ot long before she
opened up her Acclaim Cleaners drycleaning plant in Warrenton, Virginia,
Wanda Sue Evans was at an impasse in her life. She had already
worked in the industry most of her life, managing a multitude
of different plants throughout the Mid-Atlantic region of the
country; however, she felt it was time to slow down a little.
“I thought to myself,
‘I’m really tired. I’ve been walking all of
these years. I need to find one of those jobs people have where
they get to sit down,’” she recalled.
There was one small snag in the plan.
“I had a rude awakening,” Wanda said. “Nobody
will hire a drycleaner to do something else. I couldn’t
find a job to save my life.”
She eventually found a computer entry job,
but it didn’t take long for a harsh reality to sink in.
“The pay was horrible. I always found myself sitting
there, staring at the clock all day,” Wanda explained.
“I had to go back to drycleaning. I was used to walking
around all day long.”
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At one point in her career, she had walked
around so much in an expensive pair of tennis shoes that she
formed a crease in the leather.
“The crease made two of my toes run
together. I know it sounds silly, but it hurt so bad,”
she recalled. “It gave me a bone spur and I had to have
half of one of the toes cut off and the bone spur on the other
one cut off to make sure it never came back.”
She only missed a couple of days of work
after the medical procedure. For Wanda, days off have always
been a rare phenomenon, dating back to a tradition she learned
from her parents in her younger days.
Wanda’s father, Donald Ingram, first
started in the industry in 1955 as a driver for Q&F Laundry
in Maryland. He would soon work his way up to a managerial
position at Sterling Laundry, but he had one very important
stop to make on his way.
“Once a week, he would pass the bus
stop on Bowie Road and my mother and her friends were there.
They used to always laugh when he drove by because she thought
he was real cute,” Wanda said. “She ended up
meeting him five years later. She went to work with Sterling
Laundry in 1960 and that’s when they met.”
By 1968, Donald and Virginia had married
and opened up seven of their own drycleaning plants in
Washington, DC, and Maryland. The chain of stores was called
60-Minute Cleaners and the Ingrams were very dedicated to
making the business succeed, so much so that the tale of
Wanda’s birth reflects that notion.
“It’s a family joke,”
she said. “My dad wouldn’t let her quit pressing
pants, so she went into labor. I was practically born on a
laundry truck. My sister had it a little easier. My mom stayed
home that day.”
At the age of nine, Wanda began helping
out in the family business alongside her siblings.
“They took us to work and stood us
on chairs so we could bag clothes. They got away with paying us
sodas,” she recalled. “It was the only way to see
them, really. They were working all the time.”
At the time, the family lived in Great
Falls, VA, and had a long commute to work “It took about
30 to 40 minutes to get to work so all the way you kind of got
a little lesson every single day,” Wanda said.
ne of the lessons she learned was quite unusual.
“It probably sounds funny, but the first thing my father
taught me was how to watch people steal,” Wanda said.
“We did an interesting test. He told me to go to his
store on Columbia Road and work the counter. Every time I was
given a $20 bill — normally, we would walk it across the
store and drop it in a big drop safe — he said he wanted
me to pocket it all day long instead. At the end of the day, I
gave him all of the money. He also wanted me to do it again the
next day.”
The test yielded interesting results.
“Over the two-day period, there was probably about $600
to $700. Well, when the manager did his report at the end of
the week, the money wasn’t reported as missing,”
she said.
Not only did the family business have to
deal with employee theft, they also had trouble with other
thieves.
“Down in DC, we got robbed a lot. It
was a ritual every week, at least once a week. They’d
walk right in. We were lucky that nobody ever got
hurt.”
Unfortunately for Wanda, she felt a
harrowing robbery experience firsthand. In 1982, a day after
she married her first husband, she was held up at gunpoint
while opening a store.
“That was pretty scary. The funniest
thing about it was that the store they robbed was right next
door to the police station. They tied my hands up. Within like
two seconds, police were everywhere but they never caught
them.”
