Al Tanous works 80 hours per week for Pizza Patrol in Moorhead. (Photo/ Dan Haglund.)Al Tanous has delivered more than a half-million pizzas

Dan Haglund

If you have ordered a pizza from Pizza Patrol since the late 1980s, there is a good chance that Al Tanous has been your delivery driver.
Tanous has been delivering pizzas, wings, egg rolls and pop since 1989.
And not only that, but Tanous currently puts in approximately 80 hours per week. He often works seven days each week for the company which offers delivery or carry-out from 8 a.m. to 4 a.m. Sunday through Thursday, and 8 a.m. to 5 a.m. on Friday and Saturday, 365 days a year.
And last winter, when there were so many road closures and bad driving conditions, Tanous would actually sleep on the floor at Pizza Patrol for several days at a time until the roads were safe again for his return home to Casselton, which is 20 miles west of Fargo. He estimates he stayed overnight at work last year at least 14 times.
Not long after he falls asleep on the floor in a closed office, the morning shift people get to work for the 8 a.m. opening. But Tanous, 55, says he can sleep through whatever noise there is.
“I’m so tired by that time, I don’t hear the phones or anything,” he said.
Using rough estimates of how many deliveries Tanous makes in a year (about 10,000) multiplied by 34 years, multiplied by average number of pizzas per delivery (1.5+) it is easily conceivable that Tanous has delivered more than a half-million pizzas in his career.
Al says he recalled some very large pizza orders back in the early 1990s at NDSU, and he would load up over 100 pizzas in the back of his pick-up into hot boxes for those deliveries.
His duties at work are not limited to just delivering food either. 10 hours can basically do anything needed for the company, including making pizzas, taking orders over the phone, auditing the books at the end of the night, any sort of food preparation, or box folding or cleaning as needed.
And even with a very heavy workload, Tanous has been married to wife DeAn for 25 years, and they have raised three children: Devin, 24, Hannah, 22, and Conner, 19.
In fact, Pizza Patrol is somewhat responsible for his marriage as well. Al met his eventual wife while they were both working at Pizza Patrol in the 1990s, Al as a driver and DeAn as an order taker.
And DeAn is well aware that her husband may have to stay at work when the roads are bad.
“I do and I don’t” worry about him driving in bad weather. “Other than not seeing him that much. I know he stays there,” she said.
“Well, she (DeAn) works a lot, too (at a daycare),” Al said. “That’s just the way things are these days”
Over the years, Tanous said he has gone through seven or eight vehicles, and the number of driving miles he has racked up is in the millions.
“I know in the past three years, I’ve put on 200,000 miles,” Tanous said. “Probably 16,000 to 20,000 of that is commuting. And I work way more than the average person, too. It’s probably double what the average full-time person would be.”
A normal 12-hour weekend shift can oftentimes have a driver going up to 250 miles throughout the metro area.
And he said the most deliveries he can recall in one day is 70.
Tanous started at the company while attending NDSU, and he intended for the job to be temporary. “It was just going to be a college job. But I just stuck around,” he said.
He recounts some of the industry changes, as well as the population and geographical growth of the Fargo-Moorhead metro region as two main advances.
Pizza Patrol was cash-only when Tanous started, and cell phones weren’t even around yet. So when a customer needed to be contacted, he said, the delivery drivers would have to find a pay phone to call them. And Google maps wasn’t even a glint in any driver’s eye.
Not that maps matter much to Tanous. He knows all of the metro addresses in his head.
“Everyone had land lines back then,” Tanous said. “Even the dorm rooms had land lines back then. And another thing is the traffic. The town’s gotten so much bigger.”
He says he can’t remember any real crazy stories from a long time ago, but about 4-5 years ago his vehicle was hit by a police car in Moorhead.
Tanous rarely takes time off from work, but he does set aside a couple weekends each year during hunting season, as well as for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
Pizza Patrol co-owner Amy Forsythe has many good things to say about Tanous. And she has been working there nearly as long as he has, as she started in 1992. Her husband, Jay Lere, who is the other co-owner, was working there well before she started also.
“(Al) helps out a lot. He is a great guy, and he works a ton of hours. We have become good friends over the years,” said Forsythe.
Lere, who started working for his father at Pizza Patrol in 1986, has nothing but praise for Tanous also.
“He’s an outstanding, loyal employee. He’s done a wonderful job for us. Just a great guy, hard worker, very dedicated,” he said. “Talk about commitment. He’s become a very close family friend also.”