La Grange’s Flooring Historian – Gary Lincke
Gary and Gale Lincke, who own and operate Lincke Floors Inc. in La Grange, celebrated the family-owned business’s 70th anniversary in June 2021. Gary’s hand rests on a linoleum cradle, an invaluable tool back in the day when that vintage floor covering came in 1,100-pound rolls. When he was a youngster, Gary would roll the linoleum cradle up and down the showroom floor using his hands as paddles. His father, Delton Lincke, would tell him to stop when a customer walked in. Now Gary and Gale’s grandsons put the vintage flooring apparatus to the same test. Photo by Elaine Thomas While growing up in La Grange, Gary was a Boy Scout. He earned 25¢ for every lawn he cut with a push mower and enjoyed the freedom of riding his bike all over town with his pals. He served as a photographer on the Leopard Spots yearbook in high school. He’s at far left with (left to right): Kenneth Eilert, Don Von Minden, Jim Gamer, Greg Smith and Thomas Guenther. Photos courtesy of Fayette Heritage Museum and Archives The entire Lincke family loves trains so much they often plan their vacations around them. Here they’re riding the Durango & Silverton train in Silverton, Colo., this past summer. Left to right are: John, Christa, Gale, Nathan, John and Gary. Young Gary Lincke looked forward to the arrival of the Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Montgomery Ward Co. Christmas catalogs every fall. Although his parents couldn’t afford the pricey Lionel brand, he was floored when Santa brought him a battery-operated train. He’s pictured playing with it on a linoleum carpet in the family’s La Grange home. Gary was the eldest child of Delton and Allyne Lincke, who started their own business in La Grange by borrowing $1,000 from each of their parents. The couple was determined to build a life for themselves that didn’t involve farm labor. Gary’s siblings are Deborah and Mark. Lincke Floor Co. ads through the years. The façade of Lincke Floor Co.’s downtown La Grange location hasn’t changed a great deal since this black and white photo was shot in 1950. Vintage photo courtesy of Fayette Heritage Museum and Archives. Gary and Gale were all smiles after they exchanged vows on May 20, 1978, at Swiss Alp Lutheran Church.
In 1972, things didn’t work out quite the way Gary Lincke had planned. After graduating from La Grange High School in 1970, he attended Blinn College for two years and was on track to transfer to the University of Houston’s Civil Engineering School. True, Gary had been helping his parents, Delton and Allyne Lincke, with their floor covering business as far back as he could remember. However, Gary wasn’t interested in spending his life doing that.
Then Gary’s dad became seriously ill with a debilitating blood disease.
“I had to step in, literally, and run Lincke Floors. I took the reins and kept the company going from that point on,” Gary says.
He gave up on his dream of becoming a civil engineer and, in June of this year, Gary and his wife, Gale Minzenmeyer Lincke, quietly celebrated the N. Jefferson St. business’s 70th anniversary.
How Lincke Floor Covering began
Gary’s father and mother both grew up on farms where they learned the meaning of hard work. Mr. Lincke was raised in the Willow Springs community and Mrs. Lincke came from the La Bahia area near Burton.
“Not all young men back in those days enjoyed farm life. They wanted to find a better way to live. Some of them joined the military in World War II. By the time my dad, who was born in 1924, was called up, they basically turned the bus around and sent him back home. The war was winding down,” Gary says. Instead of returning to the
Instead of returning to the farm, Mr. Lincke came to La Grange and got a job as a clerk in an auto parts store. Next, he went to work at a business selling household appliances washers, dryers and refrigerators.
“I think my dad always had the idea of being an entrepreneur. So after he and my mother married, they each borrowed $1,000 from their parents, which was a great deal of money in 1951, and opened a store with that seed money. Their new business handled appliances, Pittsburgh paint, Venetian blinds, a little wallpaper, and, last but not least, a little bit of linoleum,” Gary explains.
