Every day, people come into Sandy Johnson’s restaurant and ask about her co-owner and husband, the Hawaiian shirt-loving Ronnie Butler.
Johnson, 60, dutifully fills them in between cleaning the bar counter and fill orders at The Great Pizza Company.
“He crossed the street, got the mail,” she tells them, “and came back paralyzed.”
But he hasn’t actually come home yet. For more than a month, Butler has been lying in a hospital bed barely conscious with a severed spine, four fractured ribs and a metal rod in his neck after he was struck by a car while riding in his golf cart.
Customers and fellow business people in downtown Eustis have rallied around the couple. They’re hoping for a positive outlook for Butler, described by his wife of 36 years as a quadriplegic.
“He’s a character,” said Penny Jenness, who owns a home-décor store called Peddler’s Wagon next door on Magnolia Avenue. “He always has a silly, dark-humor joke for you.”
Too busy running the business for self-pity, Johnson insists that their insurance will cover medical costs. Nonetheless, friends and customers have joined to raise money and offer support for Butler, who talks so long with customers that Johnson frequently has to yell at him to get back to work.
“He has certain customers he’s very close to and so he has to catch up on everything,” Johnson said.
Now customers are catching up on Butler.
On May 4, he got into his golf cart about 3:30 p.m. and drove down the long driveway of his home to the mailbox across County Road 452, in rural Lake County about 10 miles from the restaurant.
As he headed back across the two-lane road, a Honda Civic traveling southbound at 55 mph braked for Butler. The driver swerved into the opposite lane, burning skid marks into the road before striking the golf cart and launching it on the grassy roadside, according to a Florida Highway Patrol report.
The report said Butler was at fault for failing to yield. He was transported to Ocala Regional Medical Center.
“This is where our cart landed, this is our yard,” said Johnson, pointing to pictures on her cell phone for Pat Duffy, the owner of Whale’s Tale Fish House in Mount Dora, who was visiting on a recent weekday.
It’s a story she tells “multiple times a day, every day,” she said. To save her from reliving it even more, she printed fliers from a GoFundMe page to raise money for Butler and placed them on each table.
People are eager to help.
“Can I get this?” Duffy asked about the flier. “I’ll put it in my restaurant.”
Lisa Clay, a pre-press supervisor at The Daily Commercial in Leesburg, has known the couple since they opened their restaurant in 2008. She launched Butler’s GoFundMe page.
“It doesn’t matter how much insurance you have, it’s never going to be enough with this kind of situation,” she said. “They’re not just our clients, they’re everybody’s friends.”
She said Butler wore a Great Pizza Company T-shirt “wherever he went, whether it was abroad or in the country.”
Before going into the restaurant business, Butler was a vanity publisher, distributing material such as brochures and catalogs for local organizations. He also served as captain of a senior men’s tennis team.
Johnson said the first time she met her husband in 1981 at an Orlando restaurant, he was tending bar and she was dancing disco. She also had a permed afro hairdo.
Two days after his crash, Butler turned 71. Johnson said she’s aiming to have him in a rehab facility as soon as possible, where “he’s going to need all the help he can get.”
“My husband is of really, really good mind … and I think that’s what’s going to get him through this, is his mind,” she said.
Nine months earlier, Butler had heart surgery and within weeks he was back at work, talking to customers and yakking it up with friends, she said.
During a lull in business on a recent day at the restaurant, Johnson sat down and opened up a binder full of purchases and payments.
“I gotta balance my checkbook,” she said. “Stuff my husband does.”
https://www.gofundme.com/rally-for-ron
jruiter@orlandosentinel.com or 352-742-5927.