A third-generation Gainesville dry cleaner shares his story
On Feb. 9, 2024, Stephen Smith, owner of S&S Cleaners, stands outside the business he has run for over 40 years.
October 11, 2024 | story and photos by Brooke Davidson
As 73-year-old Stephen Smith switches on the machine, a dirty gown swishes and spins inside, reminiscent of when its bride wore the dress for her first dance. A soapy foam froths into an open-faced drum, filtering out transparent solvent. This cleansing waltz concludes in less than 20 minutes, the five-horsepower motor chugging along as it has for 34 years. The smell, like a mix of gasoline and acetone, will fade once the clothes dry.
It’s 4:30 a.m. Smith arrives 2.5 hours before any of his employees clock in at S&S Cleaners, nestled in the Porters neighborhood of Gainesville, Florida. He steams dozens of University of Florida Gator Marching Band jackets, along with this week’s shipment of blue and orange graduation robes. He preps the second load, then the third, dabbing on chemicals he mixes himself. The trash cans fill with all sorts of eclectic finds, from hypodermic needles to women’s panties stuffed in suit jackets.
Fans whirl as they work overtime to air-dry clothes for pickup the following day. Smith squeezes a chemical solution on the neckline of a wedding gown before beating it in with a wooden scrub brush, sending the makeup and perspiration stains into fight or flight mode. Four stray cats dart in and out of the building as the half-open windows let in natural light with the visiting mosquitoes.
Smith handles several hundred pieces of clothing a day, with up to 450 people coming through the door of S&S Cleaners every week. The white brick building with baby blue trim sits at the corner of Southwest Third Street and Fifth Avenue.
Originally called Street’s Cleaners, the building was completed a year after World War II ended. Enrollment at nearby UF boomed thanks to the G.I. Bill, but initial owner Street Dendy could only keep the business going for two years before he put it up for sale.
“He just wasn’t a dry cleaner,” Smith says. “He was a little too soft and maybe not tough enough to do this.”
A plastic fish hangs above the counter of the cleaners, its olive-colored scales a reminder of what lured Smith’s grandfather and father to Florida in 1948. Orange Lake, about 17 miles south of Gainesville, was the destination for their father-son fishing trip – a vacation from Grandpa’s laundry business in Newnan, Georgia.
Smith’s father, Bill C. Smith, bought the cleaners from Dendy after visiting Gainesville with Smith’s grandfather in 1948, renaming it S&S for “Service and Satisfaction.” Stephen was born in August 1950, four years after his older brother, Bill Jr.
Smith bought the business from his father in 1983. His dad continued to come in to work every day, even without pay, until his death in 2006. Smith is the third generation in his family to continue the dry-cleaning business.
He started working at the cleaners at age 12 as a simple shirt shaker, flicking wrinkles out of the warm garments. He worked more than 10 hours a day through his early teens, with short breaks back home for lunch to scarf down three tuna fish sandwiches and indulge in a 15-minute nap, trying to tune out the soap opera episode his parents were watching together. As soon as he got his driver’s license, Smith worked away his high school afternoons delivering clothes to customers and learning how to mix bottles of spotting chemicals and preserve wedding gowns from other S&S employees, whom he considered family.
Boxing elegant white dresses for preservation either before or after a wedding is S&S Cleaners’ specialty, and it’s the most rewarding one, he says.
“Anyone I can talk to is an instant sale,” he adds.
After applying chemicals from the multitude of bottles beside him, Smith sets them into the wedding dress’ neckline with a scrub brush.
He lets customers come in to see the gown before it is boxed, which most other cleaners don’t allow.
“I’ve had women come around the counter and give me a hug because I’ve restored something that they didn’t think would be restored.” He boxes over 100 gowns a year, totaling two to three thousand over his career.
Polo shirts with the embroidered script “S&S Cleaners” help make him a walking advertisement. A golden UF Albert mascot hangs on a chain around his neck. His white cap matches his trim goatee, and his face reveals time spent in the sun fishing and golfing when he was younger. He wishes he could do more of that now.
But unlike his dad, Smith has no one to hand down his business to. The fourth generation in the family isn’t interested in taking up the mantle.
Stamina has become more of an issue as he’s gotten older, he admits, though his decision-making is stronger than when he was a young cleaner. He doesn’t know any friends his age who work as hard as he does, but he continues to show up, day after day, to run the cleaners.
If he doesn’t, no one else will.
