National Clothesline

“I said to him, ‘Well, I’m nervous about that.’ I guess I had a good reason to be because it’s what burned down the building February 6 of 2003,” Fred explained. “We lost it all.”

After fifteen years of taking care of customers in the town of Jackson Hole, Fred found himself in a tough situation. Fortunately, he had good insurance and some of the equipment was saved, but he

knew his business would be down for a long time. His landlord had to contemplate whether or not to tear down the strip mall building on the property, which was comprised of seven stores altogether.

“Finally, he decided to rebuild,” Fred said. “We signed a new lease with him, but we lost 90 days of doing nothing. We started rebuilding it in the middle of August.”

Fred was excited at the opportunity to redesign his plant to his own specifications. The front of the store was repainted and a new hydrocarbon machine and conveyors were installed, among other things. After being closed for eight long months, Ryan Cleaners reopened its doors on October 13 without any advertising at all.

“We were really apprehensive about whether we were going to still have any business, but we kept hearing that what I did to the other two guys in town wasn’t nice,” Fred said. “We had about half the business in town when we burned down and they couldn’t handle it. What a golden opportunity to have — but they didn’t step up and do what I would have done. They just got irritated with the people.”

It would seem that this time, Fred had no reason to be alarmed.

“It was just amazing how the people responded,” he recalled. “The front of the shop looked like a florist’s shop with all the flowers and plants. I think they were waiting for us.”

Waiting is something that Fred doesn’t like to do. Always full of energy, he prefers to move through life jumping back and forth similar to notes in jazz rift (a big passion of his). He has held many job positions over the years. All of them had one common denominator: they were in the drycleaning industry.

Fred’s father, John, was also a cleaner. He owned Snow White Cleaners in the 1930s in Wichita, Kansas. The business was a gift from Fred’s grandfather, Ed, who didn’t want his son to follow in his coal mining footsteps.

“My parents lived above the drycleaning shop in an apartment and that’s where I was born... on the kitchen table,” Fred recalled. “The doctor’s drycleaning bill was a trade-out. I was a trade-out. That’s kind of getting born into the business, isn’t it?”

Naturally, Fred hung around the plant often while growing up.

“In those days, they had a cement block room that was all open with pipes from the boiler in it so it was quite hot,” he said. “They hung up everything there — that’s how they dried it. That was before they used dryers.”

Snow White Cleaners closed down in the early 1940s, but John Ryan purchased another Wichita drycleaning company — a different plant also named Ryan Cleaners — in 1944. Fred’s father believed the timing was better this time around due to the number of people working at Boeing and other large airplane manufacturing companies nearby The elder Ryan’s hunch proved reliable.

“I can remember at the tail end of World War II when they would open the store on Monday and take in all the clothes and put them in bundles and close it probably Wednesday or Thursday,” he said. “They wouldn’t take anymore because they were so busy and so far behind. It was an unreal situation in those days.”

When he was in high school, Fred worked at the plant practically every night — except when he was playing the trumpet or playing in a football or basketball game. He learned how to press and spot and even mixed his own spotting chemicals with ammonia, acetic acid and alkaline acid.

After graduation, Fred attended St. Benedict’s College and Wichita University, studying business so he could manage one of his father’s five stores. At that time, Fred often played softball with friends, including former high school classmates Dan and Frank Carney, the brothers who founded Pizza Hut.

“They offered me the franchise for Oklahoma, Texas and so-forth and I said, “No, I’m going to stay in the drycleaning business.’ That’s just when it [Pizza Hut] got started. Drycleaning had been around forever,” he said. “As you know, that was a mistake. Pizza Hut just exploded during those years.”

In 1959, Fred felt the pull to go out in business on his own, so he bought a plant in Hayesville, Kansas, and called it Snow White Cleaners.

“I never knew the original name of my dad’s shop,” he pointed out. “It was just one of those things. We opened up on July 25 and I had $50 in the bank and $35 in the register.”

Offering a rarity for the times — same day turnaround — the business did well for a decade. While in Hayesville, Fred served on the town’s planning commission for six years. He was also elected as a city councilman (winning by a margin of two votes) and mayor.

However, Fred must have been tired of being in the same place so long because he took a job as the supervisor of several Martinizing cleaning stores in 1969. For seven years, his territory included Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, which lead to a lot of time on the road away from his family.

Three years earlier, Fred married Margie, who he met on a blind date. She was a nurse in charge of a surgery department before she retired to raise the couple’s six children: Theresa, Susan, Mary, John, Rochelle and Joseph.

Next up, Fred accepted a sales position with Thompson Hayward Chemical Co. where he spent five years selling to laundries and drycleaners. After that, he was offered a sales position with Diversie Wyandotte where he sold truckloads of soap to the First Army in Leavenworth, Kansas in one of his accounts. The job lasted seven years.

The next challenge awaiting Fred was with Crown Center Hotel, a 720-room Westin International hotel in Kansas City. He worked as the laundry/valet manager overseeing the daily cleaning of 5,000 napkins, 700 tablecloths, 2,500 sheets and plenty of blankets, covers, pillow cases, etc.

“I set standards for everybody in the laundry in every area,” he said. “I’d say, ‘Your standard is 15 napkins a minute.’ Well, once you get people to where they know that anybody can do 15 napkins in a minute, they would want to do 20 napkins in a minute.”

In 1978, the itch to be his own boss started up once again. Fred bought a cleaning shop in Kansas City.

Eight years later, he visited his two sons who lived in Jackson Hole and noticed that town had only one drycleaning plant. The wheels in his mind started turning.

A few after that, Fred purchased a plant in Colorado and used a diesel truck to haul it over to Jackson Hole, where he officially opened the doors on Halloween of 1988. The business has remained in the same place since. The company has grown in sales every year and doubled its overall size. One big reason for the success has been Margie, who has worked at Ryan Cleaners since it opened.

“She’s a major part of the business,” Fred said. “She’s up front with a lot of people, oversees it. You can’t get the place too dirty because she worked in surgery for years.”

Since high school, Fred has followed through on his lifelong passion of playing trumpet. Now, he plays jazz as part of a 15-piece dance band for weddings and events in his spare time. He also enjoys jamming with his sons’ rock band, Revolver, on occasion. Music has proved to be a refreshing release from the daily toils of work and life.

Some hardships have been more difficult to overcome than others, as is the case with the recent fire at the plant. After eight arduous months, however, it is thriving better than ever.

It’s just Fred’s nature to turn tragic situations into hopeful opportunities. When he and Margie lost their oldest daughter, Theresa, to breast cancer five years ago, the couple was completely devastated. However, they recouped emotionally in order to raise her son, Matt, who is now in college learning to be a pilot.

“He’s doing very well,” Fred said. “He’s just like one of the kids.”

As long as interesting challenges lie further down the road, it will be hard for Fred to consider retiring, even though he’ll be 70 in March and Joe and Rochelle have the future of the family-owned company well in hand. What drives him to stay in business is the close connection he feels with his local community.

“I’m looking at this letter I got on February 14 from Dick Cheney, who has lived up here for years. I got it framed in the office,” Fred explained. “He used to come in way before he was running for vice president or anything. We would visit with him a lot —†he and Lynne. They’re great, great people, no matter what your politics are. We got a letter from him about the fire... it said to stay with it and so forth. Well, how can you just close the door and say it’s over with? I guess I’m just not there yet.”