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It was  five years ago yesterday, that George Hallak passed away.  He was the brother of our father, Joseph Hallak, Senior.  George spent his entire life in the dry cleaning business – beginning in the Bronx, and then moving to Teaneck, NJ.  He sold his business in 2001 and we had the pleasure of having our Uncle George as part of the Hallak Cleaners team for the last five years of his life.  Everyone who worked at his side loved him, and his contagious smile and constant exuberance are greatly missed by all who had the privilege and pleasure of knowing him.

John-Claude and Joseph, Jr.

In Loving Memory of George Hallak

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Experience Necessary

A Well-Dressed Dry Cleaner, Just Like Dad

By ROBIN FINN

John-Claude Hallak knows the proper way to press trousers, coax a spot from a wedding gown, or restore a carpet to its original glory. He is a second-generation dry cleaner; his parents, Joseph and Marie-Louise, opened Hallak Cleaners on the Upper East Side in 1966. (His mother, widowed in 1992, is the president.) Mr. Hallak, 54, who has a master’s degree in economics from Rutgers University, joined the company in 1982; he and his younger brother, Joseph, 49, are both vice presidents. He lives in Basking Ridge, N.J., with his wife, Michelle, and their 16-year-old twin sons.

Destined to clean: I was doomed to be in the family business. I remember being about 8 and asking my father if I could go to work with him on a Saturday and him telling me, ‘If you come with me, I’ll give you a dollar, but if you stay home and help your mother, I’ll give you $5.’ And I took the dollar. My first real job was to make pants hangers by putting those sticky pieces of cardboard on the bottom of wire hangers; it was work you could probably teach a rhesus monkey to do.

Aspirations: It was always assumed that I’d be the first one in the family to go to college and live the American dream. I wanted to be a lawyer. I worked weekends and summers at the store. I was a politics and history junkie, so it was a big thrill for me to clean Theodore H. White’s carpets.

Dressing like Dad: I emulated my father, always wore a shirt and tie. Even in the 100-degree heat pressing pants in the summer in the store’s basement, I never took that tie off. You physically removed the damp clothes from the machine; there were these big vents called ‘sniffers,’ but you could still smell the chemicals. It never bothered me. I guess it’s genetic.

The family business: My father was thinking of selling in 1980. He was such a perfectionist, the Felix Unger of dry cleaning, but he was tired. So my younger brother, Joseph, dropped out of Seton Hall to keep the business going. After I graduated, I worked nine months for an equity firm. Then my father and brother asked me to join them. I said yes, with two conditions: that we move our production facility out of New York City and expand it, and that they let me introduce automation and computerization.

Thinking big: By 1983 we had a facility in Hackensack. Now it’s 13,000 square feet and employs 60 people. But 80 percent of our clientele is in New York City. People who spend $10,000 a month on dry cleaning are not the norm, but we have them. I had a client who spent $150,000 a year. He even sent us his underwear. There was a template on how his boxer shorts should be folded.