Word: flower
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Like many another businessman, 39-year-old Master Promoter Robert Lawver Smith scarcely knew a chrysanthemum from a moss rose. But he did know that flowers could be sold. With that information, plus $125,000 and the merchandising experience gained as general manager of the tabloid Los Angeles Daily News (a job he still holds), Smith charged last year into the flower business. It took him just seven months to become the No. 1 combination grower-wholesaler-retailer in the nation's $300,000,000 floral industry...
...flower-sniffing began last August, when Daily News Horticulturist-Publisher Manchester E. Boddy offered Promoter Smith some $250,000 worth of Southern California's flowering farmland for the give-away price of $25,000. Boddy ("the Ferdinand of the publishing business") wanted a lively marketing outlet for the flowers from his 165-acre horticultural wonder ranch at La Canada, Calif. Smith had rescued his newspaper from a slow circulation death with dazzling promotion campaigns. If Smith could sell the Daily News that was, reasoned Boddy, he could sell anything...
Shops & Salons. Smith agreed. With Daily News Secretary-Treasurer William R. Powell hemming & hawing in for a third of the deal, Smith promptly formed his Mission Nurseries & Florists, Inc. He bought out two flower wholesalers on Los Angeles' Wall Street, opened a retail shop nearby. Then he hustled west to Wilshire Boulevard's breezy shopping district to unveil a retail salon (Hollywood for shop). Next he bought 28,000 square feet of greenhouse and opened another retail store in San Gabriel, Calif., added a four-and-a-half-acre nursery plot in the famed San Fernando Valley. Thus...
...Consider the exciting possibilities," beamed Smith, considering them. "Pretty soon we'll be able to drop 5,000 Ibs. of California sweet peas down on the London market 24 hours after picking. Why, Southern California will be the flower basket of the world...
...Marvin lived until he was ten, in a railroad flat in Grandma Lang's home. It was full of beaded curtains, canaries, chairs with claw feet and red leather seats, gaslights, knickknacks, onyx clocks and vases filled with cattails. From an upstairs window Marvin could look down upon flower gardens and a spider's web of clotheslines forever hung with grey underwear. His father, who then had charge of the hardware section of Bohan's department store, was a Republican with firm convictions about religion: "Live and let live is my motto...