When Jill Fitzgerald hit her breaking point three
years ago, she sought a way out.
After working as the owner/operator of
Jill’s Cleaners in Muskego, Wisconsin for over two decades, the
day-to-day pressure had taken its toll.
Part of the stress was due to the fact that Jill
has never been content to playing the role of bystander, which explains
why she has been active on the board of directors for the Wisconsin
Fabricare Institute since the mid-1980s. In that time, she also joined
several of the association’s committees, held the office of the
presidency in 1991 and 1992, and has served on the Governor’s
Council in Wisconsin for the state’s Drycleaning Environmental
Response Fund.
Then, there are her other professional projects
she has initiated throughout the years that prevent her from relaxing:
a video store, a tanning salon, an apartment building and a handful of
laundromats. With so much on her plate, it was getting harder to
maintain her sanity.
“It made me sick,” she recalled.
“I worked myself to death. I truly did. I was running around like
a chicken with my head cut off. I worked all the time. It was not even
fun. Now, when I look back at it, I don’t know how I did
it.”
When Jill finally reached the end of her rope in
2001, she exchanged it for a dog leash. Upon “retiring”
from the industry, she decided to devote her time to training her
newly-acquired Petit Basset Griffon Vendeen (PBGV) named Heidi. The
change of pace was refreshing and the small, furry creature rescued her
from the funk she had been trapped in.
In a few months, the animal became a certified
Canine Good Citizen and therapy dog — such animals are primarily
used to provide comfort and companionship to patients in nursing homes,
hospitals and other institutions.
However, it soon became clear that Heidi
wasn’t using her natural abilities to their full potential; PBGVs
innately possess powerful tracking abilities.
“They are considered a hound,” Jill
explained. “PBGVs are used in France strictly for rabbit hunting.
Here they are used as scent hounds and for rabbit hunting.”
Before long, Jill worked with a tracking
instructor to develop Heidi’s ability to track scents so she
could be a qualified Search and Rescue dog. Such animals are typically
employed to find lost items or people — such as Alzheimer’s
patients or children who have wandered off — or even possible
crime victims. Thus, both Heidi and Jill had to learn a variety of
unusual subjects, such as human remains detection (HRD).
Currently, Jill is officially certified with the
National Association of Search and Rescue and she also has successfully
passed FEMA Incident Command and HAZMAT tests.
“It’s a real cool thing because
I’m old,” Jill laughed. “It’s like being in the
Army for the weekend. It was a real feather in the cap to pass a test
because you’re out in the wilderness overnight looking for clues
with no dogs — all people stuff and survival.”
“It’s constant training,” she
added. “It’s not a fly-by-night thing. I worked repeatedly
last year with a medical examiner in Louisville. We were training Heidi
how to do water recovery. When a person dies in water — when the
scent rises — it rises in a cone. So, they build a machine and
they can actually pump the scent into the water.”
About a year ago, Jill helped form the
Wisconsin-Illinois Search and Recovery K9 Team, a volunteer group
comprised of various certified Search and Rescue members, as well as
licensed North American Search Dog Network handlers.
“We have HRD, wilderness dogs, water
recovery and tracking and trailing dogs,” she said.
“We’re planning on getting all of our dogs certified at
this time. There is no criteria in Wisconsin or Illinois for Search and
Rescue dogs, so this will just bring us a cut above the
rest.”
It has been an interesting year for the group so
far. Jill has already traveled to Illinois to assist the Oak Brook
police on a missing person investigation. She expects a lot of similar
missions in the future.
“We’ll go where needed,” she
said. “We are the only search team in the world that has PBGVs,
which is kind of cool. Even though we’ve got these funny little
dogs, they work very well.”
Last August, Jill retired from her retirement and
reclaimed the helm of Jill’s Cleaners once again. This time,
however, she plans on slowing down enough so that she can get away for
Search and Rescue missions.
“I have a really great crew,” she
said. “It’s to the point now where the crew that I have is
capable enough that I can still get away without too much of a
problem.”
