traditional furniture
Ruth got his start driving a delivery truck and getting his neighborhood buddies to help him haul mattresses for 50 cents an hour. Health problems are currently forcing him to close down his Gerard's Furniture shop.
"I is not going house to mope about it," Ruth said, sitting in the center of his Florida Boulevard showroom. "I'm going to keep on functioning. I must deliver all this furniture."
When he turned 65, Ruth brought in an outside business to help the stock is sold off by him.
"I went home, and after about 10 days, I went stir crazy," he said.
Ironically, the company that assisted him in 1996 back with all the retirement sale is currently assisting him with this going-out-of-business sale.
Like he did, 87, ruth does business. His store doesn't have a site. "I don't text and that I do not email," he explained. "Just been a few years ago we have a computer for accounting."
Gerard's has a focus on American-made furniture.
"All that stuff on the internet, it's like going into the ships. It's gambling. You do not know what you are going to get," he explained. "A number of the leather is seconds, some of it is rejects."
Ruth started working in the furniture business during his senior year in Baton Rouge High at Lloyd Furniture Co., at 1126 North Blvd.. After graduation, he attended LSU joined the Coast Guard.
In 1953, he returned with the furniture store to his job and also to Baton Rouge.
"I was making $35 a week in Lloyd Furniture, then I got a offer from Hemenway's Furniture on Plank Road," he said.
Throughout that time he was a salesman at Hemenway's, Ruth got into racing. He was a catalyst for the Tom Cat Baby, a ship with a Corvette engine that won the prestigious and dangerous Pan American race on Lake Pontchartrain in 1958.
Through the boat races, Ruth became friends with Lewis Gottlieb. Gottlieb backed some teams.
Ruth got a call from Gottlieb, one afternoon. The owner of Simon Furniture Co. had expired and his children weren't interested in taking over the business. Would Ruth be interested in having a furniture store?
Gottlieb advised him to check the shop out, and if he had been interested, he'd help him fund the offer.
"It was a great store, and I knew I could do some good on the market," Ruth explained. The problem was money. Ruth and his wife, Selma, had just had their second child, and that he needed a couple hundred bucks after paying the hospital bill. However he'd have a $10,000 life insurance policy he purchased from a fellow member of the Red Stick Kiwanis Club.
"Mr. Gottlieb told me to bring him that insurance policy into the lender," Ruth said. "He told me'You are going to make it."
Gerard's Furniture started at 1530 Foster Drive in 1966. There were three employees: a bookkeeper and the Ruths. At the store, Ruth sold furniture during the day. In the evenings, he also delivered.
At that moment, the trend in furniture was Mediterranean- and Spanish-style furniture. A Atlanta furniture salesman visited Gerard's Furniture and advised Ruth he had to find a few of those things in the store to make it successful. Ruth told the guy he did not have the money to buy the furnitureso he got them to ship three suites of furniture to Gerard and called a Virginia maker. "That really cranked business up," Ruth said. "We offered out the hell of that furniture."
A couple of decades later, Ruth heard about a shop on Florida Boulevard that was up for sale for $500,000.
"It cost $2 million to restore the whole building," he said.
Gerard's Furniture's Florida Boulevard place opened around 1975. The shop won acclaim for its completeness of this choice, which included furniture, artwork, fabrics, rugs and decorative accessories. 1 area is filled from the 1970s with George Rodrigue prints. His son Larry has a gallery of original Louisiana art and prints in another area of the store.
To round out the selection Ruth visits the furniture markets in North Carolina every six months to find items.
"Baton Rouge has always been interested in great taste and standard furniture," he said. "The men and women who purchase fine furniture want to take a seat in it, would like to feel it, and if they have any knowledge in any way, unzip it and see what is inside ."
Recently, he was diagnosed with chronic lung disorder. That led him to shut the shop after meeting with four children and his wife.
Because his children have professional occupations, the choice was made to liquidate the business.
"I never got rich, but I managed to raise four kids, send them all off to school -- and not have to pay any institutions or attorneys to get them out of difficulty," he explained.
Despite his years in business, Ruth stated he decided overnight to close the shop.
"My family would go crazy trying to work out everything at the furniture shop," he explained.
He made a point of helping his kids and eight grandchildren find things in the store to help decorate their houses.
Plans are to spend the upcoming few months promoting off all the inventory in next page Gerard's. The shop will close i was reading this when everything is gone.
Ruth said he has seen a boost in customers since announcing he shut down his business. 500 people showed up at the shop the day after it was announced he was closing. The following day about 400 people were there.
"We had them come from 20, 30, 40, even 50 years back to purchase things on our economy," he said. "It has been rewarding."