National Clothesline

Stan Caplan, a walking encyclopedia of drycleaning, died after a long battle with cancer on May 30. His death coming the day after the Memorial Day holiday was fitting timing for a man who valued his service to his country as much as his life-long dedication to the drycleaning industry.

The man who would become a teacher to many was first taught by his father, a 1928 graduate of the National Institute of Drycleaning General Course. His parents operated the drycleaning and laundry plant at Ft. Meade, MD, where he worked while growing up. After graduating from high school in Baltimore in 1942, he entered military service. In the U.S. Navy Fleet Marine Force, he was a gunner, supply NCO and instructor and later commissioned as an administrative officer.

After the war, he briefly worked for Phillips Petroleum in Oklahoma, but resigned that position to return home to Baltimore where he entered college, working in the family drycleaning and laundry business while pursuing his studies. His father had just built a new plant near the Ft. Meade, MD, post and was one of six laundry concessionaires. The plant had a large call office and featured a tailoring area in one end of the building, Caplan recalled in a recent e-mail recounting that period in his life.

Caplan worked in the plant and call office on Saturdays. Enrolled full-time at the University of Baltimore, he studied accounting and received a degree in Business Management in 1949, then began pursuing a law degree.

“At this time, I had decided to take more interest in the business, so I dropped out of law school,” Caplan recalled.

Those plans changed again. “I was called back for active duty in Korea since I had remained, not to my knowledge, in the Marine Corps Reserve as a First Lieutenant. After one short year, I was released to inactive duty, and I returned home to work full time in the business.”

Upon his return, his father made him a full half-partner in the business; his father and mother together constituted the other half.

“I then decided to eliminate my competitors, one by one, until we were the sole drycleaning, laundry and tailoring concessionaires at Ft. Meade,” he said.

Operating as Grand Valet Service, the Caplan family business purchased two of the concessionaires. Another competitor, the route concessionaire, was fired by the post commander due to complaints about quality and service.

Of the two remaining, one was a tailor who had his cleaning sub-contracted to an off-post cleaner.

“I convinced the tailor to close his business and work for me for a good salary since he was not making very much money on cleaning,” Caplan recalled. “Since he was over 75 years old, he agreed.”

This left one competitor, a widow who also had a small tailoring operation on the post. “I decided to by-pass her since she was no threat to my operation, which was the largest on the post,” Caplan said.

Illness forced her to close a few years later, leaving Grand Valet Service the only drycleaner, launderer and tailor on the post.

During this time, the post population grew to more than 35,000 troops and it was also headquarters for the First U.S. Army and support units, which added another 12,000 troops and civilian employees. The Caplans decided to expand the plant to service the growing customer base, which soon included the addition of the National Security Administration near the post. The Caplans landed the NSA contract for cleaning, also.

“We had grown to nine drop stores located within the boundaries of the post in addition to our main call office located at the end of our plant,” Caplan said. “We enlarged the call office to 1,700 square feet to hold the tailoring operation as well as the customer service area.”

The population of Ft. Meade continued growing through the Viet Nam War years. To serve the more than 35,000 troops and their families, the Caplan business ran two shifts — a day shift made up of permanent employees and a night shift composed of personnel who worked for other cleaners in the Baltimore area during the day. Caplan managed the day shift while the general manager handled the night shift.

“Our price structure was the lowest in the area of several private cleaners located off the post,” he recalled. “We had invested over $2 million in our plant and the utilities (water, sewage, electric 220V 3-phase, gas) which we brought in at our own expense.

“I was smart enough to keep my prices in range but I made small increases as my costs would rise,” he related.

The business operated on a contract that had to be renewed every five years through the bidding process governed by the Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES).

“We got extra points on the bid due to the fact that we had a large plant on the post and had invested large sums in that plant, but if we had too many complaints lodged against us, the extra points would have been erased,” Caplan noted. “Our policy was to adjust all complaints, losses and damages to the customer’s satisfaction.”

The operation consisted of two fully equipped plants: one drycleaning plant with 12 finishing units and a separate inspection/assembly/bagging area; and one laundry plant with 26 shirt units, 12 pants units, two flatwork ironers and folders, a complete personal laundry department and a separate inspection/assembly/bagging area.

“We had distribution conveyors to deliver unpressed work, pick up pressed work, convey the pressed work to the inspection/
assembly/bagging area and convey the assembled and bagged orders to the shipping department,” Caplan said. “We made continuous deliveries and pick ups to and from the drop stores all day long. The stores marked in the work and we assembled it.”

