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After 70 years in the furniture business, his business is being shut down by Gerard Ruth.
Ruth got his start getting his neighborhood friends to help him haul mattresses for 50 cents an hour and driving a delivery truck. Now, health problems are currently forcing him to close down his Gerard's Furniture store.
"I'm going to continue functioning. I got to deliver all this furniture"
Twenty-two years back, when he turned 65, Ruth brought in an outside company to help him sell off the inventory.
"I went home, and after about 10 days, I went crazy," he said.
Paradoxically, the identical company that helped him with the retirement sale back in 1996 is helping him with this going-out-of-business sale.
87, ruth , nevertheless does business like he did. His store does not have a site. "I don't text and that I don't email," he said. "Only been a couple of years ago we have a computer for bookkeeping."
Gerard's has a focus on luxury furniture.
"All that stuff on the internet, it is like going to the boats. It is gambling. You do not know exactly what you going to get," he explained. "A number of the leather is seconds, some of it's rejects."
Ruth began working in the furniture industry during his senior year at Baton Rouge High at Lloyd Furniture Co., then at 1126 North Blvd.. After graduation, he attended LSU, then joined the Coast Guard.
He returned with the furniture shop to Baton Rouge and to his occupation.
"I had been making $35 a week at Lloyd Furniture, then I got an offer from Hemenway's Furniture on Plank Road," he said.
He had been a salesman at Hemenway's, Ruth got into hydroplane racing. He was a driver for the Tom Cat Baby, a boat with a Corvette engine that won the most dangerous and prestigious Pan American race Lake Pontchartrain in 1958.
Throughout the ship races, Ruth became friends with Lewis Gottlieb, president of City National Bank. Gottlieb endorsed some racing teams.
One afternoon, Ruth got a call from Gottlieb. The proprietor of Simon Furniture Co. had died and his kids weren't interested in taking over the enterprise. Can Ruth be interested in owning a furniture shop?
Gottlieb advised him to check the shop out, and this content if he was interested, he'd help him finance the deal.
"It was a nice store, and that I knew I could do some good over there," Ruth explained. The issue was money. However he did have a $10,000 life insurance policy he bought from a member of the Red Stick Kiwanis Club.
"Mr. Gottlieb advised me to deliver him that insurance coverage into the bank," Ruth explained. "He told me'You are going to create it."
Gerard's Furniture started at 1530 Foster Drive in 1966. There were three employees: the Ruths and a bookkeeper. At the store, Ruth sold furniture during the day. In the evenings, he delivered the items he offered.
At that time, the most popular trend in furniture was Victorian - 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 shop. Ruth told the man he did not have the money to buy the furniture, so that he phoned a Virginia manufacturer and got them to send three suites of Mediterranean-style furniture to Gerard. "That cranked up business," Ruth explained. "We offered the hell out of the furniture."
A couple of decades after, Ruth heard about a store on Florida Boulevard which was up available for $500,000.
"It cost $2 million to restore the whole construction," he explained. The loan was so big, it had to be divided between CNB and St. Landry Bank in Opelousas.
Gerard's Furniture's Florida Boulevard location opened around 1975. The store won national acclaim for its completeness of this choice, which included fabrics, art, furniture, rugs and decorative accessories. One area is filled with George Rodrigue prints. His son Larry prints at another part of the store and has a bunch of original Louisiana art.
To round out the selection Ruth and the significant furniture markets visit in North Carolina.
"Baton Rouge has ever been interested in good taste and standard furniture," he said. "The people who purchase fine furniture want to take a seat in it, want to feel it, and when they have any understanding at all, unzip it and see what is inside ."
Through the years, Ruth has had health issues, such as cancer and diabetes. He had been diagnosed with lung disorder. That led the store to shut after meeting with four children and his wife.
"I got outvoted," he explained. Because his children have professional jobs, the choice was made to liquidate the business.
"I never got rich, but I was able to raise four children, send them off to school -- and visit here not have to pay any associations or attorneys to get them from difficulty," he explained.
Regardless of his years in business, Ruth said he chose to shut the shop.
"My family would go mad trying to work out everything in the furniture shop," he explained.
He made a point of helping eight grandchildren and his children find things in the shop to help decorate their houses.
Plans are to spend selling the inventory off in Gerard's. The shop will close when all is gone.
Ruth said he's seen a increase in customers since announcing he shut down his business. The day after it was announced he closed, 500 people showed up in the store.
"It has been rewarding."