Mr. Lincke’s first flooring job was not a flooring job in the traditional sense. A Flatonia customer asked him to install linoleum rather than Formica on a countertop.
“If a customer wanted to get fancy, they’d also want the linoleum rolled up the backsplash, all in one piece. Then my dad would put metal trim all the way around the outer edge,” Gary recalls.
The Linckes, who lived three blocks away, shared half of the building at 146 N. Jefferson, right around the corner from the La Grange Post Office. Their next door neighbor was Zapp’s Cleaners whose motto was, ‘It pleases us to please you.’
Bill Morgan built that yellow brick building for his friend, retailer George Lauterstein Sr., whose clothing store on the square burned down. The Jefferson street location temporarily housed Lauterstein’s until a new building could be constructed. Then a wall divided the structure in half. Zapp’s Cleaners rented one side and the Linckes rented the other.
“I remember my dad telling about an incident that occurred shortly after they opened. One of the more prominent ladies in town took her laundry in next door and then poked her head into our side of the building. My dad and mom greeted her and she asked, ‘What’s this?’
“After they explained that they had opened a new store selling flooring, appliances, paint, etc., the woman replied, ‘You’ll never make it.’ Of course, that was a big letdown and it made my parents all the more determined to succeed.”
Several months after opening their showroom, Mr. and Mrs. Lincke sublet a small office in the back to E.O. Sharp Butane Co. of Smithville. A steady stream of customers came and went through the Lincke’s showroom for over a decade to pay their propane bills.
Mr. Lincke was long on hard work, determination, and short on tools for his new flooring enterprise, but he made do.
Some of his customers came in wanting to dispense with ‘linoleum rugs.’ They had been installed in 1930s and 1940s farmhouses, as well as nicer homes in town.
“They were often beautiful rose patterns with a border laid in the middle of the parlor or living room. After the linoleum rug was eventually pulled up, the wood underneath was a lighter shade than the area exposed to light. It ended up looking like a picture frame around the perimeter of the room.”
Mr. Lincke would carefully sand the floors, blending the lighter part in the center with the darker picture frame area on the outside. A time consuming skill, it took a great deal of patience and practice. Years later, wood floors continued to be Mr. Lincke’s joy.
“Dad would uncover a gray and ugly wood floor and with that first drum of sandpaper expose the beautiful wood grain underneath. By the time he finished, he’d created a gorgeous floor in the room. It takes a special touch to run that huge machine. It’s kind of like landing an airplane. There was great technique to it.”
Gary began riding to jobs with his dad at a young age. He started by running back and forth to his dad’s truck fetching tools. Some of his first duties were sweeping and cleaning the floors before a new one could be put down.
“At the end of the job, whether it was linoleum or carpet, I always cleaned the finished product. That involved wiping the residue off the vinyl to make it clean and bright and then vacuuming the carpet. Back in the time when we laid shag carpet, I would rake the carpet,” Gary remembers.
“All the subcontractors and contractors called me Cotton Top when I was a kid because I had blonde hair. Come to think of it, they had all sorts of nicknames for me. I found watching the carpenters particularly fascinating. Their craftsmanship was so precise that in those days caulk was not used very much. All the miter joints, all the fittings were so close it wasn’t needed.”
Gary remembers learning an important lesson in the first flooring job at the age of 12 that he did on a weekend with his dad. It was at the new post office at Fayetteville.
“I thought it was just the cat’s meow to put those little square blocks with a little crossgrain looking pattern down on the floor. We turned each block a different direction to create a design. Every once in a while, Dad would point out that I had a block in wrong. That’s when I learned to fix my mistakes. That was a very important lesson that has stayed with me.”
Times change
“Installing linoleum and carpet for a new home in the 1950s would have taken my dad a whole week. Now it takes us a couple of days, three at the max, because of the tools and technology we have,” Gary explains.
