As soon as we get on the phone, Susan D’Andelet tells me that she was at Camden Yards for Jackson Holliday’s first career home run, a monster grand slam that landed out on Eutaw Street a few days earlier. “I went for work, actually,” she clarifies. “We took some of our clients.” It’s August, and as the Orioles challenge the Yankees for the best record in the American League, all of Maryland is buzzing with excitement. “Oh yeah,” she says. “I know they’re calling up another guy from, what is it, Double-A or whatever?” She lets out a big laugh. “You would think I would know more.”
Sports have surrounded D’Andelet (pronounced dee-ON-duh-LAY) her whole life. When her son was a child, he played alongside Bobby Boyd, a speedy outfielder who batted .331 at West Virginia University and spent four years in the Astros system. Boyd is now a CPA, D’Andelet tells me. Her husband is a sports fanatic who often coached their son’s teams. After they met, the couple discovered that their fathers had played together on the same football team, the Langdon Lions.
“I’m a sixth-generation native Washingtonian,” she says. “My dad grew up in D.C. and played all sorts of sports.” She remembers being dragged to Senators games and watching him play softball well into his 30s, before giving it up in favor of golf and fishing. His most enduring contribution to sports was an idea: He was William H. Williams, inventor of the cleat cleaner.
I wrote about the cleat cleaner last year, looking up the patent history to identify Williams as its inventor. A few months after my piece was published, D’Andelet was at a dinner party. “This baseball game happened to be on,” she recalls, “and I said to my friend, who I’ve known since high school, ‘Do you see that mat on the back of the pitcher’s mound?’ And I told her, ‘My dad invented that.’” The revelation earned her a skeptical look.
D’Andelet continues, “We’ve known each other probably 50 years. She said, ‘You’ve never told me that before.’ And I said, ‘Well, I didn’t think it was important.’ You know what I mean? It’s just not something that would necessarily come up. So anyway, I said, ‘Yeah, my dad invented that.’ She kind of looked at me – which people do – like, ‘Yeah… I don’t know about that.’” D’Andelet Googled it to prove her point, and happened upon my article, replete with images from her father’s patent request. She still has the originals.
The cleat cleaner is easy to overlook. Our attention is naturally drawn to incongruity, whereas the cleat cleaner is exquisitely logical and its presence on the back of the mound makes so much sense that you take it for granted. You can stare at it night after night without ever really seeing it. It might never come up in conversation, even if you spent your childhood helping your parents build a business around it. “Everybody knows it’s there, but they don’t think much about it,” D’Andelet says. “So I just thought it was interesting that you were interested.” She reached out a few days later, and when I asked whether she’d be interested in sharing her memories, she was enthusiastic about telling her father’s story.
Williams, known since childhood as Bunky, died from COVID pneumonia in February 2022, just shy of his 95th birthday. He came up with the idea for the cleat cleaner when D’Andelet and her two brothers were small children. “We lived in an apartment in D.C. when my parents had us,” D’Andelet says. “So my mother had three children under three years old. And we were in a one-bedroom apartment in Washington D.C., right off New Hampshire Avenue. I remember that. And then we moved out to the house where it was invented, in Silver Spring, Maryland, 701 Hobbs Drive.”
Williams was a vice president at American President Lines, an international shipping company. “He worked for them his whole business career, 30-some years, and the cleat cleaner was something that he did in the basement,” D’Andelet says. He lobbied on behalf of the company, often on Capitol Hill, though D’Andelet is quick to point out that he wasn’t registered as a lobbyist and never would have assented to being called one. And despite his invention, Williams wasn’t trained in engineering. “No, not at all, but he was very capable of doing a lot of things,” she says. “He was clever, and he was a smart man.” The house on Hobbs Drive had an unfinished basement, so Williams finished it himself, eventually creating a workroom with “a big old wooden workbench.” Aptly, his middle name was Handy.
Williams toiled in the workroom during the evenings, but the cleat cleaner was a family endeavor from the very beginning. “We had a little cottage industry in our home before it was fashionable,” D’Andelet says. Williams made the first prototype out of toys and a spare plank of wood. She remembers being a child and seeing him “drilling out the holes in that piece of wood, and taking my brothers’ plastic toy rockets and cutting them off and putting them in the holes.” The rockets came from sets of those little green army men that many of us had as children. “That’s what he got his patent on,” she says. Did her brothers protest about sacrificing their rockets to the cause? “No, I don’t think so. He might have even broken down and bought extras,” she says with a laugh. “We didn’t have a whole lot at that stage in our lives. He was probably in his 30s and we were all little kids.
