From a Spark to a Flame

3 Min Read By Dan Hyman

Clay Murphy has always been bold. You can hear it in the way he talks nowadays — proud and declarative and maybe even a bit brash — and this confidence was certainly a trait he’d already picked up by the time he reached his twenties. So maybe it wasn’t all that shocking how one day, in 1986, Murphy boldly announced he was going to marry a woman a few minutes after laying eyes on her.

“I just knew,” Clay says of first seeing Pam Weaver that day in Aisle 3 at St. Augustine, Florida Sonny’s BBQ location.

Speaking from one of the two Northern-Florida-area Sonny’s BBQ locations they’ve owned together since 2008,  Pam and Clay Murphy are all smiles. It’s hard to imagine them not being almost giddy — as they’ve done so many times before, they’re recounting how a chance meeting at a Sonny’s BBQ resulted in nearly 28 years of marriage to date. Clay pauses and adds, “It’s all been worth it.”

Yes, there he was that day, in 1986, when he sat down and a…