PAEAN TO POINSETTIAS

PAEAN TO POINSETTIAS
Los Angeles Times: Years ago when Johnny Carson hosted "The Tonight Show," around the holidays the entire stage overflowed with proud poinsettias whose reds and greens exploded on color TV. Do you remember that? We don't either. But that's among the oft-told stories surrounding this unusual seasonal flower, America's best-selling potted plant and a living synonym for the holidays. But the flower's ubiquity and enduring popularity are due in large part to the gardening and marketing skills of a little-known Californian, Paul Ecke Jr.
By clever planting, cutting, hybridizing, forcing, twisting, positioning and selling, Ecke and his father turned this once pedestrian roadside Mexican plant into a red-and-green symbol of joy, an American holiday staple. They even tortured some plants with X-rays to produce double and triple blooms and exotic hues like purple and orange.
Ecke asked around. He learned that men have two tendencies when visiting florists: One, they're feeling guilty about something and, two, they buy cut flowers. Women, on the other hand, prefer potted plants any time; in fact, women buy eight of 10 potted plants year-round. Poinsettias are potted plants. A year-round business is better than a seasonal one; ask cranberry growers. So Ecke built on his father's homespun horticultural skills to breed poinsettias that last months longer, which was savvy, not subversive. Not only did months of life lengthen the sales season, they could produce bumper crops of props for colorful photo layouts in women's magazines, which prepare their year-end holiday issues months before.
TV scenery
Come Thanksgiving, photos of gorgeously lush, appropriately red-and-green potted plants started appearing in millions of homes far from the Eckes' Encinitas ranch. Eckes also offered regiments of plants as free TV scenery.
All of this prompted millions of buyers to want poinsettias and thousands of florists to seek them from the main U.S. supplier, which is, yep, the Eckes' operation. If you were into plant genealogy, you could trace about 80 percent of the 65 million poinsettia plants grown annually to Eckes' place. The plant wasn't native to California. The Aztecs used it as red dye and a fever-reducer. They called it cuetlaxochitle, which doesn't exactly sing in English. In the 1820s along came Joel Poinsett (note that last name), America's first ambassador to Mexico and a botanist. He took some cuetlaxochitle back to South Carolina for propagation - and renaming. The rest is history. So, sadly, is Paul Ecke Jr. He died of cancer at 76 last May, when poinsettias once didn't prosper.
This is the first holiday season in 80 years without a Paul Ecke Sr. or Jr. peddling poinsettias. But judging by the nation's bountiful holiday decorations this week, the flower of their imaginations and agricultural acumen blooms on.
THE LEGEND OF BIGHOAX
Chicago Tribune: Let us all observe a moment of silence for Ray Wallace, a man who enriched our lives. Wallace died last month of heart failure at the age of 84. It was only after his death that his greatest accomplishment was revealed.
Of course, the clues had been there all along. Wallace had enjoyed an amazingly close relationship with the legendary Bigfoot, an 8-foot apelike creature that stalked the foothills of Humboldt County, Calif. Over the years, Wallace had created a sensation with his grainy photographs and 16mm films of the creature.
Well, after Wallace died, his son Michael revealed that, alas, Bigfoot was just a hoax. Wallace's wife Elna and others took turns dressing in the ape suit and stalking around for some of the photographed "sightings" that continued through the '90s, family members told reporters. Those included Bigfoot in various poses: a pregnant Bigfoot sitting on a log, a Bigfoot throwing stones, and a Bigfoot eating elk, frogs, and cereal.
Footprints
And what about those huge footprints that a worker for Wallace's construction company first discovered in August 1958, circling and leading away from a bulldozer? It appears that Wallace had a friend carve them from wood, and then he and his brother Wilbur stomped around in them to create the Bigfoot prints.
"He did it for the joke, and then he was afraid to tell anyone because they'd be so mad at him, Wallace's nephew, Dale Lee Wallace, told the Associated Press.
Mad? Us? Heck no. We appreciate a good joke. But we are disappointed. (Indeed, some experts dismiss the Wallace explanation and in some circles the Bigfoot debate rages on.)
There's something in the human psyche that loves a mystery, and particularly if that mystery surrounds some sort of otherworldly creature. "I think the appeal of these ideas is really something like, 'You see, I was really right, there was a monster in the closet,' " says Dr. Robert Galatzer-Levy, a psychiatrist on the University of Chicago faculty.
Or, in Wallace's case, a monster suit.
Thanks, Ray. Farewell, Bigfoot.
Luckily, we've still got the Loch Ness monster and the Abominable Snowman.
Right?