Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
JENNIFER LIBERTOAfter a beating leaves him unable to work for a year and a half, Marty Ogden is looking to rebuild the popular restaurants.
Marty Ogden is back.
The owner of Nellie's Restaurant and Nellie's Too favors his left leg when he limps around the restaurant trying to reconnect with customers, some of whom he hasn't seen in nearly a year and a half.
Ogden says he has a lot to celebrate this Thanksgiving: He's alive. He's walking. And he hasn't lost the restaurants.
"It's been a really rough year," Ogden says with a sigh.
Nellie's Restaurant has been open about 16 years and has grown into somewhat of a Hernando County institution, catty-corner from Weeki Wachee Springs. Ogden bought the original Nellie's four years ago. After three years of stellar sales, Ogden opened Nellie's Too, on Mariner Boulevard.
The June 2002 opening of Nellie's Too coincided with the turn of Ogden's luck.
Ogden had fired two dishwashers July 11, 2002, for throwing away $1,000 worth of pots, pans, silverware and china that had been deemed too dirty to wash, Ogden said.
One dishwasher was Christopher Ray Bowden, who had been arrested earlier in the year on charges of grand theft and burglary in Citrus County and on a battery charge in Hernando County, according to court records.
Bowden, who was 18 at the time, was hanging around the parking lot the evening of his dismissal, according to the Hernando County Sheriff's Office records. Ogden asked him to leave. The two then started yelling at each other, witnesses told the sheriff's office.
Ogden says that Bowden threatened to beat him up.
"If you want to beat me up, get out of the car and do so," Ogden told Bowden, according to the police report.
Bowden threw the first punch, and the two fought for several minutes before restaurant employees tore them apart, the police reports stated. Bowden walked away mostly uninjured, and Ogden ended up leaving the Nellie's parking lot on a backboard in an ambulance en route to Oak Hill Hospital.
Both of Ogden's knees had been kicked out and would later be reconstructed. He also had a fractured pelvis and femur and a completely severed pectoral muscle in his right shoulder.
"I got my tail kicked," Ogden says. "My knees were the size of basketballs."
Bowden is on probation for the charge of aggravated battery with great bodily harm for the next nine years, according to court records. Bowden was unavailable for comment Thursday.
After months of rehabilitation and surgery to his knees, Ogden is just getting back to running his restaurants from the workplace instead of out of his home. He considered Monday his first full day back free of knee braces or crutches.
"I really want the community to know I wasn't killed, I didn't sell the business," said Ogden, a youthful blond of 42 years who has put on a few pounds over the year due to his lack of mobility. "There's a reason I've been gone."
But Ogden's troubles didn't stop there.
Opening Nellie's Too had sent Ogden spinning into dire financial straits. His partner in Nellie's Too had backed out of the new restaurant at the last minute, he said.
Ogden sought financial help from his uncle C.P. Damon in Denver, who became a silent partner in Nellie's Too to the tune of nearly $100,000.
Pinched by the new restaurant, Ogden's finances were tight, and he had trouble making a $45,000 balloon payment to Nellie's former owners and teetered toward bankruptcy, until his uncle made another investment into the companies.
Over the year, Ogden lost customers to the barrage of new chain restaurants that have opened throughout Spring Hill including Johnny Carino's, IHOP and Ruby Tuesday.
He also lost some solid employees, although Ogden added he's thankful for the ones that stayed with him. He employs 60 people.
But Ogden's worst fear is that he's lost customers who stopped coming because they were used to seeing him at the restaurants all the time.
"People expect to see the guy that owns the place, and my absenteeism has really hurt us," Ogden said. "I just want to say thanks for supporting us when you did and we're back."
Several regular customers dining on Thanksgiving Day lunch at Nellie's Too said they were proud of Ogden. They also said they hadn't noticed any changes in the quality of service at the restaurants.
"With all the trouble that man had to go through, he carries on," said Bill Klepacaki, a Nellie's Too regular known as "Sarge," because he served as a sergeant major in the Marines in Korea and Vietnam. "He could have been a Marine."
- Staff writer Jennifer Liberto can be reached at 352848-1434 or liberto@sptimes.com