Louie and Juve Diaz close the doors on their last day at Valley Cleaners in downtown Solvang, the dry cleaners they have owned and operated since 1951.

Since 1941, Valley residents have taken their silks, woolens, and wedding dresses to Valley Cleaners, a family enterprise known for its friendly staff and quality service. The recent closing of the little shop on the corner of Copenhagen and Atterdag marks the end of an era in downtown Solvang, and fans of the neighborhood fixture will sorely miss it.

Brothers Juve and Louie Diaz owned and operated Valley Cleaners for 51 years, and employed most of their family members at one time or another. Long-time patrons, who came to know the family, watched the Diaz children grow into young adults as they worked behind the counter that divided the storefront from the business end of the long narrow building.

Juve Diaz, a Solvang resident for half a century, explains with a friendly snort that his name, Juventino, is south of the border Danish, and reveals that the care of haberdashery came naturally to him and his brother.

My dad owned a tailor shop in Santa Barbara, called Cinco de Mayo. He opened it in 1925, and the whole family was raised there.î

The elder Diaz did a brisk trade from his location on Haley Street, and when entrepreneur Jess Clark opened a dry cleaning firm right next door, business flourished. Juve and two of his siblings worked for Jess occasionally, tagging clothes, running the front counter, whatever needed doing.

Besides tailoring, Juve's dad taught the whole family to love music, and five of the nine children learned to play instruments. Juve's oldest sister tickled the ivories, another sister mastered the accordion, one brother took up the sax, Louie played guitar, and Juve embraced the stately double bass, an instrument he still keeps in his bedroom and plucks just about every day.

Around 1938, while Juve was still a youngster, his dad taught him how to press garments, first with an iron and damp cloth, and then with a manual pressing machine. In 1945, when Jess Clark purchased the five-year old Valley Cleaners, in Solvang, and couldn't find any local help, he called on the Diaz children to lend a hand.

Juve relates that when the Depression ended and the economy was going 100 miles per hour,î he was earning good money working for his dad and playing music with his siblings at El Paseo. He married his wife, Ruth, in 1949, and two years later, when Jess Clark decided to go into the egg business, Juve and his brother bought the Solvang dry cleaning shop.

To deliver prompt, high quality service, they did all the dry cleaning on-site, and following in their father's footsteps, they built a business that involved the whole family.

At first, we were on the outskirts of town,î Juve remembers those early days when open fields bordered the shop, now parking is a problem. He stands on the corner and points to where Dania Hall and Soren Petersen's house once stood, gestures toward the Chimney Sweep where golden grass once carpeted the land.

Over the decades, the town swept around and beyond the building that housed Valley Cleaners, and stringent regulations raised the cost of doing business. The Diaz children grew up, moved out, and went on to careers of their own, none of them in the dry cleaning game. Persuaded by a sluggish economy, fierce competition, and the absence of a buyer, Juve and Louie called it quits on May 11, 2002.

They pulled out the presses, the dry cleaning machines, the trusty cash register, and gathered up the odds and ends a tattered poster of a near-naked W. C Fields, an ancient treadle sewing machine jury-rigged with power, a moth-eaten buffalo head, a set of aged golf clubs that had accumulated over the years. What they couldn't sell they stashed in a large barn in Los Alamos.

Radio music ricochets around the empty space of the once-thriving shop, and ghostly outlines on dusty walls bear mute witness to the swishing, humming equipment that used to labor there. All that's left on the circular rack that bristled with freshly cleaned clothes for five decades is a bulky wedding dress dropped off in 1992, an unclaimed blouse, and a red dress brought in by a customer who is now deceased, the rag-tag ends of a half century in business.

When asked if he has any parting words for his many customers, Juve Diaz looks tiredly around the vacant building where he spent 50 years of his life and says quietly, Thank you very much.