Williams tested his prototype the same way anyone would. “I can remember him getting the dirt muddy, squirting it down with the hose in the backyard, getting a big patch of mud,” D’Andelet recalls. “He would have the baseball cleats on himself, and he would get a big old wad of mud on the cleats and then use the cleat cleaner. And so I imagine that he went through a number of these to get it right.” Once he’d perfected the design, Williams applied for and received a patent in 1963. “He found a place in Baltimore that would manufacture them,” she says. “He had a mold created, and had the company in Baltimore make these products. I remember my mother would load us all into the car and drive us to Baltimore, and we’d load them all in the trunk. What I remember in particular was that the rubber that they were made out of stunk. And the whole basement stunk.”
D’Andelet’s mother, Nettie Williams, now lives with her in Delaware. “She’s a delightful person, always was and still is. Very much a team player.” As the business got going, D’Andelet says, “my mother was really the one who was running it. She was a stay-at-home mom and she had the three of us. And when he started with this, she was right there at his side doing whatever needed to be done.” They initially marketed the cleat cleaner as a football product, sending mailers to NFL teams. “She did all the banking and bookkeeping, and the invoices would come in and she’d fill the orders.” Nettie made regular visits to the bank in Montgomery Country, often being served by the same young teller. “He was trying to figure out at the time why she had all these checks with the logos of the professional football teams on them,” D’Andelet says. One day, the bewildered teller finally asked whether Nettie was a cheerleader. “I guess that was the only thing he could come up with.”
Nettie went to secretarial school, so she was Bunky’s at-home secretary. D’Andelet remembers how he would return home after work, walk through the door, and say, “Nettie, take a letter!” Thinking about the scene now, D’Andelet laughs. “So she’d get her stenographer’s pad out and do shorthand, and be in there typing up letters to all the professional teams — the professional football teams and then eventually the baseball teams. And so she was the jack-of-all-trades. So whatever needed to be done, it was her and us. We were the cheap labor… Whether it was stuffing envelopes with flyers, or putting stamps on the envelopes. We would package up the cleat cleaners, initially it was in boxes, and we would address them and tape them up and take them to the post office. Everything that was done, we did.”
Although they started with football, cleat cleaners became more associated with baseball because they sat on the back of the mound, in clear view of millions of home viewers. Yet, despite the product’s popularity, Williams “didn’t make a killing from selling the cleat cleaner,” D’Andelet says, “It wasn’t what we lived off of. It was just a little aside for him. He saw that there was a need for this.”
It remained a cottage industry. When she was in her early 20s, D’Andelet’s friend, Chris Williams (no relation), posed for flyers. “He was the shoe model – or the foot model, or whatever you want to call it,” she says. “He played baseball a lot. He was very active. And my dad would have him put the cleats on and get them all muddied up, and try to get the mud out with the cleat cleaner and take pictures.”
Williams also invented a kicking tee. “That never really took off,” D’Andelet says, “and I don’t know why. It was called the Sky Tee and it sat on his rolltop desk.” At some point, the manufacturer in Baltimore was bought by another company. The new owner mistakenly believed that they also owned the mold, and Williams needed a lawyer to help him get it back. He kept the business going into his mid-80s, and you can still find the original cleatcleaner.com website, from 2001, on the Wayback Machine.
After making cleat cleaners for 50 years, Williams sold the business, along with the original mold, about 10 years ago. Before he did so, he asked whether anyone in the family wanted to take over. D’Andelet has spent her entire career in the mortgage, title, and real estate industry, and she just couldn’t see herself continuing the business. “It would have been nice,” she says. “It was kind of hard to say no.” She still has some cleat cleaners, but they’ve been in storage since a move a few years back.
D’Andelet still sees reminders of her father. On the highway, she sometimes finds herself alongside 18-wheelers hauling American President Lines shipping containers. “And you’ll see the ships. I see them sometimes when I’m going over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I’ll see the ships going along with the APL.”
The cleat cleaner is more widespread than ever. The patent expired back in 1980, and these days, there’s no shortage of companies manufacturing them. They come in an ever-expanding variety of styles, shapes, and colors, but Williams’ original design, the one that started as a plank of wood and sawed-off toy rockets, is still in production. And despite her best efforts, D’Andelet isn’t going to escape sports anytime soon. “I ended up marrying a man who was as interested in sports,” she says, building up to the punchline. “I said, ‘Look you can play all the sports you want to. Don’t expect me to come sit there and watch it.’”
Content Source: blogs.fangraphs.com