Managing a business of this size did not deter Caplan from continuing his education. He resumed law studies at the University of Baltimore and received a JD degree in 1968. He also received a master’s degree in education and liberal arts from the same school that year. In addition, he studied industrial engineering and business math at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

In the 1950s he had taken courses at the National Institute of Drycleaning (now IFI) in General Drycleaning, spotting, wool finishing and leather cleaning and finishing. Having put that knowledge to work in the family business, he went back to IFI for courses in management and laundry operations.

In 1969, three years after he had bought out his parents’ interest in the business, the AAFES bought him out due to a new law forbidding private plants on military reservations. Annual volume at the plant at that time was about $1.8 million.

Caplan was not finished as a plant owner and operator, however. He built two new drive-in package plants with adjoining coin-operated laundries in Baltimore.

Colonel Caplan

He also continued his military service throughout all those years as an active reservist in the U.S. Army.

“I had earned enough points during World War II and Korea to warrant my staying in (the reserves) until retirement,” he recalled.

The Army sent him to schools for industrial engineering, logistics management and the Command and General Staff College. He eventually became an instructor at these schools and his special assignments during this period included writing the program of instruction for the instructor training course, writing regulations for repair parts procurement and supply procedures for the First U.S. Army and implementing those procedures at a repair parts depot at Ft. Meade. He also served as the First U.S. Army Laundry Officer.

Retirement from the reserve, with the rank of Colonel, came in 1977. Soon thereafter he joined the staff at the International Fabricare Institute where he was an instructor, wrote technical bulletins and correspondence courses and gave seminars to industry groups. While doing this, he continued to visit his Baltimore businesses after work and on Saturdays before selling them in 1981.

The following year he resigned from IFI to become a full-time consultant, engineer, teacher, trainer and lecturer for the industry. As in independent consultant, his first assignment was serving as chief instructor at IFI for just over a year.

He also began writing a monthly column for National Clothesline at that time. The first appeared in December 1981, titled “The Importance of Training Programs.” In the ensuing 24 years he produced nearly 300 columns covering every imaginable aspect of drycleaning — from designing plants and purchasing equipment, to cleaning technology and effective stain removal, finishing, employee training and incentive programs, quality control and production standards, and buying and selling drycleaning businesses.

In the 1990s, when new developments in petroleum solvent and wetcleaning technology began to emerge. Caplan recognized the trend and wrote several articles to help bring drycleaners up to speed on the combination of new and old methods that the new technologies required.

One of his major and long-lasting projects in the 1980s was putting together a drycleaning school for the Southwest Drycleaners Association, then called the Texas Laundry and Drycleaning Association. He played a key role in setting up the equipment and designing the classroom space for the facility at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, TX. Beyond that, he served as chief instructor and wrote materials for the approximately dozen courses that were conducted there annually.

The school was originally conceived by the association as a temporary project to answer an immediate need for training for Texas drycleaners. But the enrollment response was so strong that the school became a permanent fixture, serving students from all around the country in addition to Texas.

For his efforts, Caplan received the association’s Distinguished Service Award in 1994 on the tenth anniversary of the school’s founding. He continued to serve as chief instructor through 1996 when Jane Zellers took over. Regular classes continue at the association-sponsored school, which has since relocated to Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

Caplan’s consulting and teaching assignments took him around the world, from Singapore to South Africa, and all over the U.S. where he worked with drycleaners individually as well as in groups at schools and seminars.

He also developed two multi-media training guides. “The Caplan Method of Stain Removal” features a book, a videotape and a detailed stain removal chart. The video portion has been translated and dubbed into Korean and Spanish. He followed that with a step-by-step shirt finishing video which also included a text; a Spanish version of that video has also been made.

Over the past few years as his health declined, he curtailed his travel schedule but his interest in the industry and sharing his knowledge did not diminish. Always ready to answer questions and help any cleaner who called him, he also became a regular contributor to the industry’s e-mail list, the Fabricare Forum, where he not only offered detailed answers to technical questions but also displayed the rakish humor absent from his formal writing but familiar to those who knew him personally.

Caplan is survived by his wife, Tillie, in Baltimore; a son, two daughters, six grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.

Contributions in his memory can be made to the American Cancer Society, 8219 Town Center Dr., Baltimore, MD 21236.