e doesn’t don
a cape or have a big “S” emblazoned on his chest,
but he does go by the name “Spotman” once in a
while — at least when he’s online. The playful
moniker is a carry-over C.B. radio handle Russ Waldron gave
himself when he was a kid. It suited him as well then
as it does today because it alludes to his passion of
removing tricky garment stains.
For most of his life, Russ Waldron
has been the kind of person who seeks out a challenge, and, for
the past 17 years, he has had plenty to keep him occupied as
the owner and operator of Crest Cleaners in Peoria, IL.
“You don’t get bored in
this business,” he said. “You can be an electrician
one minute, a pipe fitter the next. Then, you can be in sales
the minute after that. If you’re attention deficit, then
you’ll have a blast.”
Russ likes to joke that he has an
attention span deficit. Even as a child growing up in Peoria,
he was often bored, never satisfied. “Anything I
didn’t understand, I wanted to read about,” he
recalled.
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Prior to that stage in his life,
Russ — though he was only four years old — tried to
absorb everything he could about drycleaning when his father
started Lee’s Cleaners of Peoria.
“On weekends, the only way to
see my father was actually to go to the plant,” he said.
“I had a little four-gallon bucket I sat on and I used to
hang around while he worked on equipment. My dad said it was
always, ‘Why? Why this? Why do you do that? Why does this
happen for this reason?’”
It wasn’t long until Russ
could help his father out around the store. “When I was
six years old they cut a broom off so I could sweep
floors,” he laughed. “Otherwise, I kept taking the
lights out.”
By the time he turned twelve, Russ
had moved to other tasks, including a different kind of
cleaning — spotting. He worked at Lee’s from grade
school to high school, repairing everything from torn garments
to broken machinery.
fter Russ turned 18 in 1969, he took a break
from the industry and joined the Marine Corps. He spent
the next two years in San Diego, CA. During that time, he
injured his knee pretty badly, which, ironically, may have
proved to be a fortunate accident.
“I think God was looking over
for me,” he said. “Most of my platoon was killed in
‘Nam. I hurt my knee after advanced training. I was in
the hospital and they just wouldn’t let me go.”
Russ next decided to head back to
Peoria and go to school. First, he studied accounting for a
year at Midstate College, then he went to Illinois State for
the next year and a half as a business major. Russ had logged
in over 60 graduate hours, but he soon realized he had no
interest whatsoever in meeting the requirements needed in order
to graduate.
“I only took the courses I
wanted to take,” he recalled. “I didn’t take
anything that I didn’t find pertinent to what I wanted to
do.”
After leaving college, Russ went
back to work for his father’s cleaners in Peoria for two
more years, but that didn’t sustain his interest for very
long either. He wanted a whole new direction in his life,
and, fortunately for him, he found several in the coming years.
Russ first traveled to Havana, IL,
where he accepted a job as a sales manager for the local radio
station WDUK. The job was interesting to him for about six
months, but Russ didn’t enjoy the “same old
grind” every day, so he hired his replacement and headed
for Baton Rouge, LA, where he worked as a cadet pilot for a
river boat barge line that cruised the Mississippi, Illinois
and Ohio rivers.
Despite his love of natural things,
Russ only kept that job for about six months. “I thought
I would enjoy it, but we were out on the water all the
time,” he explained. “I think I had too much
testosterone to stay on the boats that long.”
he next stop for Russ was Tuscaloosa, AL, where
he worked for a subsidiary of the Gulf States Paper Corporation
for the next two years. During that stint, he worked in several
departments, including sales, marketing, and research and
development.
Afterward, he moved to Mobile, AL,
where he utilized carpentry skills he had obtained long before
from his uncle who was in the roofing business. Russ got a job
with Brown and Root Construction.
“I went to work as a carpenter
for them, and, after about the first week, they found out I
could read blueprints, so they moved me up,” he said.
“About a week later, they found out I could read
schematics too, so they offered me a job overseeing the
construction of 28 buildings. I went to work as a coordinating
engineer and never had an engineering course in my life.
