By Stacey Dresner

WEST HARTFORD – French Cleaners in West Hartford has always been known for its dry cleaning and alteration services, particularly cleaning and restoring wedding gowns and other high-end clothing.

Founded in 1911 by Morris Gassner, the Jewish family-owned business has a long history of service to the greater Hartford area.

In the past two weeks, French Cleaners has taken on another mission – manufacturing face masks for those dealing with COVID-19 on the medical frontlines.

A crew of four seamstresses and tailors at French Cleaners began making  heavy duty protective face masks on March 31 for doctors and nurses in the OB-GYN department of Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford.

So far the crew has constructed approximately 100 of the surgical masks, all free-of-charge.

“We are just trying to do whatever we can to help,”Phil Cote, owner of French Cleaners, told the Ledger.

Like may small businesses, French Cleaners has been severely affected by COVID – 19. Mark Hatch, manager of French Cleaners and Cote’s son-in-law, says that sales have dropped 60-70  percent since people started staying home and the business was forced to close its doors to the public.

“We were deemed an essential business but that is still tricky,” Hatch explains. “We shifted operations to primarily route delivery and closed our storefront to protect customers and employees. We are still open to customers either on route or dropping orders in our 24/7 dropbox.  We also are doing curbside pickup and remote pickup.”

Like many businesses, the company was concerned about the welfare of its employees during this slow time.

“Our volume faded drastically and we were prepared to start layoffs to manage cash flow and help employees so they could collect unemployment,” Hatch says.

When Congress passed the $2 trillion stimulus plan, with funds set aside for small businesses, French Cleaners applied to the Payroll Protection Program loan (PPP).

‘The PPP program will forgive funds used for employees’ payroll so we decided it’s best to keep everyone on board and ensure they receive a paycheck for themselves and their families,” Hatch says. “A lot of this is pending our loan and approval [so it’s] not really a sure thing but we have kept our full staff on board for now.”

With a full staff and increasingly less work, management began looking for ways to keep their employees busy and working.

“There was a lot of chatter on the news and online about PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) shortages,” Hatch says. “I reached out to the community to see what we could do.”

At the same time, Dr. Frank Jackson, a resident in the OB-GYN department at Saint Francis and some of his fellow doctors and nurses were growing concerned, as the coronavirus spread, about the possible shortage of medical equipment, especially after the World Health Organization (WHO) put out a warning that the supply of masks was likely to run out.

“We were initially doing very well with our supply of surgical masks and then we started looking around at what was going on around the country. We decided better safe than sorry and began to plan for whatever might come,” Jackson explains.

Jackson had read that the staff at the University of Florida Health’s Department of Anesthesiology had come up with prototypes for surgical masks, using Halyard H600, a medical fabric that is used in hospitals to wrap sterilized instruments and which filters out 99 percent of particles. The university had put all of the instructions for how to create the masks on its website.

With that information in hand, Jackson reached out to the Greater Hartford community to find someone to make the masks. He posted a message on the “Friends and Neighbors” page on Facebook asking for help creating the face masks, and he was put in touch with Hatch.

“It seemed like the right thing to do so I instructed my staff to match the design and just start pumping out the masks for Frank and his team at St Francis,” Hatch says.

Saint Francis supplied the Halyard H600 fabric; French cleaners used elastic, yarn and wire that they had in their supply. (The wire is used for the nose-piece, ensuring the mask stays around the nose. The yarn, along with the elastic, are for the masks’ ties). The tailors began making the masks, using patterns they received from Saint Francis, based on the instructions on the University of Florida Health website.

“We are fortunate we  have a lot of talented people, and we are absolutely happy to help,” says the shop’s manager, Dorothy Dziopa, who is coordinating the mask-making effort.

Saint Francis dropped off more material at French Cleaners on the eve of Passover.

“They provide material and we will see how many we can make,” Cote says. “We’ve got a great production line now, so we’re set up for mass producing. I don’t see this being over for quite some time. Fortunately, the ones we’re making now are of a material that can be washed and reused.”

Jackson and his colleagues at Saint Francis are grateful for French Cleaner’s efforts.

“They have been tremendous as far as giving us a large number of masks at this point, enough that every nurse in NICU [Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit], every nurse in labor and delivery, every OB-GYN and resident in the department has access to one if it is necessary,” Jackson says. “They are making some more for us, as long as we can get them the fabric.” 

For people who are not healthcare providers French Cleaners is also making more standard face masks, that while not as protective as the surgical masks, help to keep water droplets out.

“A lot of people are looking for masks,” Cote says. “We’ve been making other masks that aren’t made from medical material, but just regular  material in all different colors and materials. We are making them and giving them away to all kinds of people since the new direction was given that everybody should be wearing masks. As fast as we can make them we’ll give them away.”

Cote said the biggest challenge has been keeping up supplies.

“I finally just got one of my orders filled. I was looking for elastic for different kinds of masks, but everybody is sold out. I keep trying every day to buy whatever I can get my hands on, it doesn’t matter what color or size, just so we have it,” he says.

Cote is married to Susan Gassner Cote, the daughter of Roz Gassner, who now lives in East Hampton, and the late Mickey Gassner, the previous owner of French Cleaners. Susan is the great-granddaughter of company founder Morris Gassner. Hatch is married to Elyse Cote Hatch, Phil and Susan’s daughter.

“I’m fourth generation and now Mark is fifth generation here,” Cote says.

And the family just got bigger.

On the night of April 6, Elyse gave birth to the Hatch’s second son– two weeks early – at Saint Francis Hospital.

“We had our delivery in the same department French was making masks for,” Hatch told the Ledger in an email send the day after his son’s birth. “The staff here is doing a great job and are very appreciative. Multiple residents thanked us and the president of the hospital, Dr. John Rodis – a longtime French Clearners’ customer – came down and thanked me. I told him we would just keep making them.”

Main Photo: Staff in the OB-GYN Department at Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford sent a note to the staff at French Cleaners, thanking them for their hard work making surgical masks to keep Saint Francis staff safe.