Ben Kluger; Founded and Ran Garment District Business

Ben Kluger, who operated apparel manufacturing supplier Ben Kluger & Associates in the Los Angeles garment district for 55 years, has died. He was 86.

Kluger died Saturday in Studio City of cancer, his company said.

Born and reared in the neighborhood around Maple Avenue and Adams Boulevard, Kluger found his life work at age 13 when he landed a job as delivery boy for an apparel company.

In 1937, when he was 23, he scraped together $582 and started his company, a business he ran (for many years with son Lance) until 1992 when Kluger Co. was sold to Freudenberg Nonwovens USA. Initially, Kluger hustled around the garment district buying leftover thread, buttons, ribbon and linings from the big jobbers and selling to small clothing makers.

“To make people think I had inventory,” he told The Times in 1987, recalling those lean years, “I used to take empty boxes and keep them on my shelves. A lot of them.”

But Kluger and his business prospered, eventually specializing in Pellon, a fused synthetic lining for collars and cuffs. Well before he sold the company, which was renamed Pellon Sales-West, Kluger had become a self-made millionaire, employing up to 200 people and supplying more than 180 manufacturers.

In more than half a century, Kluger never strayed far from Maple Avenue. In the early years he had a factory in the heart of the garment district around Maple and 9th Street, north of the Santa Monica Freeway. In the late 1980s, he built a new, larger plant in his old neighborhood south of the freeway.

In the process, he became embroiled in a failure of state and city attempts to create jobs in areas with high unemployment.

In 1985, the Klugers bought an eight-parcel property at Maple and 28th Street in the government-sanctioned “Central City Enterprise Zone,” complete with promised tax breaks, low-interest financing and payroll subsidies.

But the land, though zoned for manufacturing, also was designated for residential use in the area’s community plan. Organized neighborhood residents claimed the factory would open their area to “sweatshops” and cause them to lose their homes.

The city Planning Commission sided with the residents, and the Klugers, who had already cleared the property for construction, lost their deposit, financing and the site.

Eventually, Kluger built his factory nearby in the area where he had grown up.

But for many years, the Kluger debacle was cited as an example of how government’s good intentions can go very wrong. As he told The Times in 1990, “We’re sorry we ever met anyone from the city of Los Angeles.”

Partly because of that experience, in 1996 he helped found the Downtown Properties Owners Assn.

An active Mason and Shriner all his life, Kluger kept fit with a five-mile daily jog well into his 80s.

Kluger is survived by his wife of 37 years, Gloria; son, Lance; sister, Mina Lewin; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His daughter, Linda Levine, preceded him in death.

The family has asked that any memorial donations be made to charities funding cancer research and treatment.