February 3, 2005

Reluctant Holly cleans his last stain

By Diane Chiddister

For more than 50 years, Joe Holly has cleaned up our messes. For five decades he has scrubbed the stains from our clothes and sent us back into the world to stain them all over again. He knows that we can’t hoist cocktail shrimp to our mouth without dribbling red sauce beneath, that we sometimes splatter more vinaigrette on our jeans than on our organic salad. And he loves us anyway.

But beginning this week, Holly won’t be standing at the counter with a joke and his own version of a smile when we bring him our wine-stained sweaters and our paint-splattered jeans. At the end of the day Monday, Jan. 31, he walked out the door of Joe Holly’s Cleaners for the last time and turned over the keys to the business’s new owner, Dolbeer Cleaners of Springfield.

“It’s been a good run,” Holly said in an interview last Thursday, as customers came and went, telling him they would miss him. “Everybody hates to see me go. I’ve got a few hugs and squeezes and a couple of kisses.”

It’s been hard for Holly, 78, to retire, and he’s been putting it off for years. He’s had offers before from prospective buyers, Holly said, but none that met his high standards. But Dolbeer’s, which has served Springfield residents for more than 28 years, has his full approval. And now that he’s found a worthy successor, he’s willing to move on, even if he’s feeling a bit reluctant.

“It’s bittersweet,” he said. “I’ll miss the people.”

The new owners plan to keep things largely the same, said Dolbeer’s owner Andy Koelsch, who noted that he hopes to maintain Holly’s employees on staff. Customers will notice only one significant change, Koelsch said — Joe Holly’s Cleaners, which had so far successfully resisted the computer age, will go electronic.

“Joe has done a great job building and keeping a clientele and we want to continue that,” said Koelsch. “We’ll try to maintain the status quo. We don’t want to ruffle any feathers.”

Holly was only about 12 when he got his first job clerking at a downtown business, and he’s worked downtown — except for a short stint at a Frigidaire plant in Dayton — ever since. A 1944 graduate of Bryan High School, he worked after high school for Chetloes, a clothing store and dry-cleaning business then located at the current site of the Yellow Springs Community Credit Union. Gradually Holly bought into the business, easing out the clothing part to focus on cleaning. On Labor Day, 1950, the dry-cleaning store moved to its current location on Corry Street, and around 1954, when Holly bought out Chetloe completely, he changed the store’s name to Joe Holly’s Cleaners.

Holly came to the dry-cleaning business naturally. His father, a Czechoslovakian immigrant who died when Joe was 8, also owned a local dry-cleaning business. The senior Holly was a custom tailor who started working in Springfield before he moved his store to the village.

“He was quite the tailor,” Holly said of his father. “I can mend a few holes and I’m a button sewer-onner. But that dude was a tailor.”

The world was a more orderly, more formal place in the late 1940s and 1950s when Holly started his business. It was a world in which men — even Antioch College faculty members — wore suits to work and women dressed up in skirts and high heels. From that time he remembers that Coretta Scott King, an Antioch graduate, cut quite a figure as a sharp dresser and that writer Rod Serling was also a regular customer.

But then came the 1960s and ’70s, bringing the civil rights movement, the peace movement and then the feminist movement, all of which sparked a new trend toward naturalness and informality. And while that stylistic change reflected those questioning times, it created havoc for those in the dry-cleaning business.

“It kind of snuck up on me, that Yellow Springs became a more casual town,” said Holly. “It was a relapse to some degree. All cleaners shrunk in sales.”

While in the past decades many Yellow Springers sported jeans and t-shirts rather than suits and white shirts, they continued to tote their other dry-cleaning needs to Holly’s counter. And he found an additional source of revenue at Cedarville College, where both faculty and students dress up on a regular basis..

“I never got rich here,” Holly said, “but I managed to get by.”

Holly’s longevity might be linked to his magical touch with stains, and his reputation for conquering even the most difficult. A modest man, Holly won’t bring up the topic, but when asked, he acknowledged that, yes, he gave those stains a run for their money. His system consisted of creative use of various presoaking agents, plus his willingness to work on tough stains for days on end.

“You have food, you have gravies, you have red wine, and coffee has screwed up a lot of clothes,” he said. “I’m not bragging but I like to think I did a good job. I had patience and perseverance. I didn’t win them all but I had my share of successes.”

Holly said he learned all he knows about stains from his three longtime cleaners, Bill Carr, Bud Turner and George Harris. They were skilled at their work, he believes, and he’s grateful for their loyalty, as well as that of all his other employees. He takes pride that, in his more than five decades as boss, he never fired a single worker.

“I’ve always been a pretty easy slob,” he said. “And I always had a fine run of people”

Holly said that he’s not entirely sure what retired people do all day, but he intends to find out. For now, he’ll focus on projects at home and he looks forward to giving more attention to his summer garden. He doesn’t plan to travel, although he’s always had a yen to visit Alaska.

But chances are that Joe Holly won’t go too far away. You’ll still find him at his favorite haunts downtown doing what he loves best, talking with the people of Yellow Springs.