It was just from what I learned in the drycleaning
industry.”
The work was very challenging, so
Russ stayed aboard for three years, but then he had had enough.
He was ready to get back into drycleaning.
In 1981, he bought a small
Martinizing plant in Macomb, IL, and ran it for the next five
years before he returned to Peoria and bought a stripped-out
cleaners from his uncle. It didn’t have any equipment in
it at all.
Russ split his time up by working
for his father’s cleaners until 2 p.m. every day and then
working several hours a day, plus weekends, on building
everything in his plant up from scratch. His hard efforts
eventually paid off. In 1985, Russ was able to open Crest
Cleaners, and he’s been at the same location ever since.
Crest Cleaners goes to great lengths in
order to be environmentally friendly. A clean environment is
something that has always been important to Russ.
In addition to wetcleaning 60% of
his garments, Russ drycleans the other 40% using Rynex. The
decision to switch from perc hadn’t been an easy one.
After researching the progress of alternative solvents
for several years, Russ finally decided about ten months ago
that Rynex was the way to go for him.
“There’s no doubt that
perc is the best solvent, in my opinion,” he explained.
“However, with all the EPA problems, it’s a whole
other story.”
So far, Russ has cleaned thousands
of pounds of garments with Rynex and is satisfied with the
results. “One reason I like Rynex is there’s a lot
less spotting. It’s excellent,” he said. “The
only drawback is that I’m a perc person and it takes so
much longer to do a load in Rynex. The biggest problem is it
takes so long to dry.”
Russ admits that his drycleaning
techniques are different than those of most drycleaners.
“Even with Rynex, I dispose of
my waste off the stills with a waste hauler, even though they
say it is not necessary,” he said. “I can’t
see any kind of waste going into the garbage, even if they say
it’s OK. I’m pretty environmentally concerned. I
don’t use filters and things like that, so I don’t
have any filters to dispose of. I just run a one-bath system.
It’s 100% distilled out so that each load is with crystal
clear solvent.”
Russ is different from most other
drycleaners in another way, as well. He has the unusual
distinction of owning a large garage that doesn’t house
any cars and a big barn that has no room for animals in it.
Instead, he stockpiles machinery and spare parts so he always
has a good supply on hand. He enjoys being able to maintain,
upgrade and modify his equipment in order to keep his business
running smoothly and efficiently.
“The intriguing part is when
you have a breakdown in the daytime and you have to fix it
because you’ve got people standing around getting paid
for doing nothing,” he noted. “You only have a
matter of minutes to fix it or to jimmy-rig it to get it back
to service. I really enjoy that pressure. I crave
it.”
Though most of his equipment is
current enough so that new parts aren’t hard to come by,
occasionally he runs into a problem where he needs something
that is no longer made. Russ has found an interesting solution
to that particular problem.
“If I can’t buy the
parts and I can’t make the parts, then I can go to an old
racing shop and we can build whatever I need,” he said.
“If you take a case of beer with you, they’ll help
you build about anything.”
n addition to tinkering with drycleaning
machines, Russ loves to tinker with computers. He views it as
one more area of interest to keep his attention deficit at bay.
Not only does he love to build and program computers, but
now Russ is working on selling them, as well. He recently
bought a distributorship for Clean EZ computers.
Since he spends so much time taking
equipment apart and putting it back together, Russ is glad that
Tammi, his wife of 20 years, is there to make sure the plant
doesn’t fall apart. He attributes most of Crest
Cleaner’s success to her. “She takes care of the
front end, the customers,” he said.
Russ has three children from two
previous marriages: daughters Michelle and Summer, and son
Ruston. Though Ruston is the only offspring to follow in his
father’s drycleaning footsteps so far — he has
worked for Crest for seven years — all three children
have experienced some quality time in the family plant, much
like Russ did so many years ago.
“My children have been around
the spotting board since they were about four of five years
old. We’d put a bucket up next to the spotting board so
they could play too,” he laughed.
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