History (1918 – 2002)

            One hundred years ago this year the Berthon story began. On September 13,1902 A.H. Berthon immigrated to the United States from France with his Father and Brother. He was fourteen years old when he came through Ellis Island. They located in Morris, Alabama, where he took a job in a coal mine but soon decided he did not like that so he quit and got a job in a bakery baking bread. In those days there were no large grocery stores so you had to purchase your food daily. You would go to the bakery for bread and to the butcher shop for meat and grocery store for vegetables. He had to be at work at 4:00AM to bake the bread and have it ready for sale by 7:00AM. After a few years he went to barber school and became a barber. Then he moved to Pratt City, which was the center of the steel industry in Alabama at that time. He opened a barbershop there because many of the steel workers lived in the area. He hired a shoeshine boy to shine shoes while he was cutting hair. The shoeshine boy pestered him for many months to buy a couple of hand irons that could be heated on the pot belly stove so the shoeshine boy could iron the pants of the men customers. Finally, Mr. Berthon agreed to buy the irons and an ironing board. The shoeshine boy developed a very lucrative business shining shoes and pressing pants.

Southside 1950

            The customers liked the service and many of them told Mr. Berthon that he should clean the clothes if he was going to press them. The dry cleaning industry was in its infancy in those days so Mr. Berthon, who knew nothing about dry-cleaning, bought some large kettles that he placed in the back yard of the barbershop. He filled the kettles with gasoline and the shoeshine boy would scrub the clothes with a scrub brush using the gasoline as a solvent. The clothes were hung on a clothesline to dry. Needless to say the clothes had a strong odor of gasoline after cleaning but that was good because the customers would pick up their garments and smell them. If the clothes did not smell of gasoline, the customer would accuse him of not cleaning the clothes. Most of the steel workers were very rough and tough and eager to fight, so you did not want to do anything that would agitate them.

            It wasn’t long before Mr. Berthon was making more money dry cleaning clothes than he was cutting hair. He decided to go into the dry cleaning business full time. He did some research and decided to follow the population shift toward the new steel plant located in Ensley, Alabama. Ensley has since been incorporated into the city of Birmingham, as has Pratt City. He moved to Ensley and constructed a professional dry cleaning building using state of the art equipment around 1925. He had several route trucks to pick up and deliver to the customers’ home. The picture shown was taken in the early 1920’s of Mr. Berthon standing by one of his trucks. Note the holes in the tires. This may have been before balloon tires were common on vehicles.

            By now he was a success. He was married and had four children and owned his own home and a thriving dry cleaning business but in 1929 the stock market crashed and he lost it all. Since no one had any money, he worked out a deal with the bank where he would pay a token amount each week in order to keep operating. He had his children running routes and he hired a black man to work for him and provided living quarters in the boiler room for the black man. Each week on Saturday, they would count the money, pay the bills and anything left over was divided among the workers. The property behind the plant was planted in a garden and Mr. Berthon raised chickens at home for meat and eggs.

            Eventually the economy improved and as the nation pulled out of the depression, so did Berthon’s Cleaners. During the decade of the thirties Mr. Berthon was able to get out of debt and pay off his mortgages. When World War II broke out both of his sons were drafted and served in the armed forces for four years. Mr. Berthon called on his two daughters to help him in the business during the war years. After the war, many soldiers brought home their GI clothing. Many were sick of olive color and wanted them dyed another color. One of his sons went to school to learn how to dye cloth and a large dye facility was built. Dyeing accounted for a large part of the volume for a decade. In the 1950’s many synthetic fabrics and blended fabrics became popular. Since there was no care handling labels in garments it was very difficult to do a successful dye job and dyeing slowly became obsolete.

Much of the winter clothing was wool so after the war, a cold storage vault was constructed for summer storage of woolen garments. This facility is still in use today, however, with air conditioning in most every home cold storage is not as popular as it once was. Most people use cold storage as a convenient way to get out of season clothing out of their closet for a few months. Fur and leather became popular after the war as many pilots brought home their flight jackets and wanted them cleaned, so a new market opened up and a leather department was added. As the soldiers came home from the war and wanted to get married there came a big demand to clean and box wedding gowns. Again, one of the Berthon boys went to school to learn how to clean and “preserve” wedding gowns.