Of course, it wasn’t always like that. In
the beginning, Jill had no crew to speak of at her plant. She ran it
completely by herself.
She first joined the drycleaning industry in the
mid-1970s. Prior to that, she had been a computer programmer for eight
years, a trade she learned only because she was not permitted to be a
flight attendant.
“I was too short,” Jill recalled.
“Back then, you had to be tall. There were height restrictions. I
think the restriction was at least 5' 4" or 5' 5". I always
wanted to be a flight attendant. I always wanted to fly.”
After attending the University of
Wisconsin-Whitewater for a year, Jill was eager to become financially
independent. Her mother encouraged her to pick up a trade before
leaving college, so she took a computer course.
“Back then, you had a printer, a colater and
a separator,” she said. “You had a room full of machines
that does the work of one PC now. It was very technical. I had to wire
boards and everything, but I loved it.”
Though Jill enjoyed computer programming very
much, her husband Mike presented her with an opportunity in 1975 that
she couldn’t let pass by.
“Mike came home one day and said,
‘Hmm. I found this land and I’m going to build a laundromat
and drycleaning plant and you could either run it or we can hire
someone’,” Jill recalled.
Having married into a drycleaning family made the
decision a little easier for Jill. Mike is a longtime salesman for the
Herb Fitzgerald Company, which was founded by his father along with Leo
Rausch and Betty Fitzgerald. The company has sold and serviced
drycleaning machinery for over 50 years.
Jill had spent a lot of time at numerous industry
functions and had numerous cleaning contacts — including her
brother-in-law Jim Fitzgerald — so advice was never hard to find.
“It was a real natural transition for
me,” she said. “I’m sure I had my days, but if I ever
got in a bind, there were more than enough people to help me
out.”
Such people included Imogene Marks, Elizabeth
Hoover and Ron Kantor — all of whom were inspirations who
influenced Jill to become more active in the industry.
The outside help was sorely needed, but Jill
didn’t have anyone inside the plant to help her along
— at least not in the early days.
Back then, she plugged away by herself —
taking orders in at the front counter, cleaning and pressing the orders
and then even delivering them whenever the need arose. Still, the hard
work and persistence paid off as the plant grew. Eventually, it doubled
in size from its original 1,600 square feet and she hired a stellar
staff.
“In order to run anything successfully, you
need a lot of trustworthy help,” Jill emphasized. “I had a
lot of good help at work. We added on a whole new plant with updated
equipment.”
Then, things got really busy when she added on
other business endeavors.
“Mike came home one time and handed me the
keys to two laundromats on my birthday and I could have killed
him,” she said. “There was a time when I would work here
all day and then go and clean five laundromats before I went home to
bed.”
Following her hiatus from the industry, Jill
returned to the plant last August. She still manages to learn something
new every day.
“You never stop learning in this
business,” she said. “If you stop learning, you’re
dead, but I think your whole life is like that. You might get a little
bored, but then you do something else, which is why I started with the
dog thing.”
In another year or so, Jill may begin training
another dog. In the meantime, she will keep busy with her plant and WFI
duties, and, of course, the Search and Rescue missions.
“It’s like a hobby, but it
isn’t,” she said. “I don’t just belong to a
club, I have to be active in it.”
Recently, she turned her pet project into yet
another financial opportunity as she launched a web site for PBGV
owners to visit and buy custom-made art, jewelry and crafts.
“The site is at www.chezpbgv.com, she said.
“I started it because people with this kind of dog have no place
to buy stuff. I decided to give them a place.” Incidentally, the
site also houses merchandise for other dog breeds, too.
While it certainly seems like Jill is headed once
again toward a breaking point — since she is once again handling
multiple projects that are becoming more and more time-consuming
— she isn’t worried about burning out.
“Somebody said to me the other day,
‘You know, you really should slow down.’ I said,
‘Huh?’ I’ll think about that,” she laughed.
“But I’m having more fun now. Life is not so stressful
anymore.”
Besides, Jill believes there’s plenty of
time for rest later on.
“Once you lay down and die, you lay down and
die,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of living left to do
before that.”
