Profile: Steve Mindzak

Steve Mindzak just doesn’t know when to quit. After owning and operating Friendly Cleaners of Weirton, WV, for over 48 years, he has no intention of retiring. After all, he doesn’t want to let his customers down. It’s hard to imagine Steve letting anybody down. Throughout his life, he’s maintained a steadfast work ethic that is honest and unrelenting. Such values were brought with him from his native country of Czechoslovakia, where he was born in 1926.

Early in his life, Steve lived with his mother, Julia, while his father, John, worked hard to raise enough money to move his four sons and wife over to America. It was a slow, arduous process because he could only move one family member at a time.

John managed to move two of his sons here before World War II, but a third son was lost to him as a casualty of the war in Europe. Once the war ended, Steve’s mother went to America. Steve finally arrived in 1948 when he was almost 22 years old.

Prior to arriving in the U.S., Steve had only met his father once when the elder Mindzak came back to Europe for a visit in 1933 — when Steve was seven years old. “The next time I saw him after that was in 1948,” Steve recalled. “If I were to meet him on the street, I wouldn’t know who the gentleman was unless I had a picture in my hand.” The absence of his father forced Steve to learn self-reliance. “Growing up without a father was very hard,” he said. “I couldn’t go to him if I had any problems. I had to do it myself.”

Steve helped provide for his family by working full-time as a farmer when he was only eleven. He would have preferred a chance to go to school, but it wasn’t an option. His family needed him to work. However, Steve did have a friend who made a living as a tailor, so he found time to acquire tailoring skills during his formative years.

It was difficult, at first, adjusting to a country with electricity and a whole new language. Steve remembered feeling like an outsider when he arrived in New York, still dressed warm for the cold boat trip over. “It was July 29th. I had a couple of suitcases and this big overcoat on me. The temperature was about 90 degrees,” he said. “My brother didn’t have a car, so we took the train and people just looked at me.

“I thought I was going to die, too, because I was used to working on the farm with fresh air and everything else, and I was so thirsty. They gave me 7-Up or something, and the more I drank, the more I wanted it. It filled me up so much, I got sick,” he laughed.

He soon joined his two brothers, Mike and John, working at a ladies’ garments factory in Newark, NJ. However, when his parents moved to Weirton, WV, Steve followed them. It didn’t take long for him to find a job for which he was well suited. His father met a tailor in the nearby town of Stubenville, OH, and convinced him to hire his son. There wasn’t very much work to keep busy, so Steve started a second job in the same town as a presser, spotter and cleaner at a laundry and drycleaning plant.

Steve wasn’t satisfied, however. The two jobs only kept him busy for five days of the week. He found a third job at Coronet Cleaners in West Virginia that allowed him to work weekends, too. The plant’s owner was quickly impressed with Steve’s work and offered him a full-time job at the plant.

For the next four years, Steve acquired more experience and served most of his employment stint at Coronet as the plant’s manager. Steve vividly recalled when the owner offered him the position: “I said to him, ‘I cannot even speak English. How in the world am I going to manage a place with 60 people?’”

What he lacked in experience, Steve more than made up for with effort and determination. “I was in charge of training, buying and everything else,” he said. “We had about 25 retail stores and about 30 wholesale.” One time, after purchasing some expensive new equipment, Steve discovered that the building wasn’t big enough to house it. “I thought, ‘I’m going to be fired for sure now.’ But, they took the roof down and put the walls up higher.”

After years of tackling challenging obstacles, Steve was surprised one day to get a phone call from the plant’s owner who had already left for a six-month vacation without any notice. Not long afterward, Steve found himself mired in court troubles because the plant’s lease had run out. Everything worked out fine, but it was enough to convince Steve that he was ready to start his own business.

In 1954, he founded Friendly Cleaners. He didn’t have any money, but he worked out a series of payment plans that would get him started. Now, all he had to do was succeed.

Not one to ever give up, Steve proceeded to work literally around the clock in order to keep the payments on time.

“I had to get up at maybe two or three o’clock in the morning and clean the clothes until about eight o’clock,” he explained. At that point, he had one employee work the counter and the other work the presser while he went on a delivery route with his truck to pick up more business.

“When I came back, I’d check the clothes in until about six or seven o’clock in the evening,” he continued. “Then, some of the repairs that came in — I took them home and worked until maybe eleven, twelve o’clock at night. Sometimes, I didn’t even go to sleep, believe it or not. I just took a shower and went back to work. This went on for maybe three years.”

Eventually, Steve bought the property next to the plant and financed the building of a larger plant with a living quarters upstairs. It was a risky venture and Steve’s father was concerned. “I didn’t want to disappoint my father. Over time we had become good friends,” he recalled. “He told me he hoped I knew what I was doing. I said to him, ‘I do, too’.”

Instead of playing it safe, Steve decided to invest in top of the line equipment. He received some good advice from Ed Resnick, an equipment salesman out of Pittsburgh, PA, who told Steve that he believed Friendly Cleaners would easily double its business in a short period of time. “Within six months, we more than tripled the business,” Steve said.

Steve attributed the growth of his business mostly to its standard of quality. “We tried to maintain the highest quality from the very beginning.”

Business continued to boom for a couple more years, but then Steve noticed a drop-off. “The business started to taper down and I wanted to know what the problem was,” he said. “I asked my customers about it and they said, ‘The place is always so busy, sometimes there’s no place to park.’”

By simply listening to his customers, Steve was able to turn things around. He bought an old building next to his plant and tore it down to make room for plenty of additional parking space. “We regained some of the customers who had been going some place else for convenience,” he said.

Over the years, Steve has tried to keep on the right track by learning as much as he could about his business and his trade. He is proud of his drycleaning skills, having attended courses by IFI in Silver Spring, MD, and he has actively participated in the West Virginia Dry Cleaners & Launderers Association, including a run as president in 1981.

Additionally, he has improved his chance of success by realizing how much marketing potential can be found in a computer, though, ironically, he never touched one prior to 1995. “The more I looked at them, the more amused I got. So, finally I decided to buy one.”

Nowadays, Steve maintains a web site at www.friendlycleaners.com and uses his in-store computer system to send targeted direct mail offers specifically tailored to individual customers. “It works pretty good. I think it’s much better than newspaper advertising or radio,” he said.

Having raised a family of his own — a son, Steven, from a previous marriage, and two daughters, Colleen and Sylvia, with his wife of 24 years, Helen — Steven fully understands that people need to rely on each other from time to time.

Friendly Cleaners donates regularly to a wide variety of charities, but Steve fondly recalled how one in particular started about 15 years ago when he noticed a young boy at the bus stop in front of his plant on a cold winter day.

“This boy was freezing. I let him inside,” recalled Steve. “I said to him, ‘John, where’s your jacket?’ He said, ‘I don’t have any jackets. My parents don’t have any money to buy me a jacket.’ So, this one lady was in the store and she had two boys almost the same size. She took one jacket off the hanger and said, ‘Here, put this on’.”

After the boy left for school, Steve called a teacher at the school. “I said, ‘This boy didn’t have a jacket and one of our customers gave him one to wear. Why don’t you take him to K-Mart, buy him a jacket, and I’ll pay for it.’ So she did. Then, the next day, she called up and said, ‘I got another boy that doesn’t have a jacket. Let’s buy him another one’,” he laughed.

Steve hopes to continue to give back to the community in the future. At 75, he still spends 10-12 hours a day working. He won’t retire as long as he can provide a helpful service to his customers.

Part of him still hasn’t forgotten the difficult times he lived through growing up. “I remember when I didn’t have, so I figure now that I can afford it, why not help out?” he said.