furniture donation
After 70 years in the furniture business, his business is being shut down by Gerard Ruth.
Ruth got his start in the furniture business getting his neighborhood friends to assist him haul mattresses and driving a delivery truck. Now, health problems are currently forcing him to close down his Gerard's Furniture store.
"I ain’t going house to mope about it," Ruth said, sitting in the middle of the Florida Boulevard showroom. "I am going to continue working. I got to deliver this furniture all ."
Twenty-two years ago, when he turned 65, Ruth brought to help him sell off the inventory.
"I went home, and after about 10 days, I went stir crazy," he explained. "So I came back."
Paradoxically, the firm that assisted him in 1996 back with the retirement sale is helping him with this sale.
Like he did 87, ruth , still does business. His store doesn't have a website. "I really don't text and that I do not email," he explained. "Only been a few years ago we got a computer for bookkeeping."
Gerard's has a focus on luxury, American-made furniture.
"All that stuff on the world wide web, it is like going into the boats. It's gambling. You don't understand exactly what you going to get," he explained. "A number of this leather is seconds, some of it's rejects."
Ruth began working at the furniture business during his senior year at Baton Rouge High at Lloyd Furniture Co., then at 1126 North Blvd.. After graduation, he attended LSU joined the Coast Guard.
In 1953, he returned to his job and to Baton Rouge with the furniture store.
"I was making $35 per week in Lloyd Furniture, then I got an offer from Hemenway's Furniture on Plank Road," he said.
He was a salesman at Hemenway's, Ruth got into racing. He was a catalyst for the Tom Cat Baby, a boat with a Corvette engine that won the most prestigious and dangerous Pan American race on Lake Pontchartrain in 1958.
With Lewis Gottlieb, president of City National Bank, Ruth became buddies Throughout the ship races. Gottlieb endorsed some racing teams.
Ruth got a call. The proprietor of Simon Furniture Co. had died and his kids weren't interested in taking over the enterprise. Would Ruth be interested in owning a furniture shop?
Gottlieb told the store to be checked out by him, and he would help him fund the deal when he had been interested.
"It was a great shop, and I knew I could do some go to website good over there," Ruth said. The problem was money. Selma, his wife and ruth, had just had their second child, and he just had a couple hundred dollars after paying the hospital bill. But he'd have a life insurance policy he bought from a fellow member of the Red Stick Kiwanis Club.
"Mr. Gottlieb advised me to bring him that insurance coverage to the lender," Ruth said. "He told me'You're going to make it."
The Furniture of gerard opened in 1530 Foster Drive in 1966. There were three workers: the Ruths and a bookkeeper. Throughout the day, Ruth sold furniture in the shop. In the evenings, he also delivered.
At that time, the trend in furniture has been Mediterranean- and Spanish-style furniture. A successful Atlanta furniture salesman visited Gerard's Furniture and told Ruth, he had to find some of those things in the store. Ruth told the man he did not have the money so that he called a Virginia manufacturer and got them to ship three suites of Mediterranean-style furniture to Gerard. "That cranked business up," Ruth said. "We sold the hell out of the furniture."
A few decades after, Ruth heard about a store.
The loan was so large, it had to be divided between CNB and St. Landry Bank in Opelousas.
Gerard's Furniture's Florida Boulevard place opened around 1975. The store won national acclaim for its completeness of this choice, which included fabrics, artwork, furniture, rugs and decorative accessories. One area is filled in the early 1970s with George Rodrigue prints. His son Larry prints at another area of the shop and includes a gallery of original Louisiana art.
Ruth visits the significant furniture markets in North Carolina each six months to find items to round out the selection at Gerard's.
"Baton Rouge has ever been interested in good taste and standard furniture," he explained. "The men and women who buy fine furniture want to take a seat inside, would like to feel it, and when they have any understanding at all, unzip it and see what's inside ."
He was diagnosed with chronic lung disease. That led the shop read review to close after meeting with his wife and four kids.
"I got outvoted," he explained. Since his children have professional jobs, the choice was made to liquidate the organization.
"I never got rich, but I managed to raise four children, send them off to school -- and not have to pay any institutions or attorneys to get them out of trouble," he explained.
Despite his years in business, Ruth said he decided overnight to close the store.
"My family would go crazy trying to work out everything at the furniture shop," he said.
He also made a point of helping his kids and eight grandchildren find things in the store to help decorate their houses.
Plans are to spend selling off of the stock . The shop will close when everything is gone.
Ruth said he's seen a increase in clients, since announcing he shut down his organization. 500 people showed up at the store the day after it was announced he was closing.
"We had them come from 20, 30, 40, even 50 years ago to purchase things on our economy," he explained. "It has been rewarding."