It was evident in the late 1940’s that the one Ensley location was not going to be large enough to support five families, so a second location was opened in 1950. The population of Birmingham was moving south, so a location was selected near the downtown area of Birmingham and a new dry cleaning fluid was being used that was not flammable. Its name is perchloroethylene commonly called “perc”. The city government would not issue permits for perc because they were not familiar with its properties and were afraid of a fire hazard. A group of dry cleaners got together and built a small fire on the steps of city hall and put the fire out with perc. After that, there was no problem getting a permit for perc, however, the fire codes for petroleum solvent have gotten stricter.

            In November of 1950 the three thousand square foot Southside location opened its doors for business and Mr. Berthon retired after thirty-two years in the dry cleaning business. His two sons and one daughter carried on the family business. The new location proved to be a wise move and in less than three years the building had to be enlarged to five thousand square feet. The Berthon’s decided to establish a name for quality service and specialized in furs, leathers, draperies, wedding gowns, and other hard to clean items that other cleaners could not or would not accept. An aggressive advertising campaign was started promoting the cleaning of wedding gowns and leathers and they started the first full time take down and re-hang drapery service in Birmingham. All this paid off because the business grew so fast that the building had to be enlarged a second time to eleven thousand square feet in 1959. Blue Ribbon Service for finer garments was promoted as an upscale service for people who wanted high quality service and were willing to pay an up charge for the service. Today, Berthon’s has the reputation of being the highest quality dry cleaning operation in Birmingham and has a reputation that is known all over the state of Alabama. Some customers who became familiar with Berthon’s while in Birmingham have sent items from as far away as Germany to have them dry cleaned because they know our quality and trust us.

            In 1965 the third generation of Berthon’s joined the firm. His firs job was to upgrade the leather department. We joined Kirk’s Suede Life as a Suede Life Licensee and became affiliated with a worldwide suede and leather cleaning company that manufactures leather-cleaning supplies and provides expertise in cleaning new types of leather and suede for dry cleaners all over the world. We have used Suede Life products exclusively since 1965. Although the popularity of leather garments has declined somewhat since the 1960’s we still have a large leather plant with cleaning and refinishing equipment exclusively for suede and leather cleaning.

During the decade of the 1970’s Berthon’s pioneered the use of computers in the dry cleaning plant. In 1973 Douglas Hulen was hired as a plant manager. He had a computer background and using inexpensive Radio Shack computers he wrote numerous programs that we used to mark and track our production and finances. We used it for several years at one location to prove that computers have a place in the dry cleaning plant, however, the hardware such as inexpensive bar code scanners were several years away. We experimented with on site drapery cleaning for hotels. Retail Malls popped up all around the city, the steel mills closed and downtown Birmingham moved from a retail district to a financial and medical center. The University of Alabama Birmingham became the largest employer in the state and its school of medicine gained a reputation as one of the finest medical centers in the world and it is only three blocks from our plant.

During the decade of the 1980’s the last of the second-generation Berthon’s retired. In 1985 a third plant was opened for producing laundry items. With the addition of this new facility the plants needed more volume so two branch offices were opened. At this time Berthon’s Cleaners had five locations and over 60 employees and two home delivery routes. This great size eventually hurt quality since there were only three key employees to oversee production and quality so management began to look at downsizing. At this time there was only one Berthon to oversee the whole operation since the other Berthon’s decided to pursue other careers. In 1986 Max Business Systems was installed to give the company professional computer systems in preparation for the computer age that was beginning to explode.

            The decade of the nineties many small dry cleaners appeared on the scene. Some of the older operators installed home delivery routes and dozens of local neighborhood pick up offices in order to stay in business as traffic patterns and dress codes changed. Competition was greater than ever before. Many older plants sold out to large conglomerates or went out of business as the population shifted to the suburbs and strip malls appeared everywhere and each one had a dry cleaner in it.  In 1993 the fourth generation of Berthon joined the firm. The attrition of our competitors over the years has made Berthon’s the oldest family owned dry cleaning operation in Birmingham and perhaps the state of Alabama. With the advent of the internet we have decided to have a web site so that customer for all over the United States and even the world can find us and contact us and use our services especially our wedding gown and leather cleaning.

            Through the years our reputation for quality has kept us in business because all of our competition use low price and fast service as their drawing card and dozens have come and gone in the past eighty-five years but we are still here. Berthon’s prices are perceived to be the highest in town but they are not. We own our own buildings and equipment and have tried to invest in our employees because high quality comes from experienced employees in a very labor-intensive industry such as ours. All through our history you will find employees that have worked at Berthon’s for most of their working life. Many have retired after twenty and thirty years of service. Without these loyal employees Berthon’s Cleaners could not have produced such high quality service for as long as it has.

            Please visit our home page and see our services. Thank you.