Flying Flora

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.

His 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 bulwarked from field to chromium counter, Smith set out to make his flowers pay as handsomely as they grew.

Smith hired the area's best horticulturists and floral designers right & left (despite protests of other growers, who claimed that he was underselling the market and charging off floral losses against newspaper profits), soon had a crack staff of 65. Among many Smith service features: a "memory service bureau," employing a pert blonde to call up husbands two days before wedding anniversaries, etc.

Next-by-Air? In December, Mission, Inc. grossed $53,000, and for its first full year of operation, ending August 1945, gross is expected to hit $350,000. Last week Smith was estimating a 1945 take of $500,000. Nobody laughed.

To make certain nobody would, handsome, hefty Robert L. Smith fortnight ago took another long jump. He has an agreement with American Airlines, Inc., guaranteeing daily, postwar air-freight shipment of Mission, Inc. flowers to New York--the first negotiation of its kind.

"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."

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