By NANCY C. WOOTEN
T&D Feature Editor

Where do you go to get more glide in your stride?

More dip in your hip?

More gut in your strut?

More zig in your zag?

Roy Snider got his in Orangeburg.

The soft-spoken slender man with the handlebar mustache who sang "Happy Birthday" to Katie Couric on "The Today Show" and was asked back so he could serenade Matt Lauer sat quietly in The Times & Democrat newsroom -- until I asked him to sing.

"Are you sure you want me to?" he asked with true concern. "My voice really projects."

"Go ahead," I said.

He had to stand up. Then he cut loose with a tune of his own making, singing about his own "Snido-Mite" spicy hot sauce:

"If you like to eat,

And you want a treat,

From morning 'til night,

Make your food, make it right,

Make your food with Snido-Mite."

The words blasted through the walls of the cubicles in the newsroom, blowing several reporters through the press and knocking out three PCs and two Macs.

Roy Snider, 49, a native of Cameron who moved to Orangeburg when he was three, now manages a Stew Leonard's, "the Disneyland of dairy stores, which does $100 million a year" in Danbury, Conn.

His dream, however, is to get his hot sauce off the ground and into grocery stores across the country. This hot sauce got its start, like Snider, in Orangeburg, with "The Seed from which all things came."

The Seed is Snider's grandmother, Ola Mae Garner, 89, of Shillings Bridge Road in Orangeburg, who played a "big part in his life."

If Roy asks Ola Mae is now, she'll say, "I'm still cool," but if Roy asks her who she is, she'll say, "I am the Seed."

Snider used to pick cotton when he was four, he says, and he and his brothers -- Robert Lee, James, Leonard, Barry, all still in Orangeburg, and Stanley Snider, who lives in Connecticut with Roy -- would come in hungry for whatever his grandmother would make. They'd go catch a chicken for her to butcher, and she'd mix up some of her sauce to put on it. She also put the hot sauce on rabbit, goat or fried fish.

In the summer, they would have a barbecue picnic by digging a hole, building a fire with wood or charcoal, putting stones around the hole and a wire fence over it and cooking a pig all day on the fence. And they'd cook it with her kicking hot sauce.

Ola Mae had a garden with squash, tomatoes, string beans and other vegetables, and she had plenty of pecan trees. She also made "bullet" or muscadine wine.

"She would always say, 'Whatever you do in life, Roy, always remember three things: "Attitude, attitude, attitude," he laughed. "And 'The only time you should look down at someone is when you're reaching down to help them up,' 'A positive attitude builds character and a bad attitude reveals it,' and 'In order to do the impossible, first you have to see the invisible.' That one used to drive me crazy."

Roy went to Whitaker Elementary, then moved with his mom, Helen Fogle, to New York City for three years. Then he attended Sharperson Junior High, then Wilkinson High, Orangeburg-Wilkinson High and then Claflin College for three years.

"Then I went into the U.S. Army to 'be all that I could be,' he said, "When I got out, I went back to Claflin but found out I was too late to register. My father was in Connecticut, so I went there and got a job."

He started out packing chicken at Stew Leonard's, listed in 2003 as one of "Fortune 500's 100 Best Companies to Work For." There they couldn't believe his work ethic and his attitude, attitude, attitude.

While he was butchering his meat, he was slinging his knives around and serenading his customers. Sometimes he got so wound up that he danced with them or for them. The store played country and western music, which he grew up on, and he couldn't help himself. He became known as "The Director of Wow."

His reputation grew, and crowds would develop around Snider. Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Barbara Bush, Donna Summers and other celebrities in the area stop by to buy meat and see Roy.

In the early eighties, Snider dreamed of becoming a singer. He took a leave of absence, grew out his hair and toured Europe with his brother Stanley, singing disco with a band known as "Secret Weapon." Their hit, "Must Be the Music," stayed on the charts for 19 weeks and still plays as a golden oldie.

When he came back to Stew Leonard's, he started back as a butcher, then moved up to assistant manager and finally store manager.

Snider had never forgotten Grandma Ola Mae's home cooking with the tasty hot sauce that always elicited such a reaction from the family crowds. "I started after her to get that recipe, and started experimenting with it," he said, "and I thought, 'I gotta do something with this. If Stew (Leonard) could start with produce and do what he did, I can do something with this."

Now sold in Bethel Foods in Connecticut and all Big Y food stores in western Massachusetts and Connecticut, Snido-mite is made by Snider's own business entity, Absolutely Necessary. It is listed in The Connecticut Food Showcase magazine, a catalog source for unique local food products.

Snider developed a name for himself and has been asked to give motivational speeches to Connecticut schools and colleges, and employees of Bank of America, Citibank, Nordstrom, IBM and other Fortune 500 companies about small business and his exemplary attitude.

