Shaw’s Flowers, located at 423 Second Street, has been serving this community since 1928.
During those years they have been a full-service florist for weddings, funerals, birthdays, anniversaries and much more. All the arrangements from Shaw’s are made from scratch, meaning that they build it for the customer from individual flowers.
Henderson floral shop marks 90 years by Chuck Stinnett 15 Nov 2018
Henderson floral shop marks 90 years by Chuck Stinnett 15 Nov 2018
In late 1977, Larry Dixon was a journeyman union bricklayer who had also been trained in welding and blueprint reading. He had a good job with a company in Evansville.
He was not intending to go to work for his father-in-law’s florist shop, Shaw’s Flowers.
Except that the Tri-state was in the midst of one of two historic back-to-back winters that dumped prodigious amounts of snow, making outdoor construction work temporarily scarce.
Walter Shaw, father of Dixon’s wife, Cynthia, needed help and promised him a steady paycheck. “He said, ‘Cindy someday is going to take over the business. You need to learn it.’ ”
Dixon agreed to try it, but said if the work didn’t suit him, he wouldn’t stay.
More than 40 years later, Larry Dixon is still working at the shop with his wife (who started there full-time in 1972) and their veteran staff.
But even that doesn’t begin to touch the full history of Shaw’s Flowers, which traces itself back to 1928 and this month celebrates its 90th anniversary, making it the oldest florist — and one of the oldest businesses — in Henderson.
The Shaw history of gardening and selling flowers goes back at least six generations to 19th-century Germany, when the family name was spelled Zschau.
Three Zschau brothers who had learned the trade immigrated to America in the early 20th century, finding work as gardeners for wealthy Chicago families and eventually each owning his own greenhouse.
One of the brothers’ sons, Walter R. Zschau (who changed his last name to Shaw as he became an American citizen and enlisted in the Marines during World War I), worked in and owned greenhouses before moving to Henderson in 1928 to lease the Fernwood Greenhouse, launching the Shaw family’s florist heritage in Henderson.
Shaw in 1930 bought out the Henderson Floral Co., which grew its own plants and flowers in greenhouses at Second and Clark streets.
In 1941 he established a new business, Shaw’s Flowers, at 222 Second St. Soon, America was immersed in World War II, and Henderson changed dramatically, in part because of the thousands of soldiers stationed just down the road at Camp Breckinridge. Shaw’s benefitted from the line of G.I.s who would line up around the block to send flowers home for Mother’s Day — the orders would be rushed across the street to the Western Union office in the Kingdon Hotel to be fulfilled via FTD — and, later, from German prisoners of war at Camp Breckinridge— as passionate about flowers as the Zschau family had been — who would pool their money to buy memorial flowers when a fellow prisoner died.
It usually fell to the family’s patriarch’s teenage son, Walter R. Shaw, to haul the flowers down to Morganfield in the family’s little delivery truck.
After the war, the younger Walter Shaw went to college, became an electrical engineer, married Jean Poole and found work with electronics manufacturers Western Electric and Potter & Brumfield. But, Jean Shaw said in 2003. “He never got the flower business out of his system. Any vacation, any weekend, this is where we were,” helping his father at the flower shop.
Finally, Walter R. and Jean came back to Henderson to operate Shaw’s Gardens, a landscaping and wholesale/retail greenhouse business that his father had opened on 10 acres on U.S. 41–North in 1950.
There, the Shaws grew enormous mums and carnations for cut flower arrangements, raised gladiolas in the summer, grew evergreens from cuttings and more
That’s where the next generation of Shaws got their initiation in the flower business as Walter and Jean’s daughters, Cindy and Debbie, began working at Shaw’s Gardens as kids, carrying flats of petunias out to customers’ cars by the time they were five or six. “She told me she was in business before I was out of diapers,” Larry Dixon said.
Shaw’s Flowers relocated to 423 Second St. in 1962. Four years later, the elder Walter Shaw retired and sold the business to his son in 1966, while Shaw’s Gardens –– where business had been hurt by construction related to the widening of U.S. 41–North –– was closed. (The Ramada Inn hotel later was constructed on the site.)
Cindy Dixon credits her father, Walter Jr. (as he was popularly but inaccurately known), with inaugurating, in the 1960s, the Christmas retail open house tradition in Henderson on the weekend after Thanksgiving, originally on Sundays.
“He brought an organ in and they played music, and people lined up around the block,” she said. “My grandmother cooked cookies and homemade bread,” and Shaw’s gave a carnation and a calendar to the ladies who came in after church to gaze at the decorated store and holiday gifts.