Linoleum back then was a material made out of linseed oil and pulp that had very different characteristics from today’s product. When homeowners’ tastes moved away from the framed linoleum rugs, they warmed to simplistic inlaid patterns composed of geometric circles and squares.
“Vintage linoleum came in six-foot-wide rolls and was not water-resistant. It was a very difficult product to work with, heavy and not very pliable. If you bent a corner, you would literally break it off. It was like peanut brittle.
“In lieu of that, we had to heat the material with an electric heat gun. My dad would pour gasoline in a torch, pump it up and light it. The hot flame would warm the linoleum and it would soften. He had to cut the linoleum quickly to fit against the baseboard using a linoleum knife that had a big crooked hook. Although it was difficult to work with, inlaid linoleum lasted forever under normal use,” Gary says.
When newer products became available, it was no longer necessary to wax the floors that the Linckes laid, but conscientious homemakers did so anyway for decades and decades. The women took pride in that chore.
“Linoleum advanced to what is called inlay vinyl. It was manufactured in a 75-foot roll, six feet in width and weighing as much as 1,100 pounds. It adhered to the floor with a petroleum-based adhesive, which was very flammable. We had to be careful not to breathe it.”
Gary learned the hard way to treat inlay vinyl with respect.
“To handle the vinyl rolls we had special dollies and hand trucks and so forth. I remember grabbing a roll to reposition it and actually cracking two ribs because it was so heavy,” Gary recalls.
Another aspect of the older floorcoverings is that they were laid with adhesives that contained asbestos as a bonding agent. They later were replaced by adhesives designed for the newer vinyl products.
As time progressed, carpets came into popularity for flooring with many different yarn structures such as rayon, a precursor to today’s nylon.
“Right now I’d say we are on the seventh or eighth generation of nylon. Each new product is an improvement in the performance of the yarn compared to the previous one. They’re all petroleum industry byproducts. As yarn systems progressed, so did the advent of stain treatments. Now that a lot of households have pets Microban has been developed to prevent bacteria growth,” Gary adds.
Gary must stay abreast of other trends in the flooring business.
“I think sometimes the designers take a color chart and throw a dart at it about every five years,” Gary says.
“That’s how trends go. This year our color was gray. Do you remember the bright orange, gold and avocado colors of flower power from the 1960s? That’swhen I grew up.”
“We don’t sell much of those colors anymore,” Gale adds with a laugh.
Customer preference has moved to more passive, natural colors like shades of mossy green and blue. Many people are opting for a hard surface with a large area rug rather than having wall-to-wall carpet installed throughout the house.
“I understand it’s certainly a comfort consideration, but it always befuddles me for want of a better word, why people would spend thousands of dollars on a gorgeous hardwood floor and then cover it with an area rug,” Gary says.
Gary and Gale’s strong work ethic
Gary met his future wife, Gale, at a country-western dance featuring the Velvet’s at the Round Up Hall in La Grange. It wasn’t long before the two were inseparable. Their dates often revolved around finishing a job that Gary had underway, so Gale picked up valuable painting and wallpaper hanging skills that later came in handy.
Gale, who was also a La Grange High School graduate, was attending Texas A&M where she graduated in two and a half years. After the couple married at Swiss Alp Lutheran Church on May 20, 1978, they started their new life together in their own home.
“My parents had rented their home for 25 years before they finally bought it and I’d learned from that experience,” Gary recalls.
“I was working like a Trojan six days a week: long days, long, long days. I finally accrued enough money for our new home. That’s when we decided to build instead of buy an existing home.”
Gale’s parents, Elmo and Johnelle Minzenmeyer, approved of the idea.
“My dad said, ‘I have the perfect house site for you and I’ll give you and Gary those 10 acres,’” Gale remembers. “So my dad loaded us up in this old farm pickup. We went out to this cornfield and he showed us the location he had picked. Gary and I kind of looked at each other and went, ‘Okay, we’ll build our home here.’ Was it the perfect site? It must have been because it was hand-chosen by my father and we’re still there.”
