AUBURN, Maine — The year was 1976.
The United States of America celebrated its bicentennial. Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in the presidential election.
And Barry Morrill’s future in-laws were growing Childs Linen Service in Auburn, Maine.
“At the time, they didn’t have the building or anything,” he shares. “They would drive around during the day to local customers they had in Lewiston-Auburn-Hicks.
“They would sort at night in the driveway and then go into a laundromat overnight that they had an agreement with.”
Eventually, the couple saved enough money for a building and commercial laundry equipment.
But by the time Morrill married their daughter in the 1990s, his father-in-law had retired, and the operation wasn’t working to gain new clients or even retain customers.
“I think we might have had around $196,000 in revenue when I bought it,” he says. “We turned it into running two shifts seven days a week within the first six months and just kept going from there because I went out did sales and grabbed everything I could.
“We went in the direction of healthcare because healthcare doesn’t move up and down like restaurants do. They were only doing restaurants, and we expanded it.”
Since then, Morrill has worked to grow the business, overcoming every laundry business obstacle.
But he couldn’t foresee the run of disasters headed his way starting in 2019.
Over about four years, Childs Linen Service endured, and overcame, fire, pandemic and flooding.
FIRE
The fire broke out on Jan. 4, 2019, on the side of the building with a wooden roof—and a lot of laundry equipment.
“That whole wooden roof, about 3,000 to 4,000 square feet of it, was totally gone,” shares Morrill. “All that had fallen, collapsed right down onto my washers. I mean, it was just a mess, a nightmare.”
The fire happened on a Friday. By Monday, Childs Linen Service was running trucks and delivering product.
“It was a very busy weekend,” says Morrill. “I contacted one of my competitors up here on a Sunday afternoon. He was skiing and took my call, thankfully, and I told him what had happened. They said have your trucks come over.
“We had a bunch of stuff that did not burn. It was more smoke and water on one side. Some stuff obviously did burn, but we just really needed to get product rewashed and reprocessed so we could get it out and start delivering.”
Childs was able to replace the product that burned by purchasing it from its helpful competitor.
“We just kept making deliveries and doing everything that we needed to do right from the get-go,” Morrill shares. “Thankfully, we didn’t skip a beat for deliveries even come Monday, even though we literally had no building or equipment or anything or inventory at that point.
“It was a pretty trying time there, but it was key to have someone that you could call, especially up here in Maine.”
The cause of the fire was an uncooled batch of restaurant towels placed in a cart directly from a dryer at the end of a Friday shift.
Morrill had surveillance video available that showed the progress from the goods smoking after two hours of sitting in the cart to some flames to fire.
“They hit the time clock and went out the door at about 5:30,” he says. “It was getting very smoky, and by 7, you definitely saw a lot of orange and flames.
“It melted the poly cart they were in and that fell open and caught a poly cart next to it, and then it caught a workstation table, like a folding area, and went right up the wall into the ceiling and then took out the whole ceiling of the whole wash side.”
Afterward, Morrill and his crew reviewed safety procedures.
“We saw how it got started, and that was because we didn’t do a proper walkthrough and shutdown procedures that did not happen,” he shares.
“I tell them most of the fires in our business start from bar mops that spontaneously combust, and no one believes you until it happens. They pretty much believe it, now.”
While Childs Linen Service was back processing goods for customers (only one customer left for another provider) as best it could just a couple days after the fire, rebuilding efforts took months.
“We were down from Jan. 4 when it happened. We fired back up in September. It was about nine months,” Morrill says.
“We’re all of us are very extremely busy with all the seasonal business that comes on in the summer. We were bumped a little bit here and there. We went and got a temporary location. We had no equipment there except a couple of wrappers that I had to buy, and we would wrap product there.
“(The competitor) didn’t want to run some small batches, so we were sending people to laundromats, which was really high-priced for what we do and how much we normally would spend. But again, it kept us going, kept us rolling.
“It was nice to not do all that after nine months.”
Check back next Tuesday to learn how Childs Linen Service got through the pandemic.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].