On the harder days, his father’s motto delivers the motivation he needs: “I may give out, but I won’t give up.”
Clothes-hanging racks bolted to the paint-chipped ceiling string their way through the building, forming a metal labyrinth that Smith knows well. According to his iPhone, Smith averages five to six miles daily without stepping foot outside the building, going back and forth through the maze of university police uniforms, folded oral surgery towels, Alpha Epsilon Phi initiation robes and church tablecloths, each attached with a tag that corresponds to one of the tickets strewn across the office desk.
He walks past a hook fastening these racks together, less than six feet off the ground.
“That was an important day in my life — when I could jump high enough to touch this,” he reminisces as he pushes up his wire glasses. That was back when he was 5 or 6 years old.
University of Florida Marching Band jackets are ready for pickup after being dry-cleaned.
Smith majored in political science at UF, reading his older brother’s hand-me-down books even though they were a full election cycle apart. Smith was the president of fraternity Delta Sigma Phi and graduated in 1972 with honors, a marriage to his first wife Ruth — and a family business. Working at the cleaners was an inevitable career path for Smith, as he had grown tired of school.
“This is a little bit of everything,” he says. “It’s psychology, learning how to motivate your employees and manage your customers; the science of cleaning and laundry; dealing with the government and paperwork. I get hit from every direction.”
Smith attributes S&S’s longevity to demand in the community; his customers draw from both UF and Gainesville locals. Some dry-cleaning businesses closer to UF’s campus went bankrupt during the pandemic. S&S Cleaners was barely able to stay afloat.
University of Florida Police Department uniforms are among the many consistent orders Smith receives from Gainesville locals.
“I didn’t even take a check because there just wasn’t enough money,” Smith says of the pandemic years.
At the end of each year, up to 15 feet of rack space is taken up by clothes that aren’t ever picked up. Smith donates them to local churches through customers like Emmett Bright, 76, who Smith has known for 55 years. For decades, Smith has donated clothes to an AME Church in Evinston south of Gainesville, where Bright was a pastor before he retired.
“We’ve helped dress many people,” Bright says.
For the cleaners, Thursdays are lab coat days. As he’s done for 52 years, Smith rolls a heavy-duty clothes rack through every major department at Shands, picking up the white garments as he wishes familiar administrative assistants good morning.
“Nobody’s been in there longer than I have,” he says. The longest-serving employee he’s been able to find has a term capped at 45 years.
At 7 p.m., after closing, Smith drives the 17 miles back home to Alachua. Reaching his backyard, guinea hens and a turkey greet him inside the fences he built himself. The star of his menagerie is Baby Girl, a 12-year-old pony who’s lived on the property as long as Smith and his current wife, Renee, have.
Renee, 65 and married to Smith for 20 years now, has fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis but is a “master of the DVR,” he says. She mostly stays at home, where they enjoy mystery movies and Tim McGraw concerts during his free time.
Smith has two grown daughters, Julie and Angela, and he describes his sons-in-law as computer geeks who aren’t from Florida. He has no sons to mentor in-house like Smith did with his dad. The closest he’s got is a 21-year-old grandson who is more interested in getting his clothes dirty as a flag football referee than in cleaning such uniforms.
Gator memorabilia and family photos surround Smith’s desk at the front of the cleaners. “Bingo,” he says after yet another laundry ticket comes rolling out of the printer with a long chirp.
In the past, he’s thought of selling the business to dry cleaning establishments on the northwest side of town, less than 10 miles away from S&S Cleaners. They could benefit from the equipment and personality of the business, Smith says. Another option could be finding someone young to train.
“It would overwhelm anybody who hasn’t done it for a long time because there’s so many things you’d have to be adept at,” he says.
He doesn’t view either route as just right for him.
“Frankly, I see no scenario right now that [retirement] will happen,” he says. “For Christ’s sake, if I’m alive, I’m not going to sell it, you know what I mean?”
“It’s what I do. It’s what I am,” he adds.
One of Smith’s favorite analogies for this business is of a snowball rolling downhill.
“It’s just going to roll until it hits the bottom,” he explains. “That’s kind of where this place is: it’ll roll downhill until I can’t do it.”
Hugged by plastic wrap, the now-clean wedding dress is draped into the trunk of a silver car pulled over to the side of Southwest Fifth Avenue. The customer drives off after paying Smith, his handiwork waving goodbye as the sparkly layers of tulle bounce up and down.