Emulating his dad’s example, Gary continued to work long, exhausting hours in the family flooring business. He and Gale legally took it over from his parents in 2006 and bought their first computer.
“One night when our son, John, was still a baby, Gary didn’t come home and didn’t come home. I was accustomed to him working long days, but this was the wee hours of the morning. So, I bundled up John and drove out to the house where Gary was hanging wallpaper. Nothing was wrong. He was just trying to finish the job,” Gale recalls.
For many years, the Linckes continued to work those long, long days only blocks from each other in La Grange. During its 37 years of operation, Gale’s Hallmark shop on the square moved twice and in each location, the couple did most of the refurbishing themselves. Since closing her business in 2019, Gale sees more of Gary than ever before because she’s at the Lincke showroom almost on a daily basis.
“When my dad started the business, a gentleman by the name of Ervin Voelkel, who was a bachelor, helped him lay floors for 25 or 26 years. Mr. Voelkel was a tremendous asset to the business. I’ve been fortunate, too. Jose Chavez has worked for us for 34 years,” Gary explains.
Stories the floors could tell
Gary has put in so much flooring in La Grange that homeowners are amazed at his knowledge.
“I went to see a new customer who told me they weren’t sure what was under the carpet. I told them I knew. ‘You’ve got carpet and under that is padding and under that is vinyl flooring and under that is wood.’”
‘How do you know all that?’ they asked. Gary replied he had installed all those floor coverings.
Sometimes a new homeowner who has just moved to La Grange will ask Gary if he knows any history of the house they’ve bought. Because he has lived/worked in La Grange his entire life, Gary often does.
“People get so excited. However, I regrettably had to tell one new owner – because he asked – that a murder had occurred in his home. I knew what room it was because I had replaced the flooring. I guess it was okay because the same couple is still living there today,” Gary adds.
Gary has come across some very unusual situations. One incident in particular, though, would be hard to top.
An elderly La Grange woman, who was a meticulous housekeeper, lived in a home built in the 1920s that had gorgeous hardwood floors. After she passed away, an investor bought the house and rented it to two men who worked shifts on oilrigs. They’d be home several days and gone for 10. After the men finally moved out, the owner called Gary to install new carpet in the three front bedrooms.
“One of my workers and I went there to measure the three rooms and walked through the back den area that had real deep, thick, green shag carpet. Then he looked down at my knees and said, ‘What’s all that black dust on your pants?’
“I swiped my hand over it with and would you believe it was solid fleas?”
A helpful neighbor came over to see what all the fuss was about and gave Gary and his helper an earful. She reported that the previous tenants had two German shepherds, two labs, and four cats indoors. There were four Barbados goats in the house, too.
The neighbor went on to explain to Gary that when they got ready to go back to work, they tenants would leave a 50-pound bag of dog food open and fill both bathtubs with water so the animals had something to drink.
Gary phoned his customer and advised him the house needed to be exterminated. When that chore had been completed, Lincke Flooring installed the new carpet, but you can bet Gary kept looking down at his trousers to see if any fleas had survived.
Stop and smell the roses
On Jan. 28, 2015, Gary suffered a massive heart attack. It changed his life.
“I stopped worrying about everything and I stopped getting to the office at 5 a.m. and not leaving until 9 or 10 p.m. Life really is too short,” he says.
Adjusting his attitude has given Gary more time and mental energy to indulge his passion for all things train related. Whether greeting visitors at the Old Depot in La Grange where he serves as vice-president of the preservation group or gathering the family together for a trip to Fort Worth to see Big Boy, the largest train on the tracks, Gary is finally at peace and can enjoy himself. Gary is making time for what’s most important in his life, while still carrying on the family tradition of Lincke Floor Co.
To read more stories written by Elaine, visit www. elainethomaswriter.com/blog/ and sign up to receive new posts twice a month. You can also call Elaine at 979-263-5031.