The Pulse: Former Phila. colleagues remember Cain fondly

Herman Cain hopes his route to the White House has come through the Philadelphia area, where former colleagues recall him fondly.

"I ran the Philadelphia region, and I was with Burger King for a considerable number of years before I went to Godfather's" Pizza, Cain confirmed for me last week in an interview.

As he details in his book This is Herman Cain!, he spent four years (1982-86) as Burger King's vice president and regional manager. Cain writes about his career path, which led from a VP job at Pillsbury to Burger King at age 36 as a part of the company executive fast-track program. His first posting after completing the training was as the fourth assistant manager at a company store in Hopkins, Minn., where he had to deal with his first crisis: The broiler had been inadvertently shut down and dozens of burgers were undercooked.

Cain instructed the staff to overload on chicken, fish, and fries while the broiler reheated. He explained to customers in line in the front of the store, as well as those in the drive-through, that it would be 15 minutes before any burgers would be served. In the meantime, Cain wrote in the book, the store sold out of chicken and fish.

You could say his instincts to play hardball politics were honed at his next posting, a store near Minneapolis. There, an assistant manager removed $50 from the register as an act of sabotage. I asked him about that challenge.

"The VP for the region was trying to make sure I failed. And so some of the younger assistant managers, they thought that sabotaging me was the thing to do," Cain said. "That young manager played a little trick on me that wasn't such a cute trick. He took money out of my cash register receipts the night that I came up short and I had to report it on the standard report, and then the next day, it showed back up. And I didn't find out until I left the region six months later about the trick he played on me, and he was deeply sorry, and I accepted his apology and to this day we are still friends."

Then, nine months into the 18-month fast-track program, he came to the Philadelphia area, where, by his account, and those of several of his coworkers with whom I have communicated, he thrived.