Jim Schaefer

Detroit Free Press

%22You are so wonderful to think of us like this -- but%2C of course you would. You never forget do you%3F%22

Sending flowers is natural for Arlene Earl. Her ancestor founded Chris Engel%27s Greenhouse in 1883.

It%27s a give-and-take relationship. It%27s what they did for her%2C and what she%27s done for them.

This is a cool September day, a brilliant sunny Tuesday, and the usual stiff breeze clips off the south channel of Harsens Island. An older woman with a walker stands on the back deck of her home, watching a giant freighter slip through the St. Clair River toward Lake Huron.

The ship passes by her property, just a couple of hundred yards away. Outside the pilot house, high above the splitting water, there's a man on the deck — presumably the captain, but who can tell from here — and he's waving the sailors wave, arms swinging over his head, crossing and dropping to his sides again.

"Hellooooooooo, Arlene!" the man shouts, and there's a pause, and then the Indiana Harbor blasts its horn: One long blow, then two short ones.

Arlene Earl is out there watching, like she always hopes to be. Even after the breast cancer, the malignant brain tumor and the seizures, Earl is there, with the aide of her caregiver, and she's waving back, and then she raises her handheld radio. "Flower Lady going to channel 8," she speaks into her two-way. "Thank you for the nice salute."

The Flower Lady. That's what they call Earl. That's what happens when you spend more than three decades donating thousands of fresh bouquets to captains and crews of Great Lakes freighters. "Flower Lady" is a title bestowed on her by generations of the men and women on these fresh water monsters, but that simplistic moniker belies the deeper story behind it. These regular exchanges on days like today, at the home of a now fragile 75-year-old woman, are not just about flowers. They are about a give-and-take relationship forged many years ago between her and the crews sliding by her home aboard these behemoths. It's about what they did for her, and what she has done for them.

Salutes for Uncle Norm

The relationship started because of Uncle Norm.

Not so long ago, the Earl home teemed with life on the southern edge of Harsens Island. Arlene and her husband, Dick, built the house in the late 1950s, and it looks out over the wide St. Clair River and across to Walpole Island. The waterway connects Lake St. Clair with Lake Huron, so it's a superhighway for freighters hauling iron ore, grain and coal. The largest "lakers" are 1,000 feet long and can carry 70,000 tons of ore.

The Earl home offers a front-row view from the backyard. They erected a flagpole, modeled after a ship's mast, that stands sentry over a dock that ends in a seating area. There's a replica lighthouse in one corner of the yard, courtesy of Dick, who was a master carpenter among other things. This yard hosted numerous parties, picnics and family reunions. The Earls were exceptionally social.

Into this environment, they brought Uncle Norm in the 1980s. Norman Lacroix was Dick's uncle, and Lacroix had spent years on the Great Lakes as a ship's engineer. He later suffered with Alzheimer's.

Retired, Lacroix was living in Lakeland, Fla. On one of their visits, Arlene and Dick noticed that the Alzheimer's was progressing. Arlene remembers checking the refrigerator and finding several gallons of milk and ice cream, and nothing else. The bedsheets hadn't been changed. He wasn't taking his medicine. She asked Uncle Norm if he wanted to go for a ride in the car, and they drove straight to Harsens Island.

Lacroix didn't mind. He grew up there, and two sisters still called the island home. And there was another draw: the steady traffic behind the home. Uncle Norm would plop down in a deck chair every day and wait. When the freighters came by, he'd wave the sailors wave, arms flapping up high, back down, repeat.

Arlene thought this brought Lacroix joy — until one day when he came to the kitchen, where she was cooking.

"The tears were just coming down his cheek," she said in a recent interview. Lacroix told her: "They don't remember me."

"I said, 'Norm, go back out. They'll be somebody coming by. ... At first, he didn't want to stay here. You get the Alzheimer's, you want to stay in your own environment, you know? So I said, 'No, Norman, this is your home. Now go back out, they'll be some more ships coming.' Now, maybe that wasn't fair to him, but I didn't know what to do with him. He followed me around, up the stairs and down, wherever I went."

Norm loved to dance. So, dance they did. They took each other's hand and danced, right in their home. Earl said he believed she was an old friend from Tashmoo Park, a Harsens Island gathering place that closed in 1951. People went there to swim, ride rides and dance.

"He says, 'You remember me,' and I said, 'I do.' He said, 'I think we had our last dance at Tashmoo.' I said, 'You're exactly right.' He said, 'Why don't we dance here?' ... It seemed to be every day, we had to dance. That was OK."

But if a ship came by, the dancing would stop. Lacroix would go out to wave. The sad old man broke Earl's heart.

So, she decided to write letters, directed to the ships. She addressed them: "To the captain and crew of (blank)." And she'd fill in the ship's name. She thinks she sent about 60, in all.

"I would just say, 'My name is Arlene Earl,' blah, blah. 'And we're taking care of Norman Lacroix, retired chief of the Reserve. He's living in our home now.' That kind of thing. 'I would appreciate if you could give him a salute between 11 and 13, the markers on the water.' "

Soon enough, Lacroix came into the house again with tears on his face. But these were tears of joy.

