38 THE NEW BARKER www.TheNewBarker.com A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Success. Pete & Shorty (Well, Two Funny Things). THE TWO FRENCHIES WHO OWN THE HEARTS OF MARSHA AND ED DROSTE. About the only type of clothing Pete & Shorty will wear are sports team t-shirts. Bucs, Rams and Redskins; Cubs and of course, Iowa State, where Ed went to school. "Oh, and Raiders. We're big Raiders fans now," said Ed. Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach and ESPN analyst Jon Gruden is now the coach of the Oakland Raiders. He and Ed are close friends. Jon once worked in the kitchen of the Original Hooters on Gulf to Bay in 1983. Having been raised in Iowa, the dogs of choice in Ed Droste’s family were hunting dogs, specifically Labrador Retrievers. Patches and Brandy were Ed's first dogs.“Amazingly, they would go in the water after the duck, no matter the freezing temperature.They would come out of the water and icicles immediately formed on their fur. They were oblivious,” said Ed, a co-founder of Hooters Restaurants, which originated in Clearwater, Florida in 1983. We recently sat down with Ed and his wife Marsha at Pete & Shorty’s, another one of his restaurant concepts, and their two French Bulldogs named Pete and Shorty. Of all the things that Ed and Marsha have done as individuals and as a couple, they said the biggest decision of their marriage came when they began thinking about getting a dog. Or two. –by Anna Cooke Photograph of Marsha, Ed, Pete and Shorty by Laura Allen Studios