Her sister had a similar incident happen
to her. “She was working a store in northeast and they
were robbed down there one day. That’s the only way you
could get the day off from my mother... if you were robbed.
Other than that, you had to work every day.”
Wanda’s parents did manage to take
some time off of work themselves when they retired in 1987 and
sold their drycleaning plants. At the time, Wanda was staying
at home with her young daughter, Cassandra. She had no interest
in owning her own business, but she did spend most of the next
decade managing other people’s plants. Her best
experience was with White Star Cleaners of Maryland and
Virginia, owned by the Slan family.
“I made good money working for the
Slans,” she recalled. “They really involve their
managers.”
Though she enjoyed the busy work, the trip
to and from her work in Springfield proved to be too much.
Wanda wanted to find something closer to her home.
In 1999, after having difficulty finding a
job and dabbling in the slow-paced world of computer data,
Wanda decided she would open up her own plant in Warrenton.
he had been divorced for three years and still
had to support her daughter and son, Billy. It was a big risk
to invest all of her savings into her new business venture.
“I didn’t even know I had that
much money because I just worked all the time for the
Slans,” she recalled. “I always used to play this
trick on myself. If my checking account got too much money in
it, I threw the money in a C.D. because I was used to being
broke. I never had any money.”
Nonetheless, it wasn’t enough. In
order to secure an S.B.A. loan, Wanda still needed to
come up with a bigger down payment, so she made sacrifices.
“Since I had moved in with John
(whom she married in 2001), I sold my townhouse in Gainesville.
I also had a beautiful Mustang 5.0. I had to sell that, too.
I’m walking on that now. That’s the tile in my
store.”
It was a stressful year of planning,
designing and finding more money. There were times when Wanda
doubted the business would ever open.
“It was a lot of money buying the
equipment and the building and all that,” she said.
“I kept saying this is never going to pan out all the
way. This is just not going to happen. I’ll tell you what
— that day the drycleaning machine pulled in here on a
tractor trailer — I really thought I was going to pass
out,” she said. “That was really exciting. Besides
my kids being born, that was probably the most exciting day
I’ve ever had.”
Wanda finally opened the doors to Acclaim
Cleaners in August of 2001 with only the help of her two
children. “They were my employees to start with and I
didn’t pay them. There wasn’t anything to pay them
with. I bought them lunch.”
Since then, Acclaim has grown to include
three full-time employees and two part-timers. Billy and
Cassandra also continue to help on occasion.
“Wherever I worked before, they
would go to work with me a lot, especially on the weekends
because you just can’t find daycare then. They picked it
up a lot,” Wanda noted.
When Wanda was younger, she was able to
enjoy a nice break from her family’s drycleaning tutelage
sessions by riding horses. She competed as a junior rider at
age ten on an intense 50-mile speed ride. She finished first in
her category with a time of 2 hours and 14 minutes, a record
that she believes still stands today. She eventually quit the
sport because it was hard on her knees.
Nowadays, she prefers a less strenuous way
to spend her sparse spare time.
“We’ve redone the garden out
front three times since we first opened up. I have to have a
garden,” she said. “If I’m going to be at
work all the time and I can’t go home and plant flowers,
then I’ll do it here.”
Acclaim Cleaners, which earned a merit
award from American Drycleaners in 2000, is unique in its
overall appearance. The building, a former Lutheran church, was
constructed with large support beams and vaulted ceilings.
When Wanda originally moved in, she took
down all of the crosses except for the one in the boiler room.
She did not want to take any chances. “I’m not
touching that one,” she laughed.
Regardless of whether or not the future of
her company proves to be “blessed,” Wanda
won’t be slowing down any time soon. After all, her job
still causes her to wear out a pair of tennis shoes every
month.
“I just throw them away now. I
don’t buy expensive tennis shoes anymore,” she
said. “I just go to Wal-Mart and buy four or five pairs
and throw them under the bed until I need them.”
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