For Rockefeller Center Scout, Finding Perfect Tree Is a Year-Round Job

Picking a Christmas tree takes most people a few minutes, a couple of hours if they head to the woods. Dave Murbach needs 11 months.

Almost every day of every year, Murbach’s thoughts turn to visions of a perfectly shaped evergreen behemoth that will take everyone’s breath away.

“The Tree,” he says wearily. “Always the Tree.”

Murbach is the man responsible for finding the towering tannenbaum that graces Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center each Christmas season.

“Typically, I’m always looking for a tree,” the center’s chief gardener says. “I look for it even when I go to the beach in the summer. It’s like a homework assignment hanging over your head.”

And if he goofs, there’s no hiding it.

“Every day it’s up, 400,000 people go by, and 2 1/2 million people watch the lighting celebration on television,” he says.

This year’s tree, a 74-foot Norway spruce from Richfield, Ohio, was flown to New York on the world’s largest cargo plane. It was lighted Dec. 2.

The arrival of the tree ushers in the Christmas season in New York--a tradition dating to 1931, when the workers building Rockefeller Center put up a small tree with makeshift ornaments.

For the last 15 years, it’s been up to Murbach to find the tree and oversee its decoration. He would love some help. He would love a little encouragement. Everybody, it seems, is a critic.

“Perfect strangers will come up to me,” Murbach says. “They somehow know me . . . and they offer their opinions.”

The spectacle has grown with the years--and so have expectations.

“It makes it harder because it’s always been done perfectly,” he says. “There’s only one way to go from there.”

The search for the next year’s tree starts soon after the old tree is chopped up for wood chips and horse-jumping logs.

Murbach has three criteria: The tree must be at least 65 feet high, at least 35 feet across and lush--dense enough not to see through.

That’s not as simple as it sounds. Though forests are full of evergreens, few get enough sunlight or space to fill out. And branches in snowy climes often break under the weight, making trees uneven.

Murbach spends hours in his car trolling secondary roads, chasing the beckoning top of every distant evergreen that looks as if it might fit the bill.

“You go up and down every little street, and the odds are you might not find a [suitable] tree for weeks,” he says. In recent years, he’s assisted his search with a helicopter and global positioning satellite equipment that pinpoints the location of trees he spots from aloft.

Back at the office, he sorts through hundreds of letters from people offering their trees, many addressed simply to “Mr. Christmas Tree Man.”

When he investigates, he finds most of the trees too puny--unfit to become the most famous Christmas tree in the world.

“People don’t have the perspective when they look at their own tree,” he says. “Theirs is always the most beautiful.”

But when he finds it, he knows. Immediately.

“When it finally happens I don’t have questions,” he says. “It’s like getting married: When you see the one, you know it.”

Despite the occasional anxiety attack and sleepless night, Murbach knows the effect the tree has on people: “It’s for bringing people together, attempting to bring together people you love. That’s what I hope it triggers.”

But Murbach says he’s always too worn out to celebrate Christmas.

“No cards, no lights, nothing,” he says.

No tree?

“No tree.”