If you’ve taken a stroll or a drive down 4th street in the last several decades, you may have seen a stand alone red brick building just east of Sutro Street. Stretched across the top of the building is a faded blue and yellow sign that proclaims “Reno Mattress Company,” and just below that, “since 1910.” The anachronistic sign stands out as a relic of the past, in the middle of an evolving 4th street.
The image on the sign is an old car loaded with furniture and stacked with mattresses on top, bouncing across Washoe Valley, with a jack rabbit dashing through the scene. The sign caught our attention at Our Town Reno, so I went to go check it out. Inside the little red brick building I met Mike Berry, who has worked full time at the store for over fifty years.
Mike greeted me with a smile as he chatted with a customer about a custom RV mattress. I tested out a couple of mattresses, and examined a row of beautiful old Singer sewing machines. After one customer left, the next approached Mike. He was an 88-year-old man from Oklahoma who rode his bike to the store. Mike helped him find the most comfortable mattress, something that would help the Oklahoman get a great night’s rest. Afterwards Mike looked at me in astonishment. “88 years old and he rode his bike here,” he said excitedly.
Mike isn’t sure exactly where the company was in 1910. In the 1960s, when his parents bought in, Reno Mattress was farther east down 4th Street. One thing Mike discovered, though, were some old articles that displayed the company’s old, four digit phone number: five seven nine one. Reno Mattress has kept those same four digits as the last part of their phone number until now. “So yeah,” says Mike, “we had the same number for probably, I don't know, 80 years, 100 years.”
Mike has worked at the store since he was a kid, and he has worked hard. “I never got any summer vacations because my dad was hard nose,” Mike told me. “So, you know, my buddies were having summer vacation, and I was down here working eight hours a day.” The missed summer vacations may have paid off (at least in part) when Mike bought a brand new Ford truck when he turned 21.
After being in the mattress business for over fifty years, Mike definitely knows what he’s talking about, when it comes to spring vs. foam or other particularities of the sleep comfort industry. “They say people are in bed like, a fourth of their life, you know,” Mike said. “So you definitely need a good bed.”
There are only four types of mattresses, according to Mike: spring, foam, water, and air. From there, the store uses their mattress magic to customize something special for any customer who has more specific needs.
“Somebody comes in and says, ‘Hey, I want a mattress this firm.’ We try to make it that firm, you know. If they want it extra, extra firm, we can do that too. The same type of mattress, (we’ll) just use a different, heavier steel coil in the spring. Or a high density foam. We can wiggle around to get what you want.” Mike says that customs are the company’s “bread and butter”-- they make custom mattresses for RVs and other vehicles, as well.
When recalling Reno Mattress memories, Mike thought of his dad, who owned the store before Mike. His dad has since passed away, but it sounds to me like they used to have a lot of fun together. “I remember one time we had a customer come in,” Mike chuckles, “and so, you know, we didn't know where my dad went. So, you know, I took the customer upstairs and we flipped over a sheet of foam, and my dad was underneath there, sleeping. So the customer says ‘what's this?’ I said, ‘oh, you know, that's just the owner.’”
With Reno Mattress Company situated right on 4th Street, Mike has seen the effects of the unaffordable housing crisis first hand, and he expressed his frustration to me. “I know people need help,” Mike said with a drip of sadness, “but the city doesn't want to help them.”
“I was on the Fourth Street Corridor for many years,” Mike told me, “and the city wouldn't let us do anything, because they had plans on selling a lot of these businesses that were out of business. Put little shops in here, maybe running an electric train…from Virginia Street all the way into Sparks.” While several new businesses have successfully made a name for themselves on Fourth Street, there is no electric train, and Mike isn’t impressed with where things have gone. “It's just not good,” he said.
Whatever his thoughts on his store’s neighborhood, Mike is proud of his work, and he plans to stick around for a while. As I saw Mike interact with his customers, laughing and joking, it was clear that he loved his job. And he’s good at it, which is important if you’re looking to buy a mattress.
“Instead of pulling somebody out of selling refrigerators and washing machines and telling them, ‘today you're going to go sell mattresses,’ you know, they don't know what the hell they're talking about,” Mike said. “I've been doing this forever. If you want the honest truth, and you want a good mattress and a fair deal, we’re here.”
“I enjoy it,” Mike told me with a smile. “One of these days I'll retire.”