Growing up in a working class family, Karen Orlicki and her three older siblings never got to go to Disney World or other exotic places during their summer breaks.
Their parents did take them to Lake Michigan, though — probably with clothes pins for their noses. They would have to pick up dead fish to be used as fertilizer for their father’s rose bushes.
Maybe that smell had something to do with Karen, the owner of Palace of Flowers, choosing a career where the scents in her workplace are of lavender and peonies rather than lake trout and panfish.
Karen, a South Bend West Sider all her life, has now been in the floral business for 43 years — 35 of those years as an owner — and “I love getting up for my job every morning,” she says.
Fresh flowers — what’s not to like? Nothing fishy about that.
Here’s nine things to know about Karen:
1
She obviously learned a lot about flowers from her father, Stanley, who had more than 50 rose bushes in his garden. He loved them. Karen did, too.
“I could walk down the rows and name what kind they were — Mr. Lincolns … New Yorkers … Chrysler Imperials …”
Her dad’s rose garden was always a special and peaceful place for her.
2
A South Bend Washington graduate — Class of 1979 — Karen was told by her high school counselor that a job in law enforcement might suit her.
Hmmmm. if she had a choice between ”guns and roses,” it was definitely going to be the roses. “I was in 4-H and I always was interested in nature, in things that grow.”
She eventually took a course in floral arrangements, and when she heard of an opening at Palace of Flowers on the corner of Lincoln Way West and Olive Street in 1982, she applied. She was hired by Marcia Labuzienski, whose husband Hank had recently died. Hank’s brother Joe had started the business in 1948 and Hank joined him soon after.
Karen bought it from Marcia in 1990 and built a new shop at 3901 Lincoln Way W. a few years later, with help from her brother Mike, an electrician.
That’s two families owning one shop for almost 80 years.
3
Like Karen herself, Palace of Flowers has been a West Side staple. “I have always had a great customer base,” she says. “But after people could start ordering online, I now have customers from all over the area.”
She has a delivery driver and a part-time designer and a few people who help her during the holidays, but she can be a one-person show on some days.
“It is a business where it seems like you never can work enough.”
4
Karen was only 27 when she took over Palace of Flowers and she had a lot to learn about accounting and inventory and all kinds of other desk-work duties.
“I remember during a recession I ran into my business teacher from Washington High — Mr. Banaszak. I told him that I didn’t remember him teaching us about what recessions could be like.
“And he said I must have been sleeping during that class.”
5
Although the days leading up to Mother’s Day make Karen’s busiest week, Valentine’s Day is easily the busiest day of the year.
“I start planning for Valentine’s Day the day after Christmas,” she says.
She loves how the guys start lining up that afternoon. She often asks “What would your wife want?” Many of them admit that they are clueless. “Well, then you’ve come to the right place,” she says, because she has all kinds of ideas for them.
6
Karen does make time to grow her own flower garden at home. She has her different sections — Mom’s Garden, her Zen Garden and a Studebaker Garden.
She does her “garden walk” almost every day with her cat L.C. (Love Cat) and talks to both him and the flowers.
“In my shop when I’m working on an arrangement and nobody else is around, I’ll talk to the flowers there, too.”
She is still waiting for them to answer her.
7
Karen loves making connections with customers. One young lady stops in when she is in town just because Karen had made her a beautiful corsage years ago.
She recently received a heartfelt “thank you” from another woman in Florida who asked Karen if she thought flowers on her mother’s casket were necessary since the funeral was going to be a low-key, lightly-attended affair.
“I told her it would be the last time she could ever buy flowers for her mother. So she did. Later, she told me that it wouldn’t have felt right without the flowers.
“I always want a person to feel like he or she is the only customer I have.”
8
Although almost all individuals who order flowers and plants are upbeat people, Karen gets a few dandelions on her deliveries.
She remembers going to a funeral home with a specifically-decorated Christmas tree before the service of a “psychic.”
“A little old lady who had a roll of money tucked in her dress asked how much the tree was. I told her and she said that was too much,” Karen recalls. “She paid me anyway. Then she pointed a finger at me and said, ‘I will get you for this.’”
Did she? “The next day, I had a flat tire.”
9
Which fragrance does she love the most? Roses, always roses.
“There’s nothing like the smell of a rose,” Karen says. “That’s scent can’t be imitated in a bottle.”
And as Better Home and Gardens contributor Roland A. Brown once wrote: “I don’t know whether nice people tend to grow roses or growing roses makes people nice.”
Bill Moor, who started at the Tribune in 1973, served as sports editor and as a human-interest columnist during his tenure. Contact him at bry14zzo@gmail.com
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Everything has come up roses for Orlicki for decades ∣ The 9
Reporting by Bill Moor, Special to The Tribune / South Bend Tribune
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By Bill Moor, Special to The Tribune | USA TODAY Network
