The Flower Lady : Sharon Satow Peddles $13,000 in Petals During 14 Frenzied Hours

It’s 4 a.m. near Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, and Sharon Satow is waltzing with a bristly purple flower from Oxnard’s Sunrise Ranch.

In her black leggings, tennis shoes and water-stained magenta T-shirt, she takes a quick spin around her counter at the Southern California Flower Market before depositing the blossom in a customer’s arms with a flourish.

After 16 years as the chief saleswoman for Sunrise Ranch, Satow still gets a rush from peddling $13,000 worth of flowers in the dead of night.

Her 9 p.m.-to-11 a.m. shift as Ventura

County’s only representative at the flower mart robs her of some conventional comforts.

Satow sleeps just four hours most mornings, and she rarely gets to tuck her three small children into bed. Although her husband works nearby, she has time for only passing banter with him.

“I don’t get to spend as much time with my family as I would like,” Satow admits, dashing from gawky yellow sunflowers to pert pink lisianthus blossoms as she readies an order just before dawn.

But despite these drawbacks, Satow loves her job.

Or rather, she assumes she does. Actually, she doesn’t have much time to think about it. She’s too busy showing off her wares, scribbling down orders and barking directions in Spanish to her crew of flower wrappers, all the while keeping a slightly frazzled smile on her face.

“I have to be cheerful--it’s part of my job,” Satow says.

Then, evidently disappointed in herself for taking time out for even that brief reflection, she dashes away, threading between red buckets of flowers to find the perfect bunch of purple statice for a loyal customer.

Satow peddles about 30 types of flowers for Oxnard grower Bryan Mimaki each Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday night--and into each Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning.

Satow unloads thousands of bouquets each week, from delicate white puffs of baby’s breath to feather-duster spears of liatris. Her customers include florists, caterers and sometimes even other wholesalers--who mark up her flowers and resell them.

Her soft-spoken boss, Mimaki, who seems almost timid, treads gingerly in trying to describe his aggressive employee.

“Sharon will bite your head off if you interrupt her when she’s working,” he says. “She doesn’t take any crap from anyone.”

But she does have a sense of humor.

When florist Brad Brown hands her his order list, for example, he tacks on a request for “free flowers” at the end. Satow slaps his bouquets in his arms and scrawls “Ha, Ha” over his plea for giveaways. She doesn’t do freebies.

“Sharon’s the best there is,” Mimaki says proudly. “You can’t miss her down at the market. She’s the one running around at 100 miles per hour.”

While she does give her tennis shoes a good beating, Satow’s hectic pace actually blends well with the cheerful chaos that settles on the flower market soon after 1 a.m., under the relentless buzz of overworked fluorescent lights.

As Los Angeles sleeps outside, quiet but for the few homeless wanderers trudging through deserted streets, the clammy-floored warehouse between 7th and 8th streets springs to life.

A dozen wholesalers, most of them Japanese, spread their wares on broad yellow counters, unloading blood-red rosebuds from packed ice and arranging prickly stalks crowned with miniature pineapples.

They fluff the cellophane packets crinkled around delicate blossoms. They unwind the cheesecloth draped across sunflowers. And they try to avoid cozying up to certain wispy lavender buds, which give off the unmistakable odor of fresh manure.

As the tempo picks up about 1 o’clock, the florists and other buyers emerge.

Double-checking crumpled lists, they slog from stand to stand, peeling off $100 bills and scribbling checks as they accumulate truckloads of flowers. Satow has almost 80 regular customers, plus dozens more who stop by to check out her wares and end up taking a few bouquets back to their stores.

Waiting for Satow to tally a bill at 3 a.m., Jaquie Rerucha smiles sympathetically at her 13-year-old niece, who’s rubbing her fatigue-red eyes with weary impatience. After paying for the bouquets, Rerucha absent-mindedly walks away without them. She returns, blushing, a few minutes later to claim her purchases.

