Leroy Neff finds a good use for discarded flowers, and reaps a harvest of smiles for his efforts.

Ninety-four-year-old Elizabeth Cook was asleep in her room at the Park Imperial Lodge Convalescent Home in Lawndale when Leroy Neff walked in.

“Elizabeth, Elizabeth,” he said as he gently shook her and held out a bouquet of flowers.

“Oh,” she said, opening her eyes to admire the small arrangement of white carnations and red lilies. “They took the other flowers you brought last week.”

“They did?” responded Neff. “Well, here are some more.”

“Oh, I love them,” the frail dark-eyed woman told a visitor. “I get them every week.”

After holding Cook’s hand and saying a short prayer, Neff hurried out to his light blue ’71 Volkswagen van, which was packed with about 200 bouquets. He gunned the engine and tore out of the driveway.

The Flower Man, as Neff is sometimes called, was hurrying to make his weekly rounds, delivering donated flowers and a few inspiring words to seven convalescent centers in the South Bay and the homes of an 11-year-old blind girl and a disabled senior citizen.

A 69-year-old retired aerospace worker, Neff says he is not one to sit around the house and listen to the clock tick away. Since his wife died of cancer five years ago, he said, he has tried to keep busy.

“You have to keep active,” he said. “That’s what keeps you young.”

Every Thursday for the last 2 1/2 years, Neff has parked his van at the Sunfresh Flower Marts warehouse in Hawthorne and loaded it with 200 to 300 bouquets. The flowers, returned to the warehouse by retailers who failed to sell them, are a bit frayed and wilted, and the warehouse manager says he would otherwise throw them away.

But Neff says the flowers he culls can still bring happiness to many lonely elderly people who don’t get out much anymore.

“They all love to have these flowers,” he said.

Marc Granovitz, president of Sunfresh Flower Marts, said Neff “touches literally hundreds of lives weekly.”

Neff, a bespectacled man with seemingly boundless energy, said he began delivering the flowers when a friend who began the task gave it up after being hospitalized in 1987. He said his gas money comes out of his own pocket and his only reward comes from the cheer he brings to people.

“You can see these people with a smile on their faces and you know they are real pleased,” Neff said as he maneuvered his van through the back streets of Hawthorne.

When Neff is not tearing up the roads to deliver flowers, he is putting the pedal to the metal to distribute food twice a week as a volunteer with the Meals on Wheels program.

At some of his flower stops, Neff drops off an armful of bouquets and lets the hospital staff deliver them individually. At others, Neff takes the time to hand a small arrangement of flowers to patients he has come to know personally.

“We wish we had more like him,” Rita Simms, administrator for the Southwest Convalescent Center in Hawthorne, said about Neff. “He makes all of us feel good.”

Teresa Green, the activities director at Las Flores Convalescent Hospital in Gardena, said the flowers Neff provides are used to conduct a weekly flower arranging class.

She said the floral arrangements are then given to the elderly for birthdays or other special occasions.

“They really appreciate the flowers,” Green said.

Neff says that when he finishes his deliveries--usually around 6 p.m.--he makes his final stop of the day. He sets down his last bouquet at his wife’s grave site and then he heads home.