chair repair



After 70 years in the furniture business, his company is shutting down.

Ruth got his start in the furniture industry getting his neighborhood buddies to help him haul mattresses and 70 years back driving a delivery truck. Health problems are currently forcing him to close down his Gerard's Furniture shop.

"I am gonna keep on working. I must deliver this furniture all ."

When he turned 65, Ruth brought in an outside company to help him sell off the inventory.

"So I came back."

Paradoxically, the company that assisted him with all the retirement sale back is assisting him with this sale.

Like he always did ruth, 87, still does business. His shop doesn't have a site. "I don't text and that I don't email," he explained. "Only been a few years ago we got a computer for accounting."

Gerard's includes a focus on high-end furniture made out of premium leather.

"All that stuff on the world wide web, it is like going into the boats. It is gambling. You don't understand what you going to get," he explained. "Some of the leather is seconds, some of it is rejects."

Ruth started working in the furniture industry during his senior year in Baton Rouge High in Lloyd Furniture Co., then at 1126 North Blvd.. After graduation, he attended LSU, then joined the Coast Guard during the Korean War.

He returned with the furniture store to his job and to Baton Rouge.



Throughout that time he had been a salesman in Hemenway's, Ruth got into hydroplane racing. He was a catalyst for your Tom Cat Baby, a boat with a Corvette engine that won the prestigious and dangerous Pan American race Lake Pontchartrain.

Through the boat races, Ruth became friends with Lewis Gottlieb, president of City National Bank. Some rushing teams were backed by gottlieb.

Ruth got a call one afternoon. The owner of Simon Furniture Co. had died and his kids weren't interested in taking over the enterprise. Would Ruth be interested in having a furniture store?

Gottlieb told him to have a look at the store, and he would help him finance the offer, when he was interested.

"It was a great store, and that I knew I could do some good on the market," Ruth said. The issue was money. Selma, his wife along with ruth, had just had their second child, and he just needed a couple hundred bucks after paying the hospital bill. But he'd have a $10,000 life insurance policy he bought from a fellow member of the Red Stick Kiwanis Club.

"Mr. Gottlieb advised me to deliver straight from the source him that insurance coverage into the bank," Ruth said. "He told me'You're going to make it."

The Furniture of gerard opened in 1966 in 1530 Foster Drive. There were three employees: the Ruths and a bookkeeper. Ruth sold furniture. In the evenings, he also delivered the items he offered.

At that moment, the hottest trend in furniture has been Mediterranean- and Spanish-style furniture. A successful Atlanta furniture salesman visited Gerard's Furniture and advised Ruth he needed to find some of those things in the shop. Ruth told the man he did not have the money to purchase the furniture, so that he got them to send three suites of Mediterranean-style furniture on credit to Gerard's and phoned a Virginia maker. "That really cranked business up," Ruth said. "We offered out the hell of that furniture"

Ruth heard about a store. Ruth checked out the construction at 7330 Florida Blvd. and chose to buy it and fix it up.



The Florida Boulevard location of Gerard's Furniture opened around 1975. The shop won acclaim for the completeness of the selection, which included art furniture, fabrics, rugs and decorative accessories. One room is filled from the 1970s with George Rodrigue prints. His son Larry prints in a different part of the store and has a bunch of original Louisiana art.

To round out the selection in Gerard's, the significant furniture markets are visited by Ruth in North Carolina.

"Baton Rouge has ever been interested in great taste and traditional furniture," he said. "The people who buy nice furniture want to sit inside, would like to feel this, and if they have any knowledge at all, unzip it and see what's inside ."

Through the years, Ruth has had health problems, such as diabetes and look at here cancer. He was diagnosed with chronic lung disease. That led the shop to shut after meeting with four kids and his wife.

"I got outvoted," he explained. Because his kids have professional jobs, the decision 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 from trouble," he said.

Regardless of his years in business, Ruth stated he chose overnight to close the store.

"My family would go crazy trying to work out everything in the furniture shop," he said.

He made a point of helping his children and eight grandchildren find things in the shop to help decorate their homes.

Plans are to spend the next few months selling all the stock off in Gerard's. The shop will close, when all is gone.

Ruth said he's seen a boost in customers, since announcing he shut down his organization. 500 people showed up at the shop the day after it was announced he was shutting.

"It's been rewarding."

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