92 Business View Magazine - April 2016
Comet Cleaners
Fine drycleaning at affordable prices
Jack Godfrey Jr. is the President and CEO of Comet
Cleaners. He’s the third-generation owner of a family
business that goes back almost 100 years. “My grand-
father started in the dry cleaning industry as a kid,”
Godfrey relates. “He grew up on a farm southwest of
Ft. Worth, Texas. He was one of nine children and he
ventured out at a very young age. He had a fifth grade
education and he started working in a tailor shop back
in the 1920s. That’s when he got started in this indus-
try. He didn’t like sitting down at a sewing machine,
and he got interested in the aspect of pressing gar-
ments. By the time he was 18, he bought his first dry
cleaning store.”
Godfrey’s grandfather met his grandmother, Ellen, in
San Angelo, Texas some years later. Together, they
moved back to Ohio, where she had come from, and
Grandfather Jack stayed in the dry cleaning business,
representing dry-cleaning equipment manufacturers
as the Jack Godfrey Equipment Company. “He was a
real fanatic about cleanliness and perfection,” God-
frey says. “He really was instrumental in the whole
evolution of the dry cleaning business as it is today.
He was always on the cutting edge of new equipment.
He worked hand-in-hand with different manufacturers
as he represented their products. “