"They remember me!" he told Earl.

Soon, more ships were saluting. And then more.

Earl knew she had to thank them.

Enter the Flower Lady.

Say thanks with flowers

Sending flowers is a natural for Arlene Earl. Her great-grandfather founded Chris Engel's Greenhouse in 1883 in southwest Detroit. The shop was handed down through the generations, and Arlene grew up in the business. She ran the shop until recently, traveling the 90-minute route daily from Harsens to Woodmere Street.

So, when the ships began saluting outside her home after Uncle Norman moved in, she started sending bouquets.

"I was brought up in a world that if somebody gave you something, you thanked them," she said. "How many people are out there today who will give you anything?"

This giving quickly grew beyond a one-time deal. Before long, Earl was sending flowers through the J.W. Westcott mail boat about five times a year, around the major holidays. Folks at the Westcott, a business in the shadow of the Ambassador Bridge that has been around even longer than the flower shop, were happy to accommodate.

"We would probably put flowers on as many as 50 or 60 vessels, when she brought in the batches, like at spring fit out and Father's Day and Thanksgiving," said Paul Jagenow, a longtime Westcott employee.

The mail boat would motor out to the center of the river, sidle alongside the massive freighters and hand up the bouquets just like the mail — by putting them into a bucket that would then be hoisted high above to the towering ships.

The flowers "always put a smile on their face," Jagenow said recently.

In return, the sailors flooded the Earl home with thank-you letters and cards. Arlene has kept many, and they spill from several stuffed photo albums.

From the Courtney Burton: "If every sailor, on every ship, were to thank you every day, it still would not begin to express what the colorful flowers you send us mean in our monochromatic world."

The John G. Munson: "The fellows in the crew came to me after we received the flowers and they commented that there still a lot of good people in the world. When someone you don't even know will show that much appreciation just for blowing a salute on the whistle. You just don't know how much this meant to us especially since we didn't get home for Easter."

The Calumet: "You are so wonderful to think of us like this — but, of course you would. You never forget do you?"

Jack Callahan, 68, a Great Lakes captain who retired in 2008 and lives in Brownstown Township, said it was common to be on a ship for two months straight, and before cell phones and the Internet, there was a feeling of incredible isolation.

His crews, most recently on the Kaye E. Barker, always looked forward to the warmth of the flowers.

"We always put them in the dining room because they brought a sense of home to us," said Callahan. The crew members, mostly men, were moved.

"These are macho guys. ... But every one of them took care of them, and would water them. ... They might not have said it but you could see it in their eyes."

Callahan made sure Earl was saluted — every time his ship passed.

"If I wasn't on the bridge, it was standing orders when we went by her house," he said. "Because this is an appreciation of what she does and what she's done."

Norman Lacroix lived with the Earls for several years, until the Alzheimer's grew so severe that it was dangerous to keep him near the water. The Earls placed him in a home for patients with the disease. He died in 1993.

But Arlene Earl kept sending flowers, year after year. She sent baskets this year for Father's Day, with the help of her sister, Linda Washburn of Grosse Ile, and plans to do it again around Thanksgiving.

"You have generations on these freighters. It's just nothing but beautiful to see, generation upon generation," Washburn said. "And when they can get a wave, or a butterfly kiss, or a package of flowers, they smile, and they know the people along these homes along the river, they care."

Later in his life, Dick Earl had heart trouble. He wanted Arlene to sell the flower shop so they could travel together. She says she didn't want to sell the family shop, but eventually did.

Dick died in 2010 at age 74. Arlene and the family welcomed people to a memorial service at the island home, where Dick was laid out for a viewing in the living room. Washburn said people lined up in the rain to get inside and pay their respects.

Arlene Earl still visits the flower shop she used to own when she is feeling up to it. Sometimes, relatives sleep over at her home. She says she misses her husband. Recently, dozens of people on the island dressed up for a sock-hop fund-raiser for her, headlined by an Elvis impersonator.

Now she has her own health struggles: Two bouts with cancer. Surgery and radiation. Seizures.

Ask her how she feels, and she might snap back: "Oh, I feel fine. How are you feeling?"

But then she'll concede that her back has been hurting, the result of a fall just weeks ago that cracked three ribs, and the neighbor friend who helps care for her then might add more ice to the pack on her back.

Still, Earl insists none of this will stop her from doing what she wants to do. Nothing has yet.

So, on this blue-sky Tuesday in September, here's Arlene Earl, the Flower Lady, pulling herself out of a chair, making her way to her back deck and hailing the passing freighter.

She's waving her arms in the sailors wave, the man on the pilot's deck is waving back, and then he shouts: "Hellooooooooo, Arlene!"

And the Indiana Harbor blasts a deep, resonating salute.

Contact Jim Schaefer at 313-223-4542 or jschaefer@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @DetroitReporter.