Final Salute

He grew up in Little Rock and graduated from Little Rock Central High School. Everyone called him Allen.

Ison served his country for more than two decades. There was a two-year hitch in the Air Force, where he was a jet mechanic, followed by 20 years as a Navy Seabee. He retired from the Navy in 1985.

“He had tons of friends and loved telling stories. He was just the neatest man,” says his daughter, Allison Phillips of Little Rock.

He had been in treatment for acute myeloid leukemia when he passed away.

“He’d been fighting it for about a year,” Phillips says.

The May 21 funeral was to be with military honors, and Phillips and her siblings, Lisa Coulter and Mark Ison, wanted their dad to be laid to rest in his Navy uniform.

There was just one problem. His Navy “dress blues” uniform with its double-breasted jacket had seen better days.

It and five of Ison’s other uniforms had spent years wrapped in a trash bag and stored in a plastic bin.

“They were in terrible shape. They hadn’t held up well at all,” Phillips says. “They were stained and smelled musty.”

Time was of the essence, and a Google search directed her to Levinson Cleaners at 5004 Kavanaugh Blvd., in Little Rock. Her boyfriend, Andrew Webre, dropped off the uniform, and everyone hoped for the best.

Levinson’s has been around since 1912. Bill Rambo worked there and bought it from the Levinson family in 1953. He is retired now, and his sons, James and Pete, run the cleaners.

Levinson’s specializes in caring for older clothing, and military uniforms get special attention.

“My dad is a veteran of the Korean War,” James Rambo says. “Me and my brother were raised up so that when someone brings a uniform in, that’s priority number one. It’s hands on, and you really take care of it.”

Rambo cleaned Ison’s uniform, which had been exposed to “mice, spiders, spiderwebs, dirtdobbers, you name it,” he says.

Complicating matters was the uniform’s material.

“That Navy wool is really particular how you can work with it.”

The process to restore the uniform, which included hand-sweeping it, hand-wrapping the buttons and hand-pressing it, took about 2½ hours.

When Phillips picked it up, Rambo told her the cleaning was free.

“I don’t want to charge someone who has done service for us,” he says. “He put in 20 years, that was the least I could do. My dad would probably skin me alive if he knew I charged for a uniform like that.”

“I went to pieces there in the lobby,” Phillips says. “It was the nicest gesture. [Rambo] was so sincere and so kind. It was such a huge deal to me, and it wasn’t about the money. It was a respect thing, and that was just so touching to me.”

email: sclancy@adgnewsroom