Amazingly enough, Leary’s Cleaners
of Rochester, New York, has been in business for 183 years.
Perhaps even more amazing is the fact that it has been owned by
five different generations of the same family during that span
of time.
The company can trace its origins back to
1822, three years before the time period which some historians
believe marks the beginning of drycleaning as an industry.
Of course, Leary’s wasn’t a
drycleaning plant at that time. For that matter, its hometown
of Rochester wasn’t even a city yet, either.
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“It started by using water power to
grind farm products like wheat, basically,” said Dan
Small, current proprietor of Leary’s Cleaners. “In
the early days, Rochester was called the ‘Flour
City.’ In upstate New York, the region was quite a
farming area until they started to develop. In that area, a
gentleman with the last name of Peocock started a dye house to
dye yarns and fabrics. That was, we believe, in 1822 when we
started.”
The business specialized in dyeing,
washing and scouring. Even back then, they worked on their
customers’ finest garments.
“At one time, a person’s
clothing — like a Sunday suit — was mailed parcel
post to the company and they would take the suit apart and get
it back into its basics,” Dan explained. “They
would do whatever was necessary. They would realign the coat
and they would take the suit material and redye it and put it
back together and ship it back. I was told they did work from
several states at the time.”
In addition to clothing, Leary’s
accepted a few bigger items.
“The building was a central shaft
building,” Dan added. “They would winch up rugs
that were used within homes and would dry them on the roof.
They would also dry all of the clothing there, provided the
weather was willing. In Rochester, it’s not always
willing at all.”
The Leary’s family introduction to
the textile industry began after Dan’s
great-great-grandfather, Daniel Leary, immigrated to America
from Ireland. He hitched a ride on a cattle barge which had
shipped cattle over to Europe on the first leg of its journey
and then returned to the states loaded with immigrants.
Shortly after, Daniel heard about work
opportunities in the Rochester area where people were digging
out water routes both below and above the Genesee River’s
many waterfalls.
“He got a job as a supervisor of a
crew that was digging and he met Mr. Peocock there who had
offered him an apprenticeship at his business,” Dan
noted.
“So, in the late 1830s, Daniel
Leary took over the business from Peocock and renamed it
‘D. Leary’s Old Reliable’.”
In the days before electricity, Daniel
had to rely on the Genesee for his livelihood.
“They were doing everything inside
of it,” Dan recalled. “They had like one central
shaft that was turning and then they connected belts to that
and had open pocket washers and everything else run off that
one power shaft.”
Edward Leary — Daniel’s son
and a founding member of the National Institute of Drycleaning
— was the next generation to take the helm of
Leary’s. Upon graduating with a chemical engineering
degree from M.I.T., he returned home to help his father with
the business.
“I had seen some of the
designs,” Dan said. “They were working on
patent-pending type things. They worked with a local company
called American Laundry Machinery in Rochester and they helped
design different machines. I know my father told me at one time
they designed a tunnel washer decades ahead of when there was
any particular use for that.”
Edward’s son, Harold, carried on
the family legacy next. He also attended M.I.T. before he and
his wife, Sylvia Leary, became owners of Leary’s in the
1920s, perhaps not the ideal time to run a business.
Many years later, Dan asked his Great
Aunt Sylvia — who used to babysit him as a child
— how the company survived the Great Depression.
“She said to me the one thing we
couldn’t do was cut the prices anymore because, normally,
at that time, they were charging about ten cents for a pair of
pants,” Dan recalled. “We had to cut services, like
instead of a pair of pants coming in and opening up that cuff,
breaking the tacking, brushing everything out and stitching
everything back together, we had to just turn them inside out.
“They used to do shirts with
separate collars and they would hand paste the starch on one
layer at a time and hang them on drying racks on the collars.
They needed to stop with some of those extra things that they
were doing.”
Dan’s father, Arthur Small, married
into the Leary family and he and his wife, Sylvia Leary-Small,
became the fourth generation of owners in the 1960s.
At one time, Arthur Small worked for J.C.
Penney and would probably have never helped continue the legacy
at Leary’s if the company hadn’t needed him during
a crisis.
“The teamsters tried to unionize
the delivery service of Leary’s,” Dan explained.
“The teamsters were demanding more than the owners and
managers were making — in order to be a driver for the
company. They told them they couldn’t afford it and they
had a situation where teamsters would do things like sew vials
of ink inside suits and bring them in hoping to have them
explode and ruin clothes, or use lighters to try to get the
petroleum machines to explode.
“They also cut the brake lines on a
company van. My grandfather and father got into an accident.
They never did unionize it so the only way out of it was to
discontinue the delivery service.”
Transferring plant ownership between two
family generations is difficult enough, but five generations is
almost unheard of.
Dan believes one of the keys for the long
success is that the family has always shown a very strong
interest.
When he was 14, Dan started work at
Leary’s and knew instantly that it was something he
wanted to pursue.
“For me, I get immediate
gratification,” he said. “If I do a nice job, I
hear about it right away. If I make a mistake, I hear about it,
too, but it’s something I found out right away when I
joined — that I got satisfaction seeing somebody happy
with the outcome.”
When he was 21, Dan decided to attend
IFI’s one-week spotting class though he had to pay for it
himself and use his own vacation time.
“I remember doing the course. I was
never done on time,” he laughed. “Others would say
they were ready to move on. I would try to leave no ring and
make it like new. Everyone else around me was just putting the
chemical on the stain to see if it was working on it. They
would never do any more. I was the only stupid one that
actually tried to make it like it was ready to wear.”
Though many things have changed at
Leary’s over 18 decades, the pursuit of perfection is one
absolute that has never waivered.
“I have a waiting list for wedding
gowns for two years,” Dan noted. “It’s just
because I only do one a week, but I’ve got people who
will wait. At one time, we were trying to do more, but it just
gets hopeless if you try to do too much. You can only do so
much right in a given day. And, if it isn’t done right,
we don’t like it.”
Nowadays, Leary’s has a
3,900-sq.-ft. production plant with about two dozen employees.
It isn’t in the same spot as the original building.
Unfortunately, that site was condemned as
part of a bridge-widening urban renewal project in the late
1950s when Dan was five.
After a lifetime in the industry, Dan has
no intentions of slowing down or giving up. In the past 20
years, he has seen at least a dozen cleaners within sight of
Leary’s go out of business while the family company stays
strong.
According to him, it all boils down to
customer service, quality and charging the highest prices
around.
“I often tell customers, ‘You
invest in your clothing. You don’t just buy it and throw
it away; you invest in it. You want it to last and make that
investment go as far as it can’,” he said.
“Maybe it’s hard to spend $12
to clean a suit, but if they spent $500 or $1,000 on that suit,
don’t they want to protect that investment the best that
they can?”
It’s that commitment to excellence
that makes Dan believe the company will reach the 200-year
mark, whether it’s with the family or somebody else.
Right now, the prospects of Leary’s
reaching the sixth generation in the family doesn’t look
promising. Dan’s three children have designs on other
careers, having witnessed the long hours of a drycleaner
firsthand.
“My kids have all said
‘no’ because it’s too hard. However, you
never know,” he said.
In the meantime, Dan will continue to do
his work on his own terms and at his own pace, even if it means
having customers wait up to two weeks for clothing during their
busiest season.
“We promise up to ten business days
during our Spring season,” Dan noted. “I cannot
rush my people or burn them out. Otherwise, they can’t do
it. I don’t meet any of the piece-per-hour standards that
the other people measure their employees by because, if we did
that, we would fall short in other areas of customer
expectations.”
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