Compton Florist’s Shop Is a Well-Loved Perennial

Maybe Bill Williams is right. Maybe he hasn’t done anything all that extraordinary in the last 81 years.

Not his marriage. Nothing special about a 56-year love affair with a woman he still calls “honey” and eyes flirtatiously as she walks across the room.

Or the flower shop he runs out of a dim garage behind his Compton house, where he has spent four decades arranging carnations and roses for celebrations and funerals, creating corsages for proms and graduations.

Or the dozens of kids he’s employed at the shop during the last 40 years, giving them their first job and a friendly ear.

You tell Bill Williams he deserves some praise, and he ducks his head with a vigorous, disapproving shake. You ask him to sum up his life, and he puts it this way: “I’ve made an honest living. I can sleep well at night.”

Longtime residents of Compton tell a different story.

To them, Williams is a rare, living link to a time when neighbors visited each other through gates in their backyard fences and parents kept a watchful eye on each other’s children playing in the street.

Williams and his wife, Myrtle, moved to a gray stucco house on 137th Street in Compton in 1951, among the first group of African American families to settle in the area as segregation broke down.

In the 1950s, Bill was working as a janitor at the Bel-Air Country Club when he saw a man arranging ferns for a table centerpiece.

“That’s for me,” he said to himself. No boss to tell you what to do. Good steady work.

He took some flower arranging classes in the evenings at Manual Arts High School and started working for a floral delivery service. Every time he picked up a bouquet or arrangement, he would spend a couple minutes chatting with the florist, learning tricks and techniques.

Flower Shop Opened in 1958

He opened up a flower shop in his garage in 1958, putting in an old refrigerator to keep the blossoms fresh. Soon the word spread that Bill Williams was in the flower business. In his first week, he did three weddings.

As the business grew, he hired young neighborhood kids to sweep the floor, eventually teaching them how to make flower arrangements and take orders.

What they didn’t realize at the time, they say now, was that in the process Williams was teaching them how to get ahead.

Stay in school, he would tell them. Take care of the shop while I’m gone. You can handle it. Be courteous. The most important phrases to remember? Yes, sir. No, ma’am. Thank you.

He told them that once when he was a child growing up around 12th Street and Central Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, his grandmother scolded him for not greeting someone on the street.

“It don’t cost you one dime to be nice to anyone,” she told him.

Williams is still selling flowers. Myrtle, who quit her job in the garment district to help him get started, still answers the phones and takes the orders.

Not that many kids come by for after-school jobs anymore. Williams doesn’t really have enough to pay them. And they’re just not that interested, he says.

“Everything is high-tech now,” he says. “What we’re doing, in a sense, is dead.”

Years of cutting stems and twisting ribbon have led to carpal tunnel syndrome, and arthritis has gnarled his hands. His hair has gone pepper gray, his voice gravelly. People come up to him in the grocery store. “Mr. Williams,” they say, “don’t you remember me? You did my wedding 37 years ago.”

He doesn’t dwell in nostalgia. The flower business is just a job, he insists. Just a way to pay the bills. He’d retire if he could afford it.

Inside the garage, an old radio blares jazz and a rusty metal clipboard on the wall divided into seven columns holds all the week’s orders, logged on slips of paper in Myrtle’s careful penmanship.

The flower shop is always full of people: neighbors, old friends from out of town, former employees who feel that Williams gave them their first and best start. Most call the Williamses Mom and Dad.

Tony Owens, who hung out at the shop as a youngster in the 1950s, stops by several times a month. He remembers that the kids in the neighborhood turned to Williams whenever they had a problem. Owens still does.

“When you walk out, he taps you on the shoulder and says, ‘I love you. You can come here any time,’ ” says Owens, 52, who works for the Compton Water Department. “That covers it all.”

In 1958, 11-year-old Anderne Anderson was one of Williams’ first employees. The florist gave the boy a job sweeping the floor, even though he really didn’t need any extra help. Eventually, Anderson learned flower design, and he still works in the shop when Williams has a lot of orders to fill.

“He taught me something I could use the rest of my life,” says Anderson, 51, who works as a security guard but hopes to get a full-time job as a florist. “He kept me off the streets and helped me grow on the right path. It taught me the value of working, of understanding people.”

Anderson, one of seven children, said the after-school job also allowed him to buy things his parents couldn’t afford. And Williams financed a trip to the mountains, his prom and graduation.

“He’d give you his heart, if he could,” Anderson says. “He’s that type of person.”

Part of the Community

The Williamses never had any children. “Maybe God didn’t intend it,” Bill says. Nevertheless, he was active in the Centennial High School PTA and booster club. He spoke at the school on Career Day. He sold discount corsages for homecoming and passed out victory roses at the football games.

“If you can’t be part of the community, why be there?” he says.

He credits any success in his life to Myrtle, a vivacious young woman when he met her at a club in Watts’ Little Harlem in 1942. He immediately asked her out to dinner.

“I thought he was a gentleman,” she says.

“I thought she was a beautiful, beautiful lady,” he says, his eyes twinkling.

She’s older, by four months. He teases her that she picked up a younger man.

“Doesn’t she move with grace?” he murmurs to himself as she hobbles over with the help of a cane.

Her favorite flower?

“Irises--and Bill Williams,” she laughs.

“Aw, do you mean it?” he chuckles.

He shares a secret: “Her laughter keeps me young.”

She shares a secret: “We’re so busy listening to other people’s misery, we don’t have time to make it for ourselves.”

After 40 years, they still work comfortably side by side. She sorts through paperwork, and he sits at a wooden stool at his work table, carefully cutting China Moons and carnations and gladiolus.

He stills delivers flowers in his blue van with the words “Bill Williams Florist” stenciled on the side.

And the kids from the old days still come back, full of thanks.

He still shakes it off.

“I don’t want to be praised for anything I’ve done. I’m just being me. I got more satisfaction out of it than anyone else.”