"I talk to kids about pursuing their dreams," he said, "and I tell them to keep studying, you don't have to be somebody big. I'm just an average guy with a regular job and a regular family, trying to pursue a dream and having fun while I'm doing it."

In 2001, Roy and brother Stanley founded a nonprofit organization, South City Organization, into which they donate half of the sales from Snido-Mite to help subsidize health care costs for persons without private insurance, Medicare or Medicaid; and to provide for the homeless and battered women.

Through his work, Roy has "been really blessed" to meet other product entrepreneurs, such as Robert Kennedy Jr., who discussed with him launching his bottled water, "Riverkeeper," to support Kennedy's environmental project, the late multibillionaire Frank Perdue of Perdue's Chicken; and Paul Newman, whose nonprofit salad dressings were first sold in Stew Leonard's.

To purchase Snido-Mite sauce, you can order it on-line at info@snidomite.com or call Roy Snider's mom, Helen Fogle, at 803-534-7493.

Snider is working on a mild version, but does not want to lose the uniqueness of it, and its heat is part of that. It is quite hot and has a uniquely spicy sweet taste that is good with potato chips or carrots.

Roy's new June bride, the young attractive Mary Boswell Snider, says she cannot cook, but says of the sauce that "Whatever I broke, it'll fix it."

He adds the sauce to macaroni and cheese, soups (such as Campbell's Select Chicken Noodle) or pasta, "just to change the character of the food."

Here a few other ways he uses Snido-Mite hot sauce:

Wings for Football Guys

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/4 cup or a palmful cilantro

1/4 teaspoon each salt and pepper

1 to 2 tablespoons Snido-Mite (2 if you like heat)

16 chicken wings

Mix first four ingredients in a cup and pour on the wings. Let it sit for the first half hour.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees with a foil-lined pan in it. When preheated, put the wings in the pan and bake for 20 minutes. Turn them over and bake for another 20 minutes. Then cover the pan and bake for another 20 minutes.

Three-color Salad

Bell (green) or orange pepper

Red pepper

Yellow pepper

Favorite salad dressing (they like Wishbone Robusto)

1 to 2 tablespoons Snido-Mite

Salt and pepper to taste

Cut peppers in rings. Mix together other ingredients and put on peppers.

"Beautiful, tasty, healthy -- whatever calories the dressing has, you'll sweat them out."

Snider's All-American Meat Loaf

Serves 6

Be careful not to overknead the meat loaf ingredients or it will become heavy and dense.

3 slices white bread

1 large carrot, cut into 1/4-inch-thick rounds

1 rib celery, strings peeled, cut into 1/2-inch pieces

1/2 medium yellow onion, roughly chopped

2 cloves garlic, smashed and peeled

1/2 cup fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves, loosely packed

1/2 cup plus 3 tablespoons ketchup

4 1/2 teaspoons dry mustard

8 ounces ground pork

8 ounces ground veal

8 ounces ground round

2 large eggs, beaten

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

2 tablespoons Snido-Mite Sauce, or to taste

1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary, plus more needles for sprinkling

2 tablespoons dark-brown sugar

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 small red onion, cut into 1/4 inch-thick rings

1. Preheat oven to 400°. Remove crusts from bread, and place slices in the bowl of a food processor. Process until fine crumbs form, about 10 seconds. Transfer bread crumbs to a large mixing bowl. Do not substitute dried bread crumbs in this step, as they will make your meat loaf rubbery.

2. Place carrot, celery, yellow onion, garlic, and parsley in the bowl of the food processor. Process until vegetables have been minced, about 30 seconds, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl once or twice. (Chopping vegetables this way saves time and ensures that vegetables will be small enough to cook through and not be crunchy). Transfer vegetables to bowl with the bread crumbs.

3. Add 1/2 cup ketchup, 2 teaspoons dry mustard, pork, veal, beef, eggs, salt, pepper, Snido-Mite, and rosemary. Using your hands, knead the ingredients until thoroughly combined, about 1 minute. The texture should be wet, but tight enough to hold a free-form shape.

4. Set a wire baking rack into an 11-by-17-inch baking pan. Cut a 5-by-11-inch piece of parchment paper, and place over center of rack to prevent meat loaf from falling through. Using your hands, form an elongated loaf covering the parchment.

5. Place the remaining 3 tablespoons ketchup, remaining 2 1/2 teaspoons mustard, and brown sugar in a bowl. Mix until smooth. Using a pastry brush, generously brush the glaze over loaf. Place oil in a medium saucepan set over high heat. When oil is smoking, add red onion. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onion is soft and golden in places. Add 3 tablespoons water, and cook, stirring, until most of the water has evaporated. Transfer onion to a bowl to cool slightly, then sprinkle onion over the meat loaf.

6. Bake 30 minutes, then sprinkle rosemary needles on top. Continue baking loaf until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the center of the loaf registers 160°, about 25 minutes more. Let meat loaf cool on rack, 15 minutes.