teve Mindzak just
doesn’t know when to quit. After owning and operating
Friendly Cleaners of Weirton, WV, for over 48 years, he
has no intention of retiring. After all, he doesn’t
want to let his customers down. It’s hard to imagine
Steve letting anybody down. Throughout his life,
he’s maintained a steadfast work ethic that is honest and
unrelenting. Such values were brought with him from his native
country of Czechoslovakia, where he was born in 1926.
Early in his life, Steve lived with
his mother, Julia, while his father, John, worked hard to raise
enough money to move his four sons and wife over to America. It
was a slow, arduous process because he could only move one
family member at a time.
John managed to move two of his sons
here before World War II, but a third son was lost to him as a
casualty of the war in Europe. Once the war ended,
Steve’s mother went to America. Steve finally arrived in
1948 when he was almost 22 years old.
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Steve helped provide for his family
by working full-time as a farmer when he was only eleven. He
would have preferred a chance to go to school, but it
wasn’t an option. His family needed him to work. However,
Steve did have a friend who made a living as a tailor, so
he found time to acquire tailoring skills during his formative
years.
t was difficult, at first, adjusting to a
country with electricity and a whole new language. Steve
remembered feeling like an outsider when he arrived in New
York, still dressed warm for the cold boat trip over. “It
was July 29th. I had a couple of suitcases and this big
overcoat on me. The temperature was about 90 degrees,” he
said. “My brother didn’t have a car, so we took the
train and people just looked at me.
“I thought I was going to die,
too, because I was used to working on the farm with fresh air
and everything else, and I was so thirsty. They gave me 7-Up or
something, and the more I drank, the more I wanted it. It
filled me up so much, I got sick,” he laughed.
He soon joined his two brothers,
Mike and John, working at a ladies’ garments factory in
Newark, NJ. However, when his parents moved to Weirton, WV,
Steve followed them. It didn’t take long for him to
find a job for which he was well suited. His father met a
tailor in the nearby town of Stubenville, OH, and convinced him
to hire his son. There wasn’t very much work to keep
busy, so Steve started a second job in the same town as a
presser, spotter and cleaner at a laundry and drycleaning
plant.
Steve wasn’t satisfied,
however. The two jobs only kept him busy for five days of the
week. He found a third job at Coronet Cleaners in West Virginia
that allowed him to work weekends, too. The plant’s owner
was quickly impressed with Steve’s work and offered him a
full-time job at the plant.
For the next four years, Steve
acquired more experience and served most of his employment
stint at Coronet as the plant’s manager. Steve vividly
recalled when the owner offered him the position: “I said
to him, ‘I cannot even speak English. How in the world am
I going to manage a place with 60 people?’”
hat he lacked in experience, Steve more than
made up for with effort and determination. “I was in
charge of training, buying and everything else,” he said.
“We had about 25 retail stores and about 30
wholesale.” One time, after purchasing some expensive new
equipment, Steve discovered that the building wasn’t big
enough to house it. “I thought, ‘I’m going to
be fired for sure now.’ But, they took the roof down and
put the walls up higher.”
After years of tackling challenging
obstacles, Steve was surprised one day to get a phone call from
the plant’s owner who had already left for a six-month
vacation without any notice. Not long afterward, Steve found
himself mired in court troubles because the plant’s lease
had run out. Everything worked out fine, but it was enough to
convince Steve that he was ready to start his own business.
In 1954, he founded Friendly
Cleaners. He didn’t have any money, but he worked out a
series of payment plans that would get him started. Now, all he
had to do was succeed.
Not one to ever give up, Steve
proceeded to work literally around the clock in order to keep
the payments on time.
“I had to get up at maybe two
or three o’clock in the morning and clean the clothes
until about eight o’clock,” he explained. At that
point, he had one employee work the counter and the other work
the presser while he went on a delivery route with his truck to
pick up more business.
“When I came back, I’d
check the clothes in until about six or seven o’clock in
the evening,” he continued. “Then, some of the
repairs that came in — I took them home and worked until
maybe eleven, twelve o’clock at night. Sometimes, I
didn’t even go to sleep, believe it or not. I just took a
shower and went back to work. This went on for maybe three
years.”
Eventually, Steve bought the property next
to the plant and financed the building of a larger plant with a
living quarters upstairs. It was a risky venture and
Steve’s father was concerned. “I didn’t want
to disappoint my father. Over time we had become good
friends,” he recalled. “He told me he hoped I knew
what I was doing. I said to him, ‘I do,
too’.”
Instead of playing it safe, Steve
decided to invest in top of the line equipment. He received
some good advice from Ed Resnick, an equipment salesman out of
Pittsburgh, PA, who told Steve that he believed Friendly
Cleaners would easily double its business in a short period of
time. “Within six months, we more than tripled the
business,” Steve said.
Steve attributed the growth of his
business mostly to its standard of quality. “We tried to
maintain the highest quality from the very
beginning.”
Business continued to boom for a
couple more years, but then Steve noticed a drop-off.
“The business started to taper down and I wanted to know
what the problem was,” he said. “I asked my
customers about it and they said, ‘The place is always so
busy, sometimes there’s no place to
park.’”
By simply listening to his
customers, Steve was able to turn things around. He bought an
old building next to his plant and tore it down to make room
for plenty of additional parking space. “We regained some
of the customers who had been going some place else for
convenience,” he said.
ver the years, Steve has tried to keep on the
right track by learning as much as he could about his business
and his trade. He is proud of his drycleaning skills, having
attended courses by IFI in Silver Spring, MD, and he has
actively participated in the West Virginia Dry Cleaners &
Launderers Association, including a run as president in 1981.
Additionally, he has improved his
chance of success by realizing how much marketing potential can
be found in a computer, though, ironically, he never touched
one prior to 1995. “The more I looked at them, the more
amused I got. So, finally I decided to buy one.”
Nowadays, Steve maintains a web site
at www.friendlycleaners.com and uses his in-store computer
system to send targeted direct mail offers specifically
tailored to individual customers. “It works pretty good.
I think it’s much better than newspaper advertising or
radio,” he said.
Having raised a family of his own —
a son, Steven, from a previous marriage, and two daughters,
Colleen and Sylvia, with his wife of 24 years, Helen —
Steven fully understands that people need to rely on each other
from time to time.
Friendly Cleaners donates regularly
to a wide variety of charities, but Steve fondly recalled how
one in particular started about 15 years ago when he noticed a
young boy at the bus stop in front of his plant on a cold
winter day.
“This boy was freezing. I let
him inside,” recalled Steve. “I said to him,
‘John, where’s your jacket?’ He said,
‘I don’t have any jackets. My parents don’t
have any money to buy me a jacket.’ So, this one lady was
in the store and she had two boys almost the same size. She
took one jacket off the hanger and said, ‘Here, put this
on’.”
After the boy left for school, Steve
called a teacher at the school. “I said, ‘This boy
didn’t have a jacket and one of our customers gave him
one to wear. Why don’t you take him to K-Mart, buy him a
jacket, and I’ll pay for it.’ So she did. Then, the
next day, she called up and said, ‘I got another boy that
doesn’t have a jacket. Let’s buy him another
one’,” he laughed.
Steve hopes to continue to give back
to the community in the future. At 75, he still spends 10-12
hours a day working. He won’t retire as long as he can
provide a helpful service to his customers.
Part of him still hasn’t
forgotten the difficult times he lived through growing up.
“I remember when I didn’t have, so I figure
now that I can afford it, why not help out?” he said.
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