Roto-Rooter began with a Maytag motor and a sewer full of roots
A Des Moines tinkerer’s homemade root cutter became a franchise business during the Depression, then a trade name so common that many people forget it belongs to someone.
Cincinnati, OH
In the late 1920s, a Des Moines man named Samuel Oscar Blanc was working on a blocked sewer line at his son’s apartment. Tree roots had pushed into the underground pipe. The usual fix was to dig up the line and clear it by hand, and Blanc wanted another way.
A manual plumber’s snake had only frustrated him. He was well into middle age by then, with correspondence courses in mechanical and electrical engineering behind him, along with work as a telephone lineman and as a salesman for a power pump company. By 1933 he had built a machine. It ran on the 1/6-horsepower motor from the family’s Maytag washing machine and turned a 3/8-inch steel cable with a sharp, C-shaped blade at the tip. Fed into the pipe and spinning, the blade cut the roots out. Nobody had to dig up the yard.
The accounts disagree about the wheels. Most, including the company’s own, say they came off roller skates. Another says they came from a child’s little red wagon. They agree on the name. Blanc’s wife, Lettie, called the contraption the Roto-Rooter.
More than 90 years later, the word is so common for sewer and drain cleaning that many people are surprised to learn it is a trademark. Roto-Rooter, headquartered in Cincinnati, describes itself as the largest provider of plumbing and drain cleaning services in North America. Its later history reads like a corporate file, with a sale, a stock offering, a buyback and a long run of acquisitions. It began, though, with an inventor who did not have indoor plumbing in his own home when he came up with the idea, according to the history page kept by the Roto-Rooter franchise in Des Moines.
The Des Moines franchise traces the start to Blanc’s garage in 1934. The company dates its founding to 1935. By the middle of the decade Blanc had incorporated Roto-Rooter Corporation and was selling his patented machine for $250. Buying one was close to buying a business. During the Great Depression, people looking for a living bought machines and set up their own Roto-Rooter operations across the upper Midwest, the Great Plains and the Northeast.
The pitch to homeowners was the lawn. In the 1930s and ’40s, Roto-Rooter advertising showed a mound of dirt over a freshly dug sewer pipe with the line “Why put a grave in your yard?”
Blanc kept building. In 1939 he designed a smaller machine on the same principle for sink, laundry and other household drains. He also went the other direction with the Roto-Rooter Royal, which had to be towed behind a truck. It carried a 10-horsepower gasoline engine and 1,000 feet of steel cable and could clean industrial and municipal sewer lines. An improved version, the Mainliner, came out in 1958 and could also thread telephone cable. It was discontinued in 1973.
For its first five years the company had no official logo, and operators painted their trucks however they liked. Copycats appeared. In 1940 Roto-Rooter introduced its first official emblem, the patented electric machine set inside an outline of the United States under the words “A Specialized Service From Coast-to-Coast.” It went on trucks, guarantees and ads so homeowners could pick out the original. In 1953 a simpler logo put “SEWER-DRAIN SERVICE” inside a drainpipe. The company recorded its most popular jingle in 1954, and it was still in use 60 years later. The Des Moines franchise’s history page opens with the old line “And away go troubles down the drain.”
Blanc stayed active in the company until he died in 1964 at 81.
In 1980 the Blanc family sold Roto-Rooter to Chemed Corporation of Cincinnati. Chemed formed Roto-Rooter Services Co. in Cincinnati to run company-owned service locations. It left Roto-Rooter Corp. in West Des Moines to keep making the machinery and to oversee the network of independent franchisees. Roto-Rooter was spun off as a public company in 1986, with Chemed keeping majority ownership. In 1996 Chemed bought back all the outstanding shares, and Roto-Rooter has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Chemed, a publicly traded company, since then.
Gary Burger came over to Roto-Rooter Corp. in 1980 from DuBois Chemical, another Chemed company, where he had worked in sales and marketing. He moved to Des Moines, became vice president of sales in 1983 and was named president in 1996. When he retired in 2006, Contractor magazine reported that the company counted 110 company-owned territories and more than 500 franchise territories, serving 91% of the U.S. population.
The work changed as well. Starting in the 1980s, some franchises and company-owned locations began offering around-the-clock service and general plumbing repair for homes and businesses, well beyond the roots-and-drains specialty Blanc started with. By 2014 the company handled everything from leaky faucets and toilets to water line and backflow repair, though as a rule it stayed away from new-construction plumbing such as gas line installation.
The other long trend has been the company buying back territory from the independent operators Blanc’s model created. After the 1980 sale, Chemed began purchasing Roto-Rooter franchises and running them as company-owned locations. The largest of those deals up to then came in 2019, when Roto-Rooter Services bought all of the franchise operations of Hoffman Southwest Corporation, its largest independent franchise operator. The deal brought 14 operations under company control, including metro Los Angeles, San Diego, Dallas, El Paso, Phoenix, Tucson, Salt Lake City and Portland. Together they served about 32 million people. Roto-Rooter CEO Spencer Lee called the purchase a long-term goal in a 2019 company announcement reported by Trenchless Technology, saying that bringing the western markets “under company control allows us to leverage our proven internal operating systems.” At the time the company counted 130 company-owned territories and about 400 franchise territories. In 2024 it bought single franchises in New Jersey, Texas and Kentucky.
Independent owners have long run much of the Roto-Rooter map, some of them families who have carried the name for generations. In Fostoria, Ohio, the Review Times marked seven decades of Roto-Rooter in town with the line “A Fostoria family tradition.” The Norwalk Reflector marked 30 years of a family’s Roto-Rooter business in Norwalk. In 2024 two brothers from Roto-Rooter in Oklahoma, Chris and Kyle, went on the Blue Collar Nation podcast to talk about building a multi-location plumbing business on the foundation their father laid.
Ryan Willbanks, a franchisee who moved to the Springfield, Missouri, market in 2015, owned Roto-Rooter locations in Springfield and Joplin, one in Wisconsin and two in Virginia when the Springfield Business Journal named him to its 40 Under 40 list in 2019. “I’m not really in the plumbing business. I’m in the people business,” he told the paper. Asked what he had learned the hard way, he said, “You can’t want more from people than they want for themselves.”
The corporate offices are in Cincinnati, but the machines stayed in Iowa. As of 2020 Roto-Rooter still built its own sewer and drain cleaning machines, cables and blades at a plant in West Des Moines. In 2014, the mechanical auger its technicians used still looked a great deal like the one Blanc built from a washing machine motor.