BATON ROUGE — Vincent Cannatella, the longtime owner of Coffee Call, died Tuesday, The Advocate reports. He was 91.

Cannatella was born in Melville in St. Landry Parish. Cannatella moved to Baton Rouge in 1940, where he attended Catholic High School and entered the Louisiana National Guard.

Cannatella then met his wife, Marie, in Baton Rouge. The couple would have five children and eventually became grandparents to eight and great-grandparents to nine.

In 1972, he entered Dunkin' Donuts University — now Dunkin' Brands University — in Braintree, Massachusetts. It was here that he learned franchising training to open Baton Rouge's first Dunkin' Donuts shop on Florida Boulevard.

Four years later in 1976, he left the franchise and opened Coffee Call at the Village Square Shopping Center in Baton Rouge.

"The shop sells beignets," his granddaughter Brandi Catoire said. "The beignets are his recipe, and he developed that recipe before he opened the shop. But he wanted to call it Coffee Call, because he said it was about coffee more so than beignets. He said coffee is how people gather — they're usually coming together over a cup of coffee. So, to him, it was all about community and having a place for people to come together with their families and their friends."

Cannatella opened a second location in the downtown Catfish Town development, and his son John Cannatella tried to expand to O'Neal Lane, but neither location lasted, the paper reported.

In 2004, Cannatella staged a jazz funeral for the shop's original location before moving it to its current home at 3132 College Drive.

Catoire said even after he retired six years ago, a day never went by that he wasn't in the shop talking with customers.

Cannatella's legacy, his family says, is that everyone should be given second chances and be welcome in his coffee shop.

"He put prisoners to work there," his daughter Debbie Cannatella said. "He felt that the incarcerated deserved a right to make an income and be reintroduced back into society."

His daughter said he treated the ex-prisoners who worked at the store the same as Bill Clinton when he walked through the shop's front door in 1992 during his campaign.

Debbie Cannatelle also remembers how her father didn't treat the ex-prisoners any differently than he treated a presidential candidate who walked through the shop's front door in 1992.

"He made them welcome at Coffee Call," she said.