Business Is Blooming

Next to chimney sweeps and blacksmiths, the people whose services are least in demand nowadays are those who sport long hair. "I tried to get a job in a supermarket, then as a newspaper copy boy, and later as a service station attendant," recalls John Wayne Suggs, 18, once a typical long-haired unemployable. "But they'd take one look at me and say 'Get out.' " Without benefit of a barber, he finally found a career.

Suggs is now a middle-echelon manager for Jerry Campbell and Tom Scott, two 24-year-olds from Dallas who employ a ragtag army of some 170 flower children to sell carnations on the streets of several cities. The pair first tried the idea six months ago at home as a way of helping some of their jobless friends. The idea paid off so handsomely that Campbell and Scott now have flowers flown in from growers in Colorado, California and Illinois, and have hired young people to sell them in Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, Phoenix, Little Rock, Ark., and Wichita, Kans. They intend to reach into ten other cities and are trying to copyright the name Flower Children. "We felt," said Campbell, "that this was an idea that could really benefit from combining the hippie and flower-children aspect with the principles of aggressive selling."

The floral path to prosperity has been thick with thorns. In Little Rock, one 17-year-old girl was busted for blocking a street. Some florists near Dallas, irked that Scott and Campbell were undercutting them by selling carnations at $2.50 a dozen, threatened to boycott merchants who allowed flower children to operate in front of their stores. In

Houston, one long-locked salesman was beaten by police for no apparent reason, his attorney charges.

The sellers get a 20% cut of the retail price and, though most of them work only a few days before drifting on, a few have found longer-lasting job satisfaction. Says one 16-year-old salesgirl in Dallas: "Flowers soothe the savage redneck." Adds John Suggs, who oversees the group's Little Rock operation: "This kind of work is fun, and flowers have a spiritual quality. They make people smile."

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