modern furniture warehouse
After 70 years in furniture business, his business is currently shutting down.
Ruth got his start at the furniture business 70 years back driving a delivery truck and receiving his neighborhood buddies to assist him haul mattresses for 50 cents an hour. Health problems are currently forcing him to close down his Gerard's Furniture shop.
"I am going to continue functioning. I must deliver all this furniture."
Twenty-two decades back, when he turned 65, Ruth brought in an outside company to help him sell off the stock.
"I went home, and after about 10 days, I went stir crazy," he said. "So I came back."
Ironically, the company that helped him in 1996 back with the retirement sale is currently helping him with this going-out-of-business sale.
Like he did 87, ruth , still does business. His shop does not have a website. "I really don't text and I don't email," he said. "Just been a couple of years ago we got a computer for accounting."
Gerard's has a focus on high-end, American-made furniture.
"All that stuff on the internet, it's like going into the ships. It's gambling. You don't understand what you are going to get," he said. "A number 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.
He returned to Baton Rouge and also to his job with the furniture store.
He was a salesman in Hemenway's, Ruth got into hydroplane racing. He was a driver for your Tom Cat Baby, a boat with a Corvette engine which won the prestigious and dangerous Pan American race Lake Pontchartrain in 1958.
Throughout the boat races, Ruth became buddies with Lewis Gottlieb. Some rushing teams were backed by gottlieb.
Ruth got a call 1 day. The proprietor of Simon Furniture Co. had died and his children weren't interested in taking over the enterprise. Can Ruth be interested in owning a furniture shop?
Gottlieb told him to check the store out, and when he was interested, he'd help him fund the deal.
"It was a nice shop, and that I knew I could hop over to these guys do some good over there," Ruth explained. The issue was money. Ruth and his wife, Selma, had just had their second child, and he only needed a couple hundred dollars after paying the hospital bill. But he did have a life insurance coverage he purchased from a fellow member of the Red Stick Kiwanis Club.
"Mr. Gottlieb told me to deliver him that insurance policy to the bank," Ruth explained. "He told me'You are going to create it."
Gerard's Furniture opened in 1530 Foster Drive in 1966. There were three workers: the Ruths and a bookkeeper. At the shop, Ruth sold furniture Throughout the afternoon. In the evenings, he also delivered.
At that time, the hottest trend in furniture was Mediterranean- and Spanish-style furniture. An effective Atlanta furniture salesman detected Gerard's Furniture and advised Ruth, he had to find some of those things in the store. Ruth told the man he didn't have the money so he called a Virginia manufacturer and got them to ship three suites of Mediterranean-style furniture on credit to Gerard's. "That really cranked business up," Ruth said. "We offered out the hell of the furniture"
Ruth discovered about a shop on Florida Boulevard that was up for sale for $500,000.
"It cost $2 million to restore the entire construction," he said.
The Florida Boulevard location of Gerard's Furniture opened around 1975. The store won acclaim for its completeness of the selection, which included fabrics, artwork, furniture, rugs and accessories. One area is filled from the 1970s with George Rodrigue prints. His son Larry has a bunch of original Louisiana art and prints in a different area of the store.
To round out the selection at Gerard's, Ruth visits with the furniture markets in North Carolina each six months to locate items.
"Baton Rouge has always been interested in great taste and traditional furniture," he explained. "The people who buy fine furniture want to sit inside, want to feel it, and when they have any knowledge at all, unzip it and see what is inside it."
Recently, he was diagnosed with lung disease. That led the store to close after meeting with four kids and his wife.
"I got outvoted," he said. Since his children have professional occupations, the decision was made to liquidate the organization.
"I never got rich, but I was able to raise four kids, send them off to college -- view it now and not need to pay any associations or lawyers to get them out of trouble," he explained.
Regardless of his years in business, Ruth stated he decided to close the store.
"My family would go crazy trying to work out everything at the furniture store," he explained.
He also made a point of helping his children and eight grandchildren find items in the store to help decorate their own houses.
Plans are to spend promoting off all of the inventory in Gerard's. When everything is gone, the store will close.
Ruth said he has seen a boost in customers since announcing his business shut down. The day after it was announced he was shutting, 500 people showed up at the store. The next day about 400 people were there.
"We had them come from 20, 30, 40, even 50 years back to buy things on our sale," he said. "It has been rewarding."