Floral Industry Comes Together to Honor NIU Students
In the aftermath of the recent tragedy at Northern Illinois University, three levels of the floral industry came together, from grower to wholesaler to retail florist, to contribute a beautiful display of flowers to commemorate the lives lost in the Feb. 14 school shootings.
On Thursday, Feb. 14, on the campus of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill., a lone gunman, 27-year-old Stephen Kazmierczak, a former Northern Illinois University student, shot and killed five students and wounded 16 other individuals at a lecture hall on the campus; he then killed himself. The shooter’s motive, according to police reports remains unclear because police haven’t found a suicide note.
To help the students, families and college community cope, and to honor the five students, the university held a memorial on Sunday, Feb. 24, — where more than 12,000 people came to pay their respects — at the school’s convocation center.
The floral industry banded together through this tragedy, and it all started with a call from Dole Fresh Flowers of Miami to Chicago-based Kennicott Brothers Co.
Tim Truhlar, manager at Kennicott Brothers Co.’s Aurora, Ill., location, says he got a call from a Dole representative offering a flower donation for the university’s memorial service. Truhlar immediately accepted and called a longtime Kennicott’s customer, Sally Kaelin-Mullis, manager of DeKalb Florist & Greenhouse in DeKalb, Ill. — the town that’s home to Northern Illinois University — to enlist her help. The florist was eager to lend a hand to create and deliver floral arrangements for the memorial service. “I said we would certainly be honored to do that for them,” Kaelin-Mullis says.
Truhlar received the donated flowers and greens and narrowed down the choices for the arrangements to match the red and white of the college mascot, Husky. Kaelin-Mullis designed nine arrangements using the donated carnations, chrysanthemums and alstroemeria for each of the memorial’s overflow rooms at the university (the convocation center where the main memorial was held already had flowers).
The network chain exemplified the “good work between all the florists,” Truhlar says, and that was important because “even in a very sad time, we all pulled together. And it wasn’t a matter of profit or publicity, it was for the college, the students and the families.”
--Cassandra P. Foster
cfoster@safnow.org
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