GREENVILLE – Dennis Leeper, the new owner of R&R Distributors (Rainbow Cleaners) Sales and Service, is still keeping a family tradition going.
He has already begun to move his products, which include Rainbow sweepers, various oils and lots of attachments for the sweepers to set up at the Darke County Fairgrounds in the Coliseum for the upcoming week.
He will also be doing his traditional beach ball/Rainbow sweeper demonstrations to entertain fair-goers, young and old, once again and is looking forward to the event.
For the past two years, Leeper, the repairman for these sweepers since 1983, has kept alive the legacy of his father-in-law, the late Nevin “Nub” Hiestand, who previously owned the business until his death at age 89 on April 19, 2023.
Leeper has taken over ownership and is making sure the store’s display is at the fair for R&R’s 60th anniversary again this year and beyond.
Dennis had hauled milk for his father, the late Ed Leeper, and then worked as a maintenance person for Cal-Maine near Union City from where he retired in 2020, all the while being a full-time repairman at his father-in-law’s shop.
Both Dennis and his wife, Karlyn, who passed in 2016, came aboard to help out in the family business.
Now, their daughter, Tracy Wendel, is the receptionist there as well.
Hiestand then showed his son-in-law, Dennis, how to make the repairs on the sweepers.
“I can work on any Rainbow out there,” Dennis said. “There is not one that comes in here that I can’t fix. I went through training in the late ’90s and I have even had to show some trainers what I’d learned. Now everything is done over the phone and Internet.”
He said, like always, he is looking forward to talking to fair-goers and potential new customers.”
Hiestand was beside himself when COVID-19 closed down the fairgrounds among other events in 2020.
Disappointed because it would have been his 56th year as a vendor at the fair, it was decided with his office’s help, to set up anyway at their shop at 929 Front St. in 2020.
So, in 2020, the new Rainbow sweeper they wanted to introduce was set up in their shop, complete with the fair sign they were going to use when they thought the fair would happen.
The exhibit unveiled its most recent model at that time, the SRX, which had many more technical features on it.
In that previous interview, the then 86-year-old commented, “I never missed a fair. I was looking forward to seeing old customers and making new ones.”
It came to be that Nub was able to attend the fair with his products the following year. And, the business has been on display since then, as a tribute to the patriarch of the family.
Nub is reportedly famous for saying, “I don’t know much, but I know Rainbows.”
He started selling Rainbow sweepers at his home in Rossburg in 1964, and began servicing them in the early 1980s.
He explained at that time that his wife, Shirley, who died in 2013, wanted a new vacuum cleaner.
“She wanted a Rainbow. The price was $277.75 in 1966,” he recalled. “I didn’t want to get anything expensive because I could get a Hoover for $49.”
However, after visiting Robert Klenke’s office in Greenville, Nub found out what the Rainbow was all about and, subsequently, asked Klenke if he could get a job selling them. And, Klenke obliged.
Hiestand took his product door-to-door.
“We had no route; you just go,” he said in that earlier interview. “I don’t like to brag, but I’d say it was successful.”
The most he sold in one month was 107 sweepers in 1995 and a plaque in the shop states such.
Before he worked for Rainbow, Hiestand was involved in farming and worked at Fram, from where he retired in 1986.
“We had 1,400 people working at Fram and about every evening I had a place to show my sweepers,” he said.