So many people showed up, Larry Dixon said, that his father-in-law “would lock the door, allow the people to mill around, then let that crowd out and let a new crowd in.” It grew into a tradition on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday after Thanksgiving for Henderson retailers before settling into a Friday and Saturday affair. (With the growing popularity of Black Friday at big-box retailers several years ago, Henderson’s local-shop holiday was switched to two weeks before the Thanksgiving weekend.)
While helping continue the family heritage hadn’t been in young Larry Dixon’s plans (nor was being regularly called “Mr. Shaw”), his fate swiveled when his father-in-law was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in 1978. Walter Shaw underwent surgery in Louisville, and much of the family went to be with him, leaving Dixon behind as what he called the “so-called manager.”
But Dixon is emphatic in saying he couldn’t have done it without employees Dolly Messamore and Goldie Stewart, who each spent more than 40 years at the shop.
“They were the columns that held this company up,” he said.
In time, he learned the craft of floral design through hands–on training.
Walter Shaw’s initial surgery appeared successful, but the cancer returned; he died in 1980. “Mother (Jean Shaw) took over,” Cindy Dixon said.
In 1994, Jean turned operations over to Cindy, with Larry serving as manager. Jean still worked holidays and one day a week to give Larry a day off, although they sometimes still had to work seven days a week.
Jean Shaw — who Dixon still calls “Mom” or “Mother Shaw,” and sometimes “Mrs. Shaw” — kept a close eye on the business and the books. “She worked up ’til (several months) before she died” on Nov. 22, 2017 at age 85.
In those final months, she wasn’t coming to the shop. “But she kept in touch,” Dixon said. “She may not have physically been here, but she asked all along” how things were going.
After Mrs. Shaw died, employee Joette “Jojo” Hay stepped into the role as shop manager. “She has been like my own child, and is family,” Larry Dixon said.
“I’ve always considered this a family business,” Cindy Dixon said. “If you work for us, you’re family.”
As for his own role, Larry Dixon said he is “boss” (using air quotes) “until somebody says I’m doing something wrong.”
“I never said I was a florist,” he insists.
But he certainly understands the changes in the business over the past two generations, such as flower shops buying all their flowers from wholesale growers. Thirty or forty years ago, “If you couldn’t grow flowers, you weren’t a florist,” he said.
Then there is the internet.
“A lot of people want to use the internet to send flowers,” Dixon said.
You can run a Google search for “Henderson KY florist,” and while you can find local shops, you’ll also find other companies that purport to be local florists. In fact, they often are “order gatherers” that might be located in Atlanta or Los Angeles; they take orders, forward the order to a real local florist and charge a marked-up fee to the customer.
“You can spend $70 for a thing you could have picked up the phone and gotten for $35” from a genuine local shop. One red flag: a web page for a florist that claims to be located in Henderson but doesn’t provide a local address.
In the past couple of years, the number of florist shops in Henderson has dropped in half, from six to three, as some other florists have retired from the business. That is keeping Shaw’s busy.
“We added four employees since O’Daniels (Flower Shop) closed,” Dixon said.
There are still the busy seasons, like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, when the staff swells from eight” — some with 30 to 40 years of experience — to a corps of about 20.
“Our son Josh is a fireman,” Cindy said. “We love firemen to deliver on their days’ off. They know the city.” Their oldest son, Jason, also helps with deliveries during busy seasons.
Something else that hasn’t changed much is Shaw’s approach to floral design.
For years, the mantra at Shaw’s Flowers was, “How would Walter have done this?” Dixon said.
While tastes and trends in floral design change, “We’re considered an old, traditional florist,” he said. “So we have not changed as much as others. We have customers who still want (an arrangement) to look like grandma’s.
We’re old school,” he said. “If you don’t like something, we’ll try to make it right. If we can’t make it right, we’ll give you back your money.”
The 90-year-old tradition continues. A prized object at the Dixon home is a flared basket in which Cindy Dixon’s grandfather sold his first flower arrangement. A customer who bought it in 1928 when her mother died brought it to Cindy some 65 years later. It was nice, the woman said of the arrangement, “but she said it was a little expensive” — $3.50 or $4.
The basket would cost more than that today,” Larry Dixon said.
Guest columnist Chuck Stinnett can be reached at chuck.stinnett@gmail.com.
https://www.thegleaner.com/story/news/2018/11/15/stinnett-henderson-floral-shop-marks-90-years/1996720002/
