For Morgan Hill
’s Martin and Marie Stein, doing the laundry is more than just a
household chore – it’s a way of life.
For Morgan Hill’s Martin and Marie Stein, doing the laundry is more than just a household chore – it’s a way of life.
And after working in laundry and dry cleaning business for more than seven decades in five different states, the couple, now in their 90s, has a lifetime of experience in the washroom.
Today, the couple, who will celebrate the 70th wedding anniversary in February, can be found at Advanced Cleaners, 259 W. Main Ave. in Morgan Hill – the same place they’ve called home for 45 years.
Martin, who will be 93 in October, said he and his wife have learned to work together through the years, side by side at first, and then in shifts as they got older. Now they take turns managing the business. He is there in the morning, and Marie takes over during the afternoons.
After decades of working together, most couples would be at each other’s throats, but Martin says they’ve managed to stay together.
“I bawl her out once or twice a day,” he joked “Oh, we argue, we fight, but we’ve always got along.”
After 70 years of marriage and almost as many working together, Marie said there is no secret formula to their success.
“We get up in the morning and get moving,” she said. “Some people just give up. You just have to keep on going. Yes, we get along.”
Martin said he doesn’t have any advice about making a marriage last so long.
“After work, we eat and sleep,” he said. “Sometimes we’ve traveled. I don’t know if this is a normal thing, but we don’t really do a hell of a lot!”
Martin started in the laundry and dry cleaning business during the Great Depression. He was just 15 years old back then, “a rookie,” in his own words, when he applied at a laundry in Leavenworth, Kan.
“I didn’t know much about it, but I needed a job,” he said. “I had to help my dad support the family.”
Martin’s mother died when he was 14. His father was a farmer, a furniture factory worker and a bootlegger, Martin said. He had three sisters. He was able to attend just one year of high school, then he had to go to work, first in a furniture factory, where he started at 16 cents an hour, and later received $8.40 for a 40-hour week – still less than $100 a week today when adjusted for inflation.
Martin said his pay increased to $11 a week when he got the job at the laundry.
“I stayed in the laundry business ever since. I never got out of it,” Martin chuckled. “When I got married, I was earning $14 a week.”
Later, the laundry added dry cleaning and Martin was promoted to foreman in the mid-1930s. Around that time, he hired his future wife, Marie.
“I had her working folding sheets,” he said.
The couple married in 1936. They moved to Bismark, N.D. and worked in a dry cleaners and laundry operation there for three years. Their first daughter, Koneta, was born there.
“Then the war was heating up and the laundry and dry cleaning place where I worked in Kansas asked me to come back and help them,” recalled Martin.
The Steins returned, but only for a year. Martin was asked to work in Camp Crowder, Mo., to take on the position of superintendent of laundry, in charge of keeping the soldiers clothed. He stayed there for four and a half years.
“There were 66,000 people coming and going,” he said, “and all their clothes had to be laundered.”
After the war, the couple moved to Idaho. The weather there didn’t agree with their second daughter, Diane, so they moved to Gilroy in 1949 and bought Gilroy Laundry and Cleaners. The building burned down in 1959 and they couldn’t find another place in Gilroy. Soon after, they rented the old press shop on First Street in Morgan Hill and converted it into a laundry and dry cleaning operation.
In 1963, the couple purchased a lot along West Main Avenue and built their present building. The laundry and dry cleaning business is viewed as a landmark in the community, and the Steins are regarded as icons of Morgan Hill, according to another longtime resident, Dennis Delisle.
“They’ve been here forever,” said Delisle, a faithful customer and neighbor, while dropping off dry cleaning this week.
Times have changed since the 1960s in Morgan Hill, said Martin. The area was but a farming community back then, where selling prunes, eggs and chickens were the main livelihood of the people.
Martin has also seen changes in the laundry and dry cleaning business through the past 77 years.
“We use different solvents now and there are a lot of synthetics,” he said. “I got my conveyors in the 1970s, and also, there are a lot more restrictions and permits we need to get,” Martin said. “The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) inspects us every year.”
Martin said he has done laundry and dry cleaning all these years because the business has been good to him.
“It’s been a good living and has always kept us going,” he noted.
And the Steins haven’t let their age get in the way of their business. The store is still open 12 hours a day, from 6am to 6pm, six days a week.
