COMMENTARY
Bruce Andriatch: A man’s way of putting his family first
Updated: 07/29/08 8:28 AM
From the street, Clarence’s newest business appears to be a coffee shop.
You have to look much closer to learn that it’s really an insurance policy designed to keep a man’s children from leaving Western New York.
“Golden handcuffs” is the term Arthur Fuerst prefers.
Fuerst, who founded Arthur’s Executive Cleaners 22 years ago and built it into a lucrative four-store enterprise, didn’t need to start another business. He doesn’t need the money or the headache. What he needs is to know that his family is going to be within driving distance.
“I would like to be around my grandchildren. I don’t want to have them leave and see them two times a year,” he said. “If you look at past civilizations, any time any civilization has fallen, it’s because the family unit fell. I see that happening now, and I don’t want that to happen.”
That’s why his middle son, Richard Budde, 22, is behind the counter at Goodrich Coffee & Tea. It’s why the two older boys, Nathaniel and James Budde, 27 and 25, respectively, are working at the cleaners. And if form holds, once Aaron Fuerst, 16, and Caleb Fuerst, 15, decide what they want to do with their lives, they’ll probably be doing it somewhere with a ZIP code that starts with “14.”
Fuerst was born in Brooklyn and followed the traditional path seemingly taken by all former New Yorkers who now live here: four years of college.
With the ink from his University at Buffalo diploma still wet, he decided to start a cleaning business after hearing that the failure rate for such businesses is only about 6 percent. A store on Main Street and Harlem Road in Snyder begat a store in Cattaraugus County and then two more additions in the Northtowns, one of which is at Main and Goodrich in Clarence.
He married a woman who brought three sons into the family, and the couple had two more. For Fuerst, business and life were good.
The two older boys were interested in the cleaning business, so Fuerst put them to work. The third was working at a local Starbucks when Fuerst asked him what he wanted to do with his life. He responded: “I don’t know, but this is a thing I really like.”
“Then it hit me,” Fuerst said. “Why do I work hard? Why do I have all things I have? I don’t need any fancy cars. What’s important is family. I want them here. I want them all out of the house but next door, not in the next state.”
So Fuerst razed the house that sat on the one-acre Clarence parcel where the cleaners is located and got into the coffee shop business.
That’s where you’ll find Richard Budde, doing what he likes and doing it down the street from his house. His old man will help him get started with the bookkeeping and other tasks and then plans to step aside.
He’s not sure about the other two boys. One wants to be a lawyer, the other wants to own his own business, both of which remain easy to do in Western New York. The prospect makes their father smile.
“I heard this story once from this immigrant who came to this country with zero,” Fuerst said. “He had a tailoring business and got married and had kids and put them all through school, and he was successful. But he never kept books, records. Someone said to him, ‘How do you know how well you did?’ He said: ‘Take my house, my kids’ educations and everything I have, minus the shirt I have on. That’s my profit.’ “
Fuerst sees his profit every day. He plans to keep it that way.