*

“It’s way too early,” she complains, clutching the Oxnard-grown blossoms she will sell in her Laguna Beach florist shop. “But when you’re working around flowers, even though you’re tired, it’s wonderful because they’re so beautiful.”

For florists throughout Southern California, from Bakersfield to San Diego, the Los Angeles center is the place to pick up quality bouquets. The selection and prices, they say, outweigh the somewhat inconvenient hours--the warehouse opens about midnight and shuts down by midmorning.

The market brings out some colorful characters--buyers, sellers and onlookers who just can’t seem to get flowers out of their system.

There’s Froggie, for one, a middle-aged man with military-straight posture who says he got his nickname from sneaking the croakers onto little girls’ seats during elementary school.

A pungent eight-inch cigar clamped between his teeth under a tidy salt-and-pepper mustache, Froggie sits stolidly on a tabletop opposite the Ventura County counter. Dressed in a white undershirt, blue jeans and black boots, Froggie’s there as a volunteer security guard to keep the market clear of panhandlers.

“I’ve been down here better than 30 years,” he says brusquely. “I used to work for an outfit down here and now I keep the homeless out. I guess it’s kind of a habit.”

But after all those years, “I don’t even like flowers,” he confesses. “I get sick and tired of seeing them all the time.”

Flower-market addicts like Froggie say they can’t stay away after years on the red-eye shift. At the same time, however, newcomers find it difficult to push into the close-knit community of sellers and buyers.

The Southern California Flower Market is largely a closed shop consisting of about a dozen second- and third-generation Japanese immigrants whose families have been cultivating flowers for half a century or more.

Sunrise Ranch, located at the corner of Etting and Nauman roads in Oxnard, pays more than $1,000 a month to rent its countertop and shelf space at the warehouse and also owns a piece of the flower market, Satow said.

The ranch ships about two-thirds of its flowers to wholesalers across the country, sending the rest to Los Angeles three times a week. Mimaki doesn’t like the hours--”You’re supposed to be sleeping at night, not working,” he says--but he does like the profits, which generally beat shipping.

“Ninety-five percent of the stuff we take down there is gone the next day,” he explains.

But the brisk sales don’t come easy. Satow spends her off-days working the phones, lining up buyers for her carnations, chrysanthemums and dozens of other varieties. Then every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday afternoon, ranch employees put the fresh-cut flowers into red buckets and pile them into trailers. From there, driver Jose Jimenez takes over.

Chugging through rush-hour traffic, Jimenez completes two round-trips to Los Angeles in about six hours, creeping up the Conejo Grade at 20 m.p.h. and slowing to a near-halt in bumper-to-bumper jams through the San Fernando Valley.

“Wake up!” he shouts, banging on the warehouse door as he arrives with his first load at about 6:30 p.m., a good five hours earlier than most other growers. Two sleepy flower market employees answer, opening the battered metal door with a clatter.

Like expert shuffleboard players, Evencio Vargas and Antonio del Rio slide the bouquet-filled buckets across the warehouse floor. Once the trailer is unloaded, they get to work wrapping the flowers in newspaper in a routine that keeps them going almost until sunrise.

*

“By the end, I get tired,” Vargas says, pointing to his hand, rubbed raw from the constant motion of tying string around the bundles. “But it’s good to work here.”

For a break, the wrappers, sellers and buyers can head to the Flower Market Coffee Shop, carved out of a warehouse corner. The mom-and-pop diner opens at 3 a.m. with a choice of Chinese or American breakfast--pancakes or fried rice, bacon or won-tons, a mushroom omelet or an egg roll.

With its turquoise booths and orange seats, soy sauce vying for space with Sweet N’Low, the coffee shop is “its own little world,” says waitress Ginny Wong.

So is the flower market.

“There’s nothing else like it in the city,” says Lou Goitia, who sells exotic imports from Costa Rica and Hawaii. “It’s not the same old 9-to-5.”