Not long after Gustav swept through Louisiana, Eric DuBuisson felt quite
relieved. True, the storm wreaked considerable damage on southern Louisiana,
and his hometown of Slidell saw 55 of its homes flooded, but businesses and
schools were able to resume shortly after Gustav’s departure.
“There certainly was some damage to the community and the state, but Slidell
fared extremely well,” Eric noted. “I have a pool full of cyprus tree limbs to clean up and I’m thrilled.”
It was quite a different story three years ago when Hurricane Katrina hit the
same region of the United States. Overall, it took over 1,300 lives and caused
more than $81 billion in damages, making it the
costliest natural disaster in the country’s history.
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Eric and his family managed to evacuate and make it out safely then. However,
when he returned to Slidell, he discovered that his house and his 77-year-old
family cleaning business were not so fortunate.
At his lakeside property, the flood reached up to the kitchen countertops, while
Slidell Cleaners was immersed under six feet of brackish waters.
“We got home and my friend that owned the soda shop right down the street from us
was there cleaning up, so I went over and hugged him before I even went into my
shop,” Eric recalled. “He was just taking five-gallon buckets of melted ice cream out of his storage
room and putting it in the street. It was an awful, awful smell. The water had
just gone down. The streets were black with mud. So, I opened the door to the
shop. That was a confirmation that we weren’t going to reopen.”
Originally called Slidell Drycleaning Works, the family plant was first opened
in 1929. Eric’s uncle, Joe Johnson, needed a way to win the favor of his future father-in-law.
“He was dating my aunt, my mother’s sister, and my grandfather wanted her to marry someone in business for
himself,” Eric explained.
One day, Joe went to pick up a suit from the cleaning business and mentioned his
dilemma to the owner. It wasn’t long before Joe bought the three-month old business.
“The fellow he bought it from had a boiler and one standard press that you could
convert — you could take the grid off of the top to do linens, and put the grid back on
to do wools,” Eric said. “They did all of the cleaning by hand... wetcleaning in wet buckets and the
drycleaning in solvent buckets. My uncle bought it from him right before the
Depression hit.”
One month later, a big truck pulled up to the shop with a man attempting to
repossess the boiler and pressing machine that the original owner hadn’t fully paid for. Joe had to buy the equipment a second time to stay open.
Despite the tough economic times, Eric’s uncle and aunt ran the business by themselves for a decade. In 1939, they
moved the company into a bigger building that housed operations until Katrina hit in 2005.
While his uncle ran the business for 52 years altogether, Eric never had much
interest in drycleaning, especially after working at Slidell Cleaners for a
couple of years during high school.
Instead, Eric’s passion came from playing music, although that pursuit had an inauspicious
beginning, as well.
“I started with piano lessons when I was in junior high school, and hated it,” Eric laughed. “It was one of those things that your mother made you do. I never practiced.”
Later on, Eric switched to clarinet in the junior high school band and really
enjoyed it. Then, in high school, the band had a shortage of saxophones so Eric
switched again and was hooked.
The decision of what to do with his life was an easy one. Eric studied music
education at Louisiana State University, graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in 1973 and a Master’s degree in 1976.
Shortly after, he began his teaching career, serving as the band director for
two years at Glenn Oaks High School in Baton Rouge and for four years at
Archbishop Rummel High in Metairie.
By that time, Eric was married to his wife, Mary, and the couple had a young son
and daughter at home. As rewarding as his teaching career was, Eric believed
that he would soon need a larger income to support them.
Around that time, Uncle Joe had announced that he was ready to sell the business
and retire. Upon finding out, Eric joked to his wife: “Hey, how would you like to go into the drycleaning business?”
The question lingered on both of their minds for a while before they realized
they were genuinely interested in becoming owners.
In 1982, Eric and Mary purchased the business.
“It was probably a very wise decision,” Eric said. “I continued to teach music privately until about two years before Katrina. I had
a very successful private teaching career — successful in the sense that my students excelled. They did very well and every
year I had somebody in the all-state honor band.”
Though spare time was sparse, Eric found time to juggle drycleaning and music.
He even played professionally with a small quartet in addition to teaching.
Unfortunately, he began to develop serious hearing problems.
“It got more and more difficult with the ringing and hearing to the point where I
was in a community band at rehearsal and the director stopped and corrected
something in the percussion section and he mentioned the cymbals,” Eric recalled. “I thought, ‘I didn’t hear a cymbal.’ I looked around and watched them and I realized that I could hardly hear the
cymbal.”
His doctor told him that if he kept playing, his ears could not take the sound
level his saxophone produced more than five minutes a day. It was an easy
decision to quit.
Everything ran relatively smoothly at Slidell Cleaners for Eric and Mary’s first dozen years. The couple upgraded equipment and added on to the plant
many times, including converting the upstairs into living quarters.
However, in May of 1995, 26 inches of rain hit Slidell in a 24-hour period,
drenching everything in the shop, including all the equipment and $10,000 worth
of customers’ clothes.
“The hardest part of it — and this is the thing that people don’t understand — you cannot insure people’s clothes,” he emphasized. “There is no bailee coverage available from anybody for flood coverage. You can
cover equipment, the building, but the National Flood Policy does not cover
other people’s belongings.”
Eric had to take on large loans just to keep the family business on its feet. He
updated his equipment, repaired the damages and paid back every cent on his
customers’ ruined garments.
His actions kept the business open for another decade, but when Katrina tore
through Slidell, it was simply too much to recover from.
In addition to inflicting devastating damage to the building and the equipment,
the flood waters also destroyed $500,000 worth of customer clothing.
“There was no way I was going to be able to borrow a half a million dollars to
pay for these people’s clothes this time, and the emotional hit you take from that... there’s just no way,” he said. “We were still paying the loans from 1995. I was 54 at the time. Financially, it
just didn’t make sense.”
With the family business gone for good, the only thing left for Eric and his
family to do was to pick up the pieces and start over. Fortunately, three
months later, the non-profit organization STARC asked Eric to work as a
consultant on their drycleaning plant design project.
“For three months I did the planning and the layout, got prices on the equipment
and made a presentation to them,” he said. “I thought that will be the end of that, then I’ll find something else to do. Wal-Mart greeter was beginning to look good.”
STARC, which seeks to help individuals with mental and physical disabilities
reach out and connect with the world and become more independent, asked Eric to
stay on as its operations manager. Since he has taken the reins, STARC Cleaners
has become one of the forerunners of Solvair cleaning technology.
After using it for six months, Eric has become a vocal proponent.
“This is going to sound like Streets is paying me to say it, but I assure you,
they are not. The machine is truly amazing. I’m getting cleaning performances that are just spectacular,” he said. “It’s taken me six months to break old habits, but I’m evolving into a different spotting procedure. It has probably cut down my
actual spotting by 90 percent. What I do have to spot is so much easier to
remove.”
Eric often invites cleaners to his plant so they can see the new machine in
action.
“It’s an incredible technology,” he added. Anyone in the area or anyone coming to New Orleans and would like to
visit has an invitation to come and see it.”
Of course, those who wish to come may want to wait until hurricane season is
over. Hopefully, the lifelong Louisianan won’t have anymore close calls anytime soon.
“Honestly, if Gustav had been a half degree off of the course it was in, you and
I would not be having this conversation right now,” he said. “This community would very likely have been destroyed. It’s a scary thing.”
Still, Eric has never had any intention of moving away from the area that has
housed him and his ancestors since the 1750s.
His life there may have had its share of high and low notes, but he’s not ready to give up on Slidell yet.
“It would be very tough for me to leave,” he admitted. “I love the area and we have rebuilt amazingly well from Katrina.”
