love the town. I’ve been to a lot of different places, but I always come back to Granby.”

And, there are the high school students who have passed through the doors.

“You learn a lot. For a lot of kids, it’s their first job,” said former employee Nikki Minichino, a 2005 graduate of Granby Memorial High. “For everyone having a first job, it’s scary, you know? But it’s very comforting here. You have the regulars come here and you get to know Granby better. It’s like a family here."

Sports a must

There’s also the personal touches in the pizzeria. Like the packs of baseball cards that kids (or not so young adults) can pick up and rifle through and the marvelously outdated, faded pennants that hang on the walls. Johnson is an avid sports fan and, before he went to business school after graduating from Canton High, he flirted with a professional career as a soft-tossing baseball pitcher who threw nothing but junk.

“I wanted to play for the Yankees,” Johnson said. “That was my dream. I wanted to play baseball. I was undefeated in high school. When I was 14 or 15, my father took me out of state to pitch under an assumed name because I could not play high school baseball and for an organized team. It was just fun.”

His love of sports has kept him connected to the youngsters in the community.

“The best fun I have is with the kids who come here with team spirit after coming in from practice or games or they had cheerleading,” Johnson said. “I’ve gone to a lot of basketball games, soccer games, baseball games. I’ve participated in activities in school.

“I’ve tried to be a good friend, and teacher and mentor to as many as I can.”

He also stubbornly refuses to repaint the pipe in the dining room that has endured over a decade's worth of etchings from lovelorn high schoolers.

"We repainted it once; that was enough," Johnson said. "I kind of like it."

So Johnson, like ABC Pizza, keeps chugging along. How long can he keep going now that he’s in his 70s?

“I don’t get in here as much as I’d like to,” he said, noting back problems that have slowed him recently. “But I just signed a new five-year lease. My goal is to be working at 76 right here. I still love the people. ...

“I’m extremely happy. I wish it was 20 years ago, so I could put in another 20 years on top of it. … It’s unbelievable how fast this went.”