Joe Karban is standing in the back of his Lombard flower shop on one of the busiest flower holidays of the year.
Okay, so it’s actually Valentine’s Day, not Mother’s Day, but we wanted to give Tempo DuPage readers an idea of what it will be like this coming week at Lombard Floral, as the Karban family and their six employees prepare for Mother’s Day, which, as every florist knows, is the second biggest flower holiday of the year, next to Christmas. (Valentine’s Day is 4th, behind Easter/Passover.)
Karban, 57, is stripping long-stemmed roses of their thorns with an old-fashioned potato masher, a must for every floral shop, he says, at least for those who don’t like pulling out cumbersome deleafing machines.
“We’re still stripping roses,” he says. He has been doing this all day, as customers and delivery trucks come and go and the phone nearly buzzes off the warehouse wall.
Valentine’s Day is a major rose holiday. Mother’s Day, on the other hand, is more of your carnation corsage type of flower day, although certainly certain types of roses (bright pink, eggshell yellow) turn up in Mother’s Day bouquets, always flavored with spring.
“Most thorns on roses grow down,” Karban ruminates. “They never grow straight up.”
Thorns are a subject he knows well, for Karban has been in the flower business since 1958 and has been co-owner (with wife Marie) and floral designer of the Lombard establishment since 1975.
Thorns are a tricky proposition, not unlike the morass of petalmania that must be navigated, from wholesaler to driver to customer, on the two most Hallmark-y of holidays. This Valentine’s Day, Karban has ordered 4,000 roses, 4,800 carnations, 570 tulips, 200 bunches of chrysanthemums, 75 orchids and 75 bunches of miniature carnations, among myriad other blooms.
The Karban family and their six full-time employees began preparing for Valentine’s Day five days out, working right through the weekend on more than 600 orders. This week, for next Sunday’s celebration, they will also pull late-nighters, and the shop itself will stay open late Thursday and Friday evening, as well as next Sunday itself from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
“Mother’s Day is probably as big, if not bigger,” Karban says. “Everybody has a mother.”
Karban, an ordinary-looking man in comfortable clothes, is covered with brown bits of floral flotsam. Around him in the shop’s warehouse are the quieted accouterments of a dozen kinds of ceremonies, boxes of flowers along the wall and pots of baby’s breath, lemon leaves and purple statice placed here and there. There are also nearly 400 packages of double-wrapped flower arrangements ready to be delivered.
It used to be everyone wore a corsage or a boutonniere on Mother’s Day (a white flower if your mother was deceased and a colored flower if your mother was alive). Things have changed.
“Now they’re doing arrangements,” Karban says, shrugging his shoulders.
Today, if you wanted, you could buy a cheerful, spring-look bouquet of daisies and yellow mums and fuchsia carnations and pink tulips and purple iris for $25, cooling in one of Lombard Floral’s three walk-in refrigerator cases.
Karban and wife Marie own a shop that has been a presence in Lombard, in various incarnations, since 1938.
“It’s a family business,” says Bonnie MacKay, the editor and publisher of the Lombardian, the local newsweekly. “You can call them up and tell them what you want, and you’ll end up with a nice-looking arrangement. You can leave it in their hands.”
The hands include Karban and Marie, 56; son Mike, 31, and daughter Gina, 32. Mike also works as a firefighter/paramedic in Hinsdale.
Although Marie and Joe grew up together, they didn’t merge their interest in flowers until after their 1961 marriage. Marie has worked in various family-owned flower shops since she was a grade-schooler.
Karban, too, says he wanted to be a florist since he was a youngster.
He went to funerals as an acolyte in his youth, “and the priest would be praying in Latin and I would sit there and look at all the flowers,” he remembers, gesturing in the air to invisible floral sprays gone by.
Pinch-hitting delivery driver Vince Catalano, 33, a Lombard resident and warehouse employee for Dominick’s grocery, has been “helping out Karbans,” as he puts it, for nearly 10 years, as long as he has known Mike.
For his help on the holidays, Catalano gets paid in flowers. He chooses strongly scented lilac-colored sweetheart roses for his wife, Patti, a homemaker, or plants for his mother, Janet, in Florida.
This day, he’s delivering a round of packages to various office buildings, hair salons, restaurants and even a Midas Muffler shop.
“The women get all (angry) . . . when other women get flowers,” he explains, striding upstairs in his shiny white sneakers with a bouquet in his hands.
Now that it’s the 1990s, men get flowers, too, although they might not appreciate them in exactly the same way. This Valentine’s Day, for example, was Flower Day at a Midas Muffler on Roosevelt Road, where mechanic Bob Alexander received a surprise bouquet from his wife of 24 years.
Alexander purpled slightly when he opened the package-this was a first for him-especially when Catalano chortled, “Happy Valentine’s Day” and sped off.
“I thought it was pretty neat,” Alexander says afterward. “My manager got them, too, from his wife.”
Catalano gives his wife flowers often.
“Flowers are a way of saying whatever you want to say,” he says. ” `I miss you’ or `I love you.’ Everybody likes them.”
You can learn a lot about human nature by arranging flowers, the talismans that seem to commemorate every one of life’s Great Events, birth to death.
“It’s always interesting to work with John Q. Public,” Karban says back at the warehouse.
Consider the unhappy lover who returned her bouquet, card and all, saying, “I don’t want it. You keep it!” The mother who did the same because she was not on speaking terms with her son. The tragedy of Christmas poinsettias, unwittingly left to freeze in the back seat.
Or consider the full moon effect, in full flower at Lombard Floral.
“You’ll have more deaths, more babies being born in a full moon,” says Joe Karban.
Then there’s the fact that New Year’s Eve brings funeral arrangements.”For me, it’s not New Year’s unless I’m working on funeral pieces,” says Karban.
Ummm, because of drunk-driving fatalities?
No. “People who are generally terminal will make it through a major holiday like Thanksgiving and Christmas and then they’ll expire.”
Hey, that’s business.
Here are some floral secrets from Joe: Order early for best selection. Don’t put your flowers on anything warm, like a stereo or a TV. And did you know that if you put one rosebud in a can of 7-Up and one rosebud in a vase of water, the 7-Up bud will last longer because of the sugar and the citric acid?
By 4:30 p.m., floral designer Joe Crook, 44, a Bolingbrook resident who has been with Lombard Floral for six years, keeps threatening, half seriously, that he might end up over at the Karbans (who live next door) by the liquor cabinet, although “my ulcer kicked in about 4 o’clock this morning.”
“We are tired, exhausted, beyond that stage,” says Joe Karban.
There are just a few dozen red roses left and the packages awaiting delivery. The foyer is filled with men and women and a few children, frantically picking up plants and anything else they think might be a good gift, a mopey pink plant (kalanchoe) or a fake dewdropped rose for $1.50.
Lombard Floral personnel are by this time operating in a fragrant haze.
Designer Martha Reynolds, 30, a Lombard resident, had awakened at 1:30 a.m. that day, convinced she had never left work.
“I had a dream I was in the shop making another arrangement,” she says. “It was like I never left.”
Designers Reynolds and Crook will tumble home at 6:30 p.m. after having worked until 10 p.m. the previous evening. The Karbans will leave at 7:30.
“I’m just glad it’s behind us,” Crook says. Until, at least, this week, Mother’s Day. And the cycle buds anew.
