National Clothesline

How do you put 44 years in a file folder? Forty-four years of hard work, laughter and tears all placed in a file folder.

Selling my drycleaning company was the escape from doing the same place, same thing scenario. Forty-four years of pleasing customers, making payroll, growing the business, and putting a roof over my family ’s head, and food in their stomachs.

I looked at the matchbooks that we placed in customer’s coat pockets now going into a

cardboard folder. I put ballpoint pens with our ads in the file folder.

The first book we used to keep records of sales popped up into my hand. I looked at the numbers and smiled reverently. Graphs that were hand drawn, in the days prior to computers, and showing constant growth, brought back more memories.

Other marketing pieces made their way into the file folder. The oldest coupon offering was $2 off drycleaning or laundry. I recalled one of our earliest newspaper ads —One Pair of Pants Cleaned Free, No Strings Attached. It was an unheard of offer at that time. There were newspaper articles about Sterling Cleaners, Harvey, Barry, and Allen, ranging from The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, to IFI, CCA and IDC bulletins. I was putting 44 years of history to sleep and the tears came to my eyes.

I never thought I would get emotional as I walked down the path from March 1963 to January 2007. I looked at the logos and their evolution over the decades. Our business cards changed from having two names, Barry and Harvey Gershenson, on the same card, to having one name per card and each of us retaining the title of president. In the same way our business cards evolved, so did the size and face of our company.

My brother and I were 20 and 24 when we started working together. We put our money together, borrowed from the grandparents, and bought out our father ’s two partners. We had two full-time employees, a silk finisher and a seamstress, plus a part-time presser who worked for the post office and came in after work.

Barry did the cleaning and spotting. He had recently graduated from NID, the organization that preceded IFI. Barry won the award from NID as the top student of the year and attended the NID business course on scholarship.

I handled the counter, marking, assembly, bagging, and hanging on the conveyor. In addition, I was the business end of the business.

Neither of us was properly prepared to take over a company. The training we had was as employees, not supervisory in any fashion. I had worked the counter, marked in clothing, assembled, bagged, pushed a broom, transferred loads, and did whatever else was needed when I worked for my dad and his partner while in high school.

After some college, I worked as a route driver for a year and did cleaning and spotting for a year. I then moved on to sales. I worked for a drycleaning supplier, Los Angeles Soap Co., maker of White King Soap. Warco Laboratories enticed me to change jobs and sell their products. I then moved to R.R Street and Co., which I thought would be my dream sales job.

After his graduation from NID, Barry worked as a cleaner and spotter for our father, Ben, at the first Sterling Cleaners, located in West Hollywood.

Ben was a strict taskmaster who loved the drycleaning industry. Our father’s dream was to see Harvey and Barry together in business. What is ironic is when I was in the army I wrote to Barry about that exact subject. I never expected that years later, the two of us would go into business together, and have a partnership that would last for 44 years.

Nine months after going into Sterling Cleaners of Westwood, Barbara gave birth to Allen, our oldest son. The timing could have been better, but we survived. In the meantime, Barry was the Don Juan of West Los Angeles. The women were on the hunt for the young single stud of Sterling Cleaners.

Sterling Cleaners was in a unique building designed specifically to our father’s and his partner’s specifications. The boiler room was on the roof and a self-service laundry was connected to the area of the cleaning plant.

Business grew very slowly those first few years. The neighborhood, Westwood, was in a state of development. Apartments and condominiums were being built in the Wilshire corridor and the population density constantly increased.

Instead of running out and waiting on cars, Barry and I could stay behind the counters and take care of customers. Part-time and full-time employees were added as the sales dollars grew. We put a sign on the roof and new customers would ask, “When did you open?”, as though the location was new.

Barry extricated himself from the cleaning department and we worked together building the company. We were hands-on operators who knew all of our customers and they knew us. The customers knew they could walk in and ask for Harvey or Barry and they would have their problem solved. We replaced the self-service laundry moving our marking, finishing, inspecting, assembly, and tailoring departments into the area.

There were problems too. A presser threatened to kill everyone in the plant and sent the staff running out into the street. I subsequently learned he had done a similar thing at a prior employer ’s plant with a gun in hand.

The Amalgamated Clothing Workers went on strike at our place of business, among others, and our production department walked a picket line around Sterling.

Our first computer, brought to us by Arthur Weiss of Liberty Tag, only did pricing and listing but increased sales and caused a couple of staff to quit. We felt that the sales increase was due in part to a few hands being caught in the cookie jar. Barry and I loved to put new drycleaning technology in our plant.

We were approached in 1987 or 1988 with a revolutionary computer system (Press N Clean) that used touch screen technology and bar coding, and we jumped on it. Unfortunately, a subsequent sale to a major drycleaning supplier took Press N Clean out of the market just before they came out with a Window ’s version of their software. I am happy to say the two founders, Mark Aljian and Mike Eveloff, have done well.

A customer who was an architect saw how tight we were for space. He suggested the addition of a structure over our driveway to house a conveyor to handle the needed storage conveyor. I had the pleasure of sitting down, pen in hand with graph paper, and laying out the placement of six conveyors that are currently in use at Sterling.

What is interesting is, the busier we got, the more we kept growing. The growth cycle was unending. We went to seven-day per week production with a night shift during the week.

The next development was the acquisition of a shirt laundry plant with a drive-in sales location. My oldest son, Allen, then joined our company. Routes were the next order of business. It amazed me that those routes were growing at the rate of 20 percent-plus per year.

Allen, now an attorney, eventually left our company but our annual sales continued to grow. However, 44 years of blood, sweat and tears takes a toll on you. It may not be a physical toll, but the stress, over the last few years, of handling employee theft, an environmental lawsuit, a sexual harassment lawsuit, fraudulent injury claims causing the workers ’ compensation premium to exceed 6 percent of gross sales, and other issues that arose, can and will wear you down.

Now I can close the folder on the 44 years of our family history at Sterling Cleaners. The file could never hold everything because the 44 years of memories, imbedded in our minds, cannot simply be put in a cardboard file folder and tucked away. The memories will live on as we drive down the street and see: the sign we put on the roof, the structure with the conveyor over the driveway, cleaning machines being installed through a wall that has been torn open, and Kenny Rogers, Vic Damone and John Raitt walking in together to drop off their cleaning. Our father ’s dream came true to a greater extent than he ever expected. Thank you for your dream, Dad.