Julie Kaplinger (right) and her daughter, Kaydie Russell, both hold Russells daughter, Annaka, outside of Metcalfs Submarine Sandwiches in Damariscotta on Wednesday, Sept. 18. Kaplinger, who owns the sandwich shop, is also a music lover and antique car enthusiast. (Johnathan Riley photo)
Life can be a lot more fun if shared with others, and Metcalf’s Submarine Sandwiches owner, grandmother, and music enthusiast Julie Kaplinger, of South Bristol, takes every opportunity to indulge in sharing with her family.
Kaplinger said her love language is food, and running her own sandwich shop allows her to be near her family and express her love for the community.
“I have a serious need to feed,” Kaplinger said. “My kids can tell you, they say they’re coming home and I make enough food for 50 people.”
Kaplinger, the youngest of seven kids, grew up in South Bristol on S Road. The sibling closest to her age was eight years older, so she said she felt like an only child growing up. Between that and living outside of the village in South Bristol, Kaplinger said growing up down the peninsula was isolating at times, but she still had plenty of community.
Going from a class of nine students at South Bristol School to 125 at Lincoln Academy in Newcastle was a bit jarring for Kaplinger, but she said she had family who she was close to. During her time at LA, Kaplinger was a self-described “band kid,” playing the flute and the oboe. She was also in the school’s audition choir, Lincolnaires.
Kaplinger’s love for music was significant enough that she believed she was going to be a music teacher after high school. However, during her senior year, Kaplinger decided to “switch things up” and take an accounting class instead of making the trek down to the theatre where the music programs were housed.
To her surprise, she received a perfect score in the class and fostered a different kind of love for paperwork.
“I went, ‘I like this,’ filling out forms and crap,” Kaplinger said. “Thought I wanted to be a music teacher; turns out, I wanted to go to accounting school.”
After graduating from Lincoln Academy with the class of 1988, Kaplinger attended Casco Bay College in Portland, where she earned an associate degree in accounting. The first year she lived in Portland and the second year of the degree she commuted from South Bristol to be closer to her family.
Kaplinger doesn’t pick up the oboe or flute anymore, but she does indulge in her eclectic music and sing along in the car on her way to and from work. She said she’ll listen to everything from Indigo Girls, a folk-rock duo, to Godsmack, a groove-metal band.
“It’s all over the place,” she said. “And I was trained to play classical music.”
While her first jobs were working at Gamage Shipyard in South Bristol, mowing lawns, and babysitting, it wasn’t until she started working at Zecchino’s Submarine Sandwiches in Damariscotta her senior year of high school did she feel like she had a “real” job.
Kaplinger continued working at the sandwich shop throughout college and even when she moved to Topsham with her husband at the time in 1993. In 2000, Kaplinger returned to South Bristol to take care of her parents, and so her kids could go to school at South Bristol School.
Kaplinger was offered the chance to buy the business when she was 23, but “it wasn’t the right course of action for me at the time.”
However, she knew she wanted to run her own business at some point and, in 2011, she got the opportunity again when Erica Davis, the co-owner at the time, decided to sell the business, which she had renamed Metcalf’s to honor owners of the building, Kaplinger said.
“She looked at me one day and said, ‘So are you going to buy it or what?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, why not? Let’s try. What’s the worst that could happen?’” she said. “So, I tried.”
Running a business is never easy, according to Kaplinger, but she and her family keep going.
“We’re doing this all in sandwich,” she said. “We do it, 14 years later and we’re still doing it.”
Kaplinger’s kids all work, or have worked, at the shop. Once her kids started having kids, she said she designated a part of the dining room as a play area so she could be near her grandchildren, and so her kids could still work there without having to pay for child care.
In addition to family, Kaplinger said she likes to hire teenagers in the area who are looking for their first jobs, which ends up being an education about a lot more than how to make sandwiches.
“It’s a learning experience, it was my first real job and I’ve made it the first real job for a lot of kids and I love it,” she said. “I have a hard time bossing people around, so it becomes much easier to hire younger people that I can just be mom and I don’t have to be a boss. I’m good at mom. I’m not so good at boss.”
Everyone who starts working there ends up being like family, said Kaplinger, and she’s proud of what her kids and grandkids have learned working at, or just being in, the shop.
“(They are) learning to say thank you and have a nice day, they’re learning work ethic, they’re learning manners, they’re learning customer service, which is a hard skill,” she said. “I love being able to see my grandchildren, even when I have to work all day long.”
Along the shop walls are framed foot and hand prints of the grandchildren. Kaplinger said she has five biological grandkids and nine in total that are a part of the “Metcalf’s family.”
The grandkids have given her a nickname, Mim, after the character Mad Madam Mim from Walt Disney Studios’ 1963 film “The Sword in the Stone.” Like the character, Kaplinger has a zest for games, whimsy, and music that her family enjoys. However, Kaplinger doesn’t want to see the demise of the famous sorcerer Merlin.
Outside of her love for her family, she said her “pride and joy” is a dark green 1954 Ford F-100 farm truck named “Martha,” after the previous owner, which she’s owned since she was 20. She doesn’t get to drive Martha too often because most of the car shows are on Saturdays and she works that day, but she does get to join local parades on occasion.
“She’s all original,” she said, “Right down to the nubs on the spare tire.”
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