National Clothesline

The first president of the newly renamed Drycleaning & Laundry Institute also happens to be the first woman to serve as president of the organization in its 100-year history. Barbara Harvey, owner of Fabricare by Fran in Severna Park, MD, began her one-year term as president during Clean ’07 in Las Vegas.

Harvey previously served the institute as president-elect, treasurer, and District 2 director. In addition to her service on the DLI board, she worked on the institutes ’s Textile Analysis Peer Review Group and, until her election as a board member in 2002, was the District 2 representative on the District Committee advisory group.

She also has been an active volunteer leader in several cleaning and laundry associations, serving as president of the MidAtlantic Association of Cleaners and the Coin Laundry Association of Maryland, for example.

Despite her credentials, DLI’s president, known to friends as “Bobbie,” remains humble.

“I haven’t gone very far in life,” she joked. “I live in the same house I was born in, and I’m working the only job I ever had.”

Her parents, Francis and Theo Sadler, started Fabricare by Fran in 1951 as a route service and built it into a full-service drycleaner and coin laundry. She worked for her parents until taking the reigns of the company in 1989. The coin laundry side of the business was sold in 2005.

Harvey chaired the committee to change the International Fabricare Institute’s name to the Drycleaning & Laundry Institute.

“Basically, most consumers did not understand what IFI means,” she said of the name change. “Inside the industry, we all know what ‘fabricare’ means, but the name IFI did not represent what we do very well to the general public. We wanted to simplify the name. ”

Other members of the DLI board for 2007-08 are Steve Poulos of Blair’s Cleaners/Elmest Inc. in North Canton, OH. He is the immediate past president and now serves as chairman of the DLI board.

The president-elect is Peter Valessares of M.K Cleaners in Chicago. Ed Robinson of Ed Robinson Laundry & Dry Cleaning in Columbia, SC, is the treasurer.