Peter Buck top restauratuer

Peter Buck is an American top restauratuer, physicist and philantropist. He co-founded the Subway fast food restaurant chain. Buck was born in South Portland, Maine, in 1930. He was graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, in 1952. He then earned master’s and doctoral degrees in physics at Columbia University. While working as a nuclear physicist for several companies from 1957 to 1978, Buck loaned partner and family friend Fred DeLuca $1,000 in 1965. Buck advised him to open a sandwich shop to help him pay for college at the Univeristu of Bridgeport in Bridgeport, Connecticut. They named the restaurant after Buck, calling it “Pete’s Super Submarines”. Together Buck and De Luca formed Doctor’s Associates to oversee operations of the restaurants as the franchise expanded. Though neither the first nor the second restaurants were financial successes, they continued to expand their operations. By 1973, they had 16 locations throughout Connecticut and, in 1974, they began franchising out the restaurants. They also introduced Subway’s current logo and changed the name of their operation from what was then “Pete’s Subway” to “Subway Sandwiches”. Buck is ranked #261 on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest people, with an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion. He is the ninth-largest landowner in the United States by acreage, according to landreport.com. Among Buck’s philanthropic works, he donated the Carmen Lúcia Ruby to the gem collection at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. He also gave a grant to Bowdoin College in 2009 that completed its capital campaign. Consequently, the college’s new fitness center bears his name. In 2008, Bowdoin College awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.