Distribution News

Kelly Tulloss stands in the prep area of her flower shop, Sutcliffe Floral. The business is celebrating 75 years