This January, Oscar King, Jr. will turn 95
years old. After servicing tailors and drycleaners in the
greater Kansas City area with supplies for over 50 years,
he’s just about ready to settle down and retire.
These days, he spends a lot of time at
home handling many of his King’s Supply business orders
through an answering machine, letting his lone employee provide
most of the footwork for his clients.
“We used to have more customers, but
a lot of them have died,” he explained matter-of-factly.
“Lots of them died or sold out to other businesses that
already had a supplier.”
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The King family was once riddled with
poverty, but not from a lack of hard work. Although there were
no opportunities available for a southern black family in the
early part of the 20th century, Oscar’s father refused to
give up on the dream of a better life.
“My father bought a farm, but it was
a really bad deal,” Oscar said. “It was spread out.
It was hilly country. He raised cotton, but the farm land was
flooded out each Spring so he finally sold it. He sold his cows
and horses and everything. He kept one horse and one cow to
move down to Tunica; that was in the desert part of
Mississippi.”
The desert was indeed dry for the Kings,
who ended up working for a manipulative landowner.
“He had this big plantation and all
of his people on the plantation would have to trade at his
store,” Oscar recalled. “He was supposed to furnish
you with money the whole year — for your groceries and
everything — to help you carry your crop. He didn’t
give you any receipts. We worked up until February, gathering
cotton all winter so we could get paid.
“Then when we were ready to settle
up, he took everything. He said, ‘You done really good.
You almost got out of debt. I’m going to take that cow.
I’m going to take your horse and this year you can start
anew.’ There was nothing my father could do about it.
Black people weren’t supposed to say anything.”
Days were certainly longer back then.
Oscar remembers waking up at 4 a.m. every day.
“The young people just don’t
know how we used to live,” he said. “I had to be up
early to milk the cows because, when the sun rose, we had to
hit the fields. At twelve o’clock, you would stop and go
feed the mules, and then you eat. At one o’clock, you had
to be back in the fields. You worked until sundown. Whenever
the sun went down, that was quitting time.”
Oscar labored away on many farms
throughout his childhood, but the result was inevitably the
same: the landowner would profit and the King family would be
ransomed into deeper debt. Times were so tough that Oscar
didn’t attend school until he was 12.
“I started off in the second
grade,” he noted. “My mother had been teaching me
how to read a little. I was pretty good in
mathematics.”
Unfortunately, Oscar didn’t get a
chance to stay in school. His father passed away two years
later. Though only 14, he was the eldest son in the family, so
he inherited more responsibilities. It was up to him to run the
family business and finish the crop. He soon grappled with the
same frustrations that his father had faced.
“When you grab a bale of cotton and
go to the gin, the boss went with you,” he recalled.
“They gave you a receipt for how many pounds you had and
we’d go to the bank — me and the landowner. The
bank would cash the check for us. If the check came to $600,
well, the bank was giving me $200 and the landlord $400. I
protested. The landlord and the banker would be in cahoots
together.”
The family left that farm and started all
over again. This time, however, Oscar had a plan. He wanted to
go back to school and obtain a higher education. Oscar shined
shoes in Kansas City, hoping to save up money to go to Kansas
State University and study agriculture. Instead, other
priorities took precedence.
“After I got here for a while, my
sister came out. She was old enough to go to high
school,” he said. “Next year, my brother was ready.
I sent back and brought him over and put him in school. Next
year, I had another brother ready for high school. I sent back
and got him. I had too many of them in high school so I had to
quit school.”
College wasn’t an option for him,
but Oscar attended tailoring school at night so that he could
acquire a trade. He became adept at making clothes, as well as
cleaning and pressing them. Even though he worked for a tailor
at the time, Oscar couldn’t make more than $9 a week, no
matter how much his skills improved.
“I learned the business in and out
and the boss would never give me a raise, so I went in business
myself,” he said. “I opened up my own shop. It was
named Manhattan Cleaners and Hatworks. I excelled at tailoring.
