If Lathay Pegues has his way, the future of his business — JohnTom’s Barbecue Sauce — and his hometown will be intertwined.
“It’s never just been about selling people barbecue sauce,” he said. “I’ve always had thoughts of, just maybe, I can provide jobs one day in Muncie.”
The city raised him, after all.
And even though Pegues’s Muncie-based business outsourced its production to Indianapolis, Pegues has built local connections. His sauce is used by Ball State Dining Services in barbecue recipes at some of their dining locations.
Pegues, 40, co-founded JohnTom’s in 2006 with his friend Rodney Robinson and cousin Terrell Cooper, both of whom he attended Indiana University with.
Pegues is president and CEO of JohnTom’s, Cooper is vice president of marketing and Robinson is vice president of business operations.
JOHNTOM’S ORIGINS
Pegues, who was born in Muncie, left his hometown to study journalism at IU in 1993. In Bloomington he tried to recreate the barbecue sauce his grandfather, John Tom Branson, had developed years earlier.
“That just turned into, I don’t know, some quest to crack this code my grandpa had,” he said. “He didn’t write [the recipe] down. I just started getting serious about it. I would find myself on weekends just going to the kitchen and trying it again.”
Branson died when Pegues was 11 years old, so he had to rely on other relatives to help piece together the recipe. Eventually, Pegues found the missing ingredient: a store-bought sauce.
“He did what most people [did] back then … he bought Open Pit and he added his own concoctions to it to make some sauce,” Pegues said. “The more serious I got, the more I thought about it. I thought, well, that’s kind of cheating. So I threw everything out that I had been working on and I started from scratch — a can of tomato sauce and seasonings.”
He said it took about five years for the tomato sauce and seasonings to develop into a full-fledged sauce. His wife, Lashea, said she helped.
“I was the taste dummy,” she said. “We went through cycles of different flavors, different things he had to take out and put back in.”
In 2000, Pegues left Bloomington to work at a television station in Quincy, Illinois. There, he presented his creation to his co-workers.
Back then, Pegues said, he was just trying to have some fun.
“Doing something with the barbecue sauce, it was just a hobby,” he said. “It wasn’t anything that I thought, ‘Oh, I could make a career out of this,’ because I thought I had the career that I wanted for the rest of my life.”
Pegues moved to Milwaukee in 2004. Two years later, Pegues’ station shut down and Pegues changed his tune. It was time to transform JohnTom’s from a hobby into a business.
Finding another broadcasting job would have been easy, Pegues said, but he wasn’t going to try.
“I was burned out on television news — that passion just wasn’t there anymore,” he said. “It made it easier for me to say, ‘Let me take the risk of trying to start this business up.’”
Initially, Lathay, Lashea and their two kids, Jarrod and Anya (though they now have a third, Averie) moved in with Lathay’s mother.
“I knew to start a business from the ground up I’d probably have to move back home to Muncie — but I had to convince my wife,” he said while laughing. “To my surprise, when I brought [the idea] to her … she was like, ‘Let’s do it.’ Just that easy.”
Lashea said she didn’t need to be convinced because she knew her husband would eventually make the decision.
“It was something that he had been wanting to do for a while,” she said. “His job came to an end so it was like, what better time to go ahead and make that transition?”
Returning to Muncie eased the Pegues financial burden, but it also meant they would be closer to extended family, and that has made all the difference.
“There’s absolutely no way I could have pulled this off if I had not moved back to Muncie,” he said. “Having [babysitting] options like my mother, my wife’s mother, my aunts, my wife’s grandmother … we wouldn’t have had that if I tried to do that in Milwaukee or anywhere else.”
Robinson, Pegues’s business partner, said Pegues’s pride in his hometown is evident.
“Most people, when they go to Muncie, they just leave,” he said. “A lot of people don’t come back.”
GROWING UP IN MUNCIE
Pegues now lives in the same neighborhood where he grew up, named Whitely.
