Owning and running a drycleaning plant is exhausting work. However, when Steve
Yudelson leaves his
Bentley Cleaners plant in Norwalk, CT, each night, he still manages to have a song in his heart.
For the past handful of years, Steve has worked evenings rehearsing and
performing in a variety of local theater groups. His specialty is musicals.
Though he has no formal training, he does have a lifetime of singing experience.
As a child in Brooklyn, he and the rest of his family often took turns
performing in their own talent shows at home.
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Steve began singing before he could really talk. That did not stop him from
making up nonsensical lyrics for songs like
“Old Man River.”
The elder Yudelsons were hardly the only talented members in the clan.
“I had an uncle who was actually a professional comic for a while until he
decided to make a living,
” Steve laughed. “He always told me the reason he gave it up. He worked some club in Miami — some mob club there. He worked a Friday night with the mobsters there and he
couldn
’t get a laugh. He couldn’t get a snicker out of anyone. He said, ‘I’ve got to get out of this business.’ So, he went into the drycleaning business.”
After graduating from high school, Steve attended Brooklyn College and studied
television production. He earned a B.A. in 1976 and was released into the
workforce. Unfortunately, it was a bit crowded.
“The job market was a little tight,” he recalled. “There wasn’t a lot out there. I spoke to my uncles out in Las Vegas and they were looking
to slow down a little themselves and they wanted to bring somebody in.
”
Steve was as good of a choice as any. His uncles, Phil and Mel (the former
stand-up comic) Shapiro, owned Al Phillips The Cleaners in Las Vegas, a large
chain dubbed as the
“original drive-through cleaners.”
Uncle Mel may have had difficulty making mobsters laugh in Miami years before,
but he and his brother were certainly good at taking care of their garments.
“It was Las Vegas in the 1970s,” Steve noted. “It was pretty much a wild town then. Have you ever seen that film Casino with
{Robert} De Niro, {Joe} Pesci and Sharon Stone? That was exactly the way it
was. That was not fiction. That was based on real events.
”
The business lost its share of customers, but not because of bad service or
missed spots. Many of them would end up missing themselves, presumably whacked.
“I remember one mobster’s wife used to give me a hard time all the time until they found his head
rolling around the desert one day,
” he recalled. “That kind of stuff was normal. Vegas was like that at the time.”
After working at Al Phillips for about seven years, Steve felt it was time to
get out on his own. His uncles wanted to help him finance his own plant, but
there was one stipulation: it could not be in Las Vegas.
Steve moved back to the New York area and started scouting for good locations.
In 1987, he found one
with a drive-through in Connecticut. He started Bentley Cleaners, which,
according to Steve, was the first drive-through cleaners on the East Coast. He
was told it would not work.
“Everybody said to me: ‘You’re crazy. It’s cold weather. It will never work’,” he recalled.
The idea worked right from the start, perhaps a little too well.
“We advertised heavily,” Steve explained. “Actually, we advertised too heavily because when we opened up it was like the
floodgates opened. We weren
’t able to handle the work. They were bringing in truckloads of work, literally.
We didn
’t have enough people. We didn’t have enough equipment. It was frightening.”
Strangely enough, Steve’s cousin in Utah, who owned a few plants of his own, had the opposite problem. A
mutual solution was quite simple.
“He had some excess employees he didn’t really need, but he didn’t want to let them go,” Steve explained. “So, I literally flew them out here to help out. I put them up in motels just to
get through the first couple of weeks.
”
Not only did the plant survive the first few weeks, it keeps plugging away over
20 years later. The company has added two drop stores and employs about 30
people.
Steve believes a large reason for Bentley’s success is its superior quality. However, it also helps to be the first plant
in the area to offer added convenience and other customer benefits.
“We were the first to stay open seven days a week. Sunday is a big market,” he noted. “We were also the first to offer automatic same day service. If it comes in
before ten o
’clock then it will be ready today. That’s the religion.
“We were the first to bring in express bags here,” he added. “Nobody in Connecticut was doing it at the time. We were also the first to take
credit cards.
”
While Steve has worked hard to become a successful drycleaner, he’s the first to admit it hasn’t exactly been a calling for him. That might surprise many of his peers,
especially since he has served on the National Cleaners Association
’s board for many years.
In fact, he was fulfilling one of his four terms as NCA president when the
association expanded its scope, changing the
“N” in its name from “Neighborhood” to “National.”
Despite all the time he has volunteered in order to try to improve the industry,
Steve has other priorities.
“I’ve spoken to many guys at all these business and management meetings and people
have said to me they love their business so much that
’s where they want to die,” he said. “If I died in my store, I would die in my store because it would really kill me.”
For Steve, the best part of life takes on other forms: his wife and their five
children, softball, and singing and acting on stage.
Over five years ago, he saw an ad in the newspaper looking for a 1940s-style
band singer. Since auditioning and getting that role, Steve has performed in
three to four shows a year with troupes such as the Sherman Playhouse,
Brookfield Theater for the Arts, the Richfield Theater Barn, and The Brewster
Theater Company, among others.
“If you count the rehearsal time, each show is a good two- to three-month
commitment,
” he said. “It’s a lot of work when you spend four or five nights a week rehearsing. You’re working on music and choreography. You’re working on lines and creating characters.
“Every time, even if I just have a walk-on part — a small role that’s just a fill-in part — I take a piece of paper and write down a whole bunch of characteristics that
aren
’t written in the script. I get to know that person and I play it as a person. I
have the whole history of this character and he has three lines.
”
Steve has played plenty of bigger roles, as well. His favorite was a show called
Pump Boys and Dinettes, a light-hearted musical revue where he played a
mechanic. He got to sing a few uproarious and risque songs.
“My director had me wearing a tight t-shirt, tight jeans and a cowboy hat and I
pranced around and danced like that. We had one song called
‘Serve Yourself’ which was basically a blues song that had very, very suggestive lines telling
women that I make the rules, not you.
”
In the same show, Steve crooned a number called “Farmer’s Tan” as he actually stripped off some of his clothes on stage.
“I had to pump a lot of iron for that show to get in shape,” Steve laughed. “We had a great cast. We had sold-out audiences for that one every night. They
were loving it. When you can turn an audience and get to people, then you
’ve really done something.”
There have been many shows over the years for Steve, including: the
Pulitzer-Prize farce Lucky Stiff, Man of La Mancha, Bye Bye Birdie, and the
Neil Simon classics London Suite and Rumors. He has also produced a couple of
shows on occasion, including Annie.
Both of his time-consuming careers have more than their share of challenges.
When asked which is more stressful, forgetting his lines on stage or dealing
with an angry customer whose favorite garment was ruined, it was a close call.
“I’ve only actually blanked out on stage one time,” he recalled. “I was having a rough day. I didn’t put it aside. The actor I was with looked at my eyes. They were circling.
Computer crash, reboot. I didn
’t even remember my name at that point. He picked me up and we got through it.
The audience didn
’t realize it, but it was a pretty stressful situation because you feel naked and
alone out there.
”
On the other hand, angry customers are no walk in the park.
“With customers yelling at you, well, it’s something that has happened so many times that you have to learn to deal with
that,
” he said. “I think that is more stressful, though.”
Of course, there is a major difference in the two occupations. Singing is in
Steve
’s blood; drycleaning is simply a source of income.
“In general, a lot of people in business define themselves by what they do for a
living,
” he noted. “What I do for a living pays bills... sometimes. More often than not, it doesn’t pay bills. But that’s what I do for a living. That’s not who I am.”
