Gladiolus

We already know you can learn things from obituaries, and not just something about the deceased subject.

Take the recent Twitter posting from @Obitsman who links to the story of the nation's first Spelling Bee champion, Frank Neuhauser, who has just passed away at 97. Frank won the competition at the age of 11, correctly spelling g-l-a-d-i-o-l-u-s, a multiple blossom flower appearing on a stalky stem that apparently is in the the iris family.

I know gladiolus. I know plenty about gladiolus from my formative years spent in the family flower shop. I never knew they were part of the iris family, and apparently no one else in my family did either. I would have remembered that.

We sold plenty of them. We used plenty of them in funeral arrangements. In fact, they were used so often in funeral arrangements that people had an aversion to them because they reminded them of death. These customers, being alive, didn't buy the gladiolus.

The flower comes in a variety of colors, and given a mixture of these colors you can create some hideous pieces. They had a pretty good shelf life, but after a few days they were moved to the right of the refrigerator in hopes that a funeral order would come in and they could get used before they expired as well. As such, when they made it to a funeral piece, they weren't always at their freshest. And depending on far my overseers wanted to push the envelope, they could use some gladioli that were well past the freshness date, looking a bit weak around the petals, somewhat like gym socks that don't stay up.

I distinctly remember my great-uncle Peter using so many of these flowers from the right side of the refrigerator in a funeral piece that he basically cleared that side out. He got rid of all the "junk." The result was an awful looking wreath that was surely a "coat of many colors" that luckily my father intercepted before it left the shop. He basically ripped it all out and used slightly fresher flowers with a better sense of color coordination. The shop's reputation survived for another day.

The family is long out of the flower business. But I still slow down and look at flower shops, and have walked through what is left of the wholesale district on Sixth Avenue and 28th Street in New York. I remember a contemporary of my father telling him that he grew up in the family business as well, an apothecary--drug store--and always found himself looking at their windows with the pestel and mortar and glassware of colored liquids.

Frank's reward for winning the spelling bee is recounted as getting $500 in gold, a bike, and a visit to see the president, Calvin Coolidge. It was 1925. It is assumed that was all part of the first prize, and there was no ranking on the items.

Apothecaries as we knew them are pretty much gone, but there are still flower shops to gaze at. I have however noticed over the years that the flower gladiolus, "glads" as we called them, don't show up in florists' displays too often. In fact, I sometimes am hard put to even see any evidence of them.

And the only Calvin most people will think of is Calvin Klein.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com/