I made new clothes and my brother excelled at hats. He really
knew hats.”
The drycleaning side of the business
didn’t fare badly, either. In fact, Oscar’s company
is still in business today, operated by his brother’s
nephew.
Making clothes for customers wasn’t
the hard part for Oscar; it was dealing with customers that
sometimes proved difficult.
“A man wanted to have a suit made
for him and his wife,” he explained. “I went over
to their house with my samples to show them and let them pick
out. They wanted green suits to match and I showed them a green
they liked. I about had them sold on it, but they had a
houseguest there. So, this lady came in and said, ‘That
ain’t green. That’s teal blue.’ We got to
arguing because she’s showing me up like I don’t
know what I’m talking about. We finally got it
settled.”
The two settled things so well that he not
only made the sale, but he also married the lady. Oscar and
Sally, who was a registered nurse, married in 1948. Sally
didn’t waste any time in turning Oscar’s world
upside down. She started developing a habit of taking some of
her patients home with her to stay at the couple’s home.
“At that time, I was just a fast
worker. Old people were slow and I didn’t have nothing to
do with them,” Oscar said. “I didn’t want to
be around them.”
He decided to tell one of his older
houseguests that she would have to leave. It didn’t work
out as planned.
“She was paralyzed from the waist
down. She laid on her back all the time,” he remembered.
“She was laying in bed smoking — back then it was
OK to smoke cigarettes. She gave me a beautiful smile and said,
‘Good morning, brother. How are you doing? Have a
cigarette.’ I stood there and I was stunned that this
woman was laying there smiling at me when I was mad. I liked
that old lady. I ended up calling her Aunt Sue.”
Oscar suddenly didn’t mind old
people so much. From then, it didn’t take long before
Sally took home so many other patients that their home became a
full-time nursing home business. It started to effect
Oscar’s ability to run his drycleaning shop.
“She had so many people. She
wasn’t able to hire orderlies,” he said.
“They’d be falling out of bed and men had to be put
in bathtubs, so by the time I got back to work she would call
me to come home because someone had fallen out of bed or
something.”
Keeping it in the family, Oscar sold his
share of the cleaning business so he could have a more flexible
schedule to help out at the nursing home.
That’s when he got the idea to start
King’s Supply. As a distributor, he could run back home
between visits to clients. He started on a smaller scale, but
his dealings took on a life of their own.
His clients asked him why he didn’t
offer zippers or buttons, so he added them to his inventory.
They kept asking and he kept adding: press tags, covers,
hangers and detergent — you name it. The key to his
success was simple: just listen to the customer.
“I went out and talked to people. I
had what they wanted and was able to buy the stuff in
quantities. I didn’t try to make a big profit,” he
noted. “If I didn’t have it, I’d get it from
somebody who did have it and I didn’t try to charge the
person an extra price because I had something else to fall back
on. I had the nursing home.”
Of all of life’s accomplishments,
Oscar is perhaps proudest of passing along selfless values to
his son, Oscar III.
Though Oscar was never able to go to
college himself, he made sure that his son had better
opportunities. Since earning Master of Divinity and Doctor of
Ministry degrees from Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Oscar
III has worked as a pastor Detroit, MI.
Not to be outdone, Oscar still likes to
help others when he can. He continued to help Sally run the
nursing home until she passed away in 1990. He sold the
business, but, in an odd twist of fate, found himself buying it
back a short time later. Carrie, his current wife of ten years,
runs the company now.
“I was lucky enough to get another
RN who was interested in the business who seemed to be
interested in me,” he laughs. “She takes care of
everything and she takes care of me.”
Having someone else take care of him is a
role that may take some getting used to for Oscar, especially
since he still finds himself playing the part of caretaker for
others. For over eight decades he has taken care of customers,
patients and family. For now, he’s not ready to give that
up.
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