The neighborhood is located east of McCulloch Park and on the north side of the White River. It was — and still is — rare to see Ball State students in Whitely, Pegues said.
Whitley has been called the ghetto of Muncie, Pegues said, but he has a problem with that term.
“If you call anything ghetto in Muncie, you don’t know what a ghetto is,” he said.
Pegues's family was one of many African-American families that headed north during the Great Migration.
“They all migrated from Mississippi, heard you could walk into a factory job making X amount of dollars,” he said. “That meant they could buy homes for their families, they could buy cars for their families, they could provide their kids with clothes and things that they wanted. It was just a different lifestyle.”
He doesn’t see many neighborhood children playing outdoors today — “I guess they’re in the house on video games and stuff,” he said. Pegues and his friends constantly played sports.
A nostalgic smile crept across Pegues’s face as he pointed from his kitchen to the outside and recalled his childhood.
“About four blocks that way is the Buley Center, that was my second home,” he said. “If I wasn’t home, I was at the Buley Center. We played basketball, we played dodgeball. We were lucky enough to grow up at a time when there was a former NBA player, his name now is Rasheed Shabazz but his birth name was Bill Dinwiddy … he worked at the Buley Center.”
He continued to smile as he remembered summers when he and his friends would ride their bikes to one of the five candy shops in Whitely to get penny candy or walk to the community pool.
“We’d walk to Tuhey’s,” he said. “We’d cross the train trestles, go through the park, cross the train trestles — even though our momma said don’t get on that train trestle, walk around, we’d cross the train trestle anyway — and we went to Tuhey’s three times a week.”
Whitely’s tight-knit community, Pegues said, allowed parents to let their children roam free.
“Our parents didn’t have to worry about us getting snatched or something happening because anywhere we went — this community is so small — we all know each other,” he said. “And if you’re talking about just the African-American community, we definitely all know each other.”
He even met Lashea while the pair grew up in Muncie. Lashea said they dated in high school but put the relationship on hold when Lathay, who was two grades ahead of her, first enrolled at IU.
“We reconnected when he was still at IU,” she said. “We got back together probably four or five years after we broke up.”
Pegues said he thinks his hometown was, and still is, a great place for families.
“Muncie, to me, growing up —I wouldn’t change it,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to grow up in California, I loved it here. I think it was just big enough and just small enough for us.”
MUNCIE PART II
By many measures, Muncie isn’t what it used to be.
Drugs, particularly methamphetamines, are a major problem. In 2014, Indiana State Police busted a state-high 148 meth labs in Delaware County, 90 more than the county with the second highest rate of meth lab busts.
Muncie also suffered from a bleed-out of job opportunities. Even the Ball Corporation, founded by Ball State’s namesakes, moved its headquarters to Colorado in 1998.
Muncie’s poverty level jumped from 23.1 percent in the 2000 U.S. census to 33.4 percent in the latest census. Pegues said this has posed a unique challenge to his business.
“Living in a place where the poverty level is that high and people really don’t have money to buy niche products and gourmet products, we’re only dealing with a very small population of people who won’t bat an eye at $4 or $5 for a bottle of barbecue sauce,” he said. “So that is definitely a thought.”
Pegues said the hard times have even changed Muncie's culture.
“There used to be so much pride in Muncie, you were proud to be from Muncie,” he said. “I don’t see that now, everyone hates Muncie. People are hurt. I think people are hurt for the most part because jobs use to be plentiful, and good jobs.”
Still, Pegues said he sees positives throughout the city.
“Even when I moved back, I was like, 'Man, Muncie’s trying,'” he said. “We’re doing some things. Downtown, even when I was a kid, there was nothing down there, it was like a bunch of vacant buildings and pigeons everywhere … But man, what they have done with Muncie’s downtown I think is just the epitome of coming back and working with what you have. We don’t have a lot but let’s put all we have into it.”
