Boston Globe
Jan 8 2005
Sharkay Kletjian; oversaw growth of cleaning company
By Gloria Negri, Globe Staff |
As the daughter of immigrants, Sharkay (Gumushian) Kletjian worked
hard to fulfill her own American dream and helped hundreds of other
immigrants to achieve theirs.
“Mrs. K set an example with her own hard work,” said John Feitor of
Medford, a native of Portugal who started out as a cleaner with Mrs.
Kletjian’s UNICCO janitorial and maintenance service company and
retired as its executive senior vice president. “She was my anchor,
my motivator.”
Mrs. Kletjian, who worked with her husband in UNICCO soon after he
founded it in 1949 and continued to run it after his death in 1969,
died Tuesday at Massachusetts General Hospital of kidney failure. She
was 84 and lived in North Falmouth and Rancho Mirage, Calif.
Born in Istanbul, Mrs. Kletjian was 3 months old when her parents
fled the Armenian genocide in Turkey, came to this country, and
settled in Somerville. Her father, Sempad, was a tailor. Her mother,
Vasganous (Torissian), was a housewife. Mrs. Kletjian was the oldest
of their four children. She was voted outstanding Latin student at
Somerville High School and graduated in 1938 with a full scholarship
to the former Burdett School of Business where she studied accounting
and bookkeeping.
She graduated from Burdett in 1940 and that same year married Herbert
Kletjian, whose family had also fled the Armenian genocide. Mr.
Kletjian had left school in the eighth grade to go to work and was a
candy mixer at the Necco candy company in Cambridge, said their son,
Robert T. of Andover. “Dad decided with a friend to make extra money
by washing windows and cleaning floors,” he said. The two men worked
together for a time and then Mr. Kletjian bought out his partner.
In the early days, UNICCO, the acronym for University Cleaning
Company, was located in Central Square, Cambridge, with a very small
staff. Robert recalled that his father would go out during the day
dressed in a suit to recruit clients and then go out on cleaning jobs
at night. Eventually, Mrs. Kletjian joined her husband in the office
to do the bookkeeping.
The couple’s three sons, now executives of the company, started out
scrubbing floors and doing other janitorial services. “My father
worked us harder and paid us less than other employees,” Robert said,
“and my mother fully endorsed what he did.”
When Mr. Kletjian died in 1969 at the age of 48, Mrs. Kletjian and
her sons took charge.
“She was instrumental in growing the company into what it has
become,” Robert said. “She ran all the backroom operations and was
treasurer through the mid-1990s.”
On its website, UNICCO, now based in the Auburndale village of
Newton, describes itself as “one of North America’s largest
facilities outsourcing companies with over $700 million in annual
sales, with 1,000 customers and 19,000 employees.” The company has
about 20 field offices around the country and in Canada, Robert said.
Many immigrants, unable to speak English when they arrived, were
given their first job at UNICCO and some rose to supervisory
positions. John Correia of Arlington was one of them. He started out
doing janitorial work and now heads UNICCO’s New England Division.
“When I arrived from Brazil, UNICCO was my first job in 1980,”
Correia said. “Mrs. K related to immigrants well and understood the
challenge of uprooting that we faced. She took a motherly interest in
us. She had the rule: Everyone had to speak English in front of her.
If we made a mistake, she corrected us, but always with a smile and
in a friendly way.”
Feitor recalled arriving in the United States in 1970 without work or
a word of English.
“She always taught me to say, ‘Yes, I can’ when I thought I
couldn’t,” Feitor said. “She talked to me like I was her own son. She
screamed at me like I was one of them. When I came to this country I
had dreams I did not think I could fulfill. I saw a star very far
away. It was success. Mrs. K helped me reach that star.”
Besides her son, Mrs. Kletjian leaves two other sons, Steven C. of
Osterville, and Richard J. of Hingham; a daughter, Dianne of
Hamilton; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Funeral services will be held at at 11 a.m. today at Holy Trinity
Armenian Apostolic Church in Cambridge. Burial will be at Forest
Hills Cemetery in Boston.