Art Students Celebrate With Party

Art Students Celebrate With Party

Hey, Valentine, You're Groovy!

By Pat Materka

(News Starr Reporter)

To read the newspaper ads, you’d think Valentine’s Day was a national schools-out-and-stores-closed holiday.

“Remember the 14th!” they exclaim. “Buy your sweetheart a . . .” (Fill in the blank: seal skin coat, chess set, garbage disposal . . .)

In display windows and on inside counters, local stores group all of their red items together into a glaring, grabbing montage: umbrellas, knee socks, ear muffs—even a bowling ball or combat boots make appropriate Valentine’s Day remembrances, as long as they’re red.

One store promoted a plastic heart shaped hoop from which dangled three more plastic hearts, all punctured with holes. “What it really is,” a salesgirl explained, "is a pierced earring rack.”

“Do I love you?” asked the top of a cardboard box in a men’s store. The box opens and up springs a grinning Indian squaw labeled, "And How!”

Other season-minded manufacturers produced fork-tailed devil dolls inscribed, “Out of the fire, into your heart,” and a wide array of red furry poodles, cats, monkeys, giraffes and skunks.

It would be hard to total up the volumes of heart-shaped boxes of chocolates being dispensed from every dime, drug and department store counter in town. But it is possible to get some figures on flowers.

Bleary-eyed from working past midnight and beginning again at about 5:30 a.m., local florists all report that the blossom supply grows more inadequate every year. “On Christmas and Easter we can deliver a day or week ahead, but buyers insist on having Valentine flowers delivered only on the holiday,” Fred Nielsen of Nielsen’s Florist says.

His greenhouse has taken about 1,100 orders for the day,—about 10 times the average day’s sales. Mrs. Gladys Profrock, proprietor of University Flower Shop, was waiting for another warehouse shipment of carnations and chrysanthemums early this morning and Louise Meyer of Louise Flowers reported, “We’re only selling assortments and promising nothing.”

Miss Meyer said her shop stopped taking orders for roses on Tuesday. One man called The News plaintively at 8 a.m. to report, after he made 15 calls, “there’s not a rose left in town.”

So much for hearts and flowers. The most popular Valentine trappers of all seem to still be plain old paper cards, priced from a penny apiece, with every rhyme and reason for saying, “Hey, you’re groovy.” They come specially designed for any one from “My Valentine in the Service” to “My Valentine in the Hospital.”

Valentines were, after all, the first kinds of greeting cards with historical roots to pagan love feasts on the feast of Lupercalia, Feb. 15, in Rome. The church adapted it to Christianity by switching the practice to the feast of St. Valentine, a Roman martyr who had no remote relation to cupids and paper hearts.

If the date snuck up on you, don’t waste any time in getting to the stores today. Those counters are already being cleared to make room for fuchsia marshmallow rabbits and chocolate cream eggs.

University art students Sara Harwin (left) and Carol Hanmun helped paint their classroom in the U-M Architecture and Design Building "red" in observance of Valentine's Day.  The room was completely decorated with the traditional color of love by students of Prof. Emily Weddige of the U-M art department.  The drawing of Prof. Weddige encircled by a heart (far right) was done by University student Steven Cole. (Ann Arbor News Photo by Cecil Lockard)