Robinson said Pegues’s ties to Muncie help to keep him grounded.
“He comes from a place where he appreciates the small things,” said Robinson. “It’s not about making a million dollars. He’s rich and he’s wealthy with family and with pride — doing the right thing.”
SACRIFICES FOR A DREAM
Pegues took a pay cut when he left the media to start JohnTom’s — and he said he’d do it again.
“It comes with a price because I don’t make the money I used to, so things aren’t as comfortable as far as that’s concerned,” he said. “But if I had to trade it off, quality time with my family or money … we’re fine. The lights are on, the mortgage’s paid, car note’s paid, kids got what they need. Is it hard? Yeah, it’s a struggle right now, but we make it happen, my wife and I.”
He holds a part-time job at the Downtown Farm Stand to help finance his fledgling business. He said he hopes his kids will learn from his hard work.
“My kids have seen me in the professional realm, they’ve seen me with this almost dream job,” he said. “Especially my son, because my son grew up when I was on TV and he saw me with like a local celebrity status. So he saw that, he felt that, and they are now seeing me work as a clerk at a grocery store. Two totally different worlds, but I think the common denominator is that they’re seeing [their] dad do whatever he needed to do to make his dream come true.”
Pegues used to work for The Star Press, but he left when the paper underwent organizational changes in 2014.
As he cooked chicken and noodles before his son’s Muncie Central football game, Pegues said he would probably have missed Jarrod’s games and Anya’s plays if he still worked for the newspaper.
“These at-home tailgate parties we do, I live for this stuff,” he said. This is living right here ... I haven’t looked back. “
Pegues said he was able to focus on JohnTom’s after he left the Star Press.
“I threw myself into JohnTom’s because we got a small severance from work and plus we had unemployment,” he said. “It was able to sustain me for a little while, not long, but I used that time to just go at it full-throttle and to see what I could do before I knew I had to find some other means of employment, and so in that time I landed the Ball State account.”
BALL STATE AND BEYOND
For as long as he can remember, Pegues said, Ball State’s campus and Muncie have struggled with their “town and gown” relationship — but he thinks JohnTom’s, as well as events like Artwalk and Mayor Dennis Tyler’s One Muncie campaign, are examples of how that is changing.
“It just seems like it was always these two different entities, Ball State stayed at Ball State and Muncie stayed with Muncie,” he said. “That is a thing of the past. These relationships and this synergy that’s going on between the city and Ball State is just unbelievable. It’s what was supposed to have been happening anyway.”
Despite previous unsuccessful bids to supply the school with barbecue sauce, Pegues said he was inspired to try again after watching CNBC’s “The Profit.” Host Marcus Lemonis told a business owner that he needed to find a single, important account to help stabilize his business.
“That is exactly what we need — but who, what?” said Pegues. “And Ball State popped in my head again. And I was like, ‘OK, they turned you down twice … all they can do is turn you down again.’ So in the next morning I called Chef [Lucas Miller].”
Pegues said Miller, the assistant director of operations and executive chef for Ball State University Dining, was an important part of the process that eventually landed him his dining contract.
Miller declined to comment on Pegues’s barbecue sauce, but he did confirm that JohnTom’s is used in all of Ball State’s barbecue recipes at Woodworth, Tally, LaFollette, Noyer and the Atrium, though it is not available at the condiment tables. Sweet Baby Ray’s supplies the individual servings and Heinz is in the pumps.
Students living off-campus can also find Pegues’s sauce at several local restaurants and butcher shops in Muncie, like Savage’s Ale House in downtown Muncie and Lahody Meats on North Wheeling Avenue.
It is also available in some Indianapolis and Fishers, Indiana establishments as well, but Pegues said Muncie will always be his main target.
“Hopefully this’ll be something that a few years from now," he said, "everybody from Muncie will be able to say, ‘JohnTom’s, yeah that’s where I live. I’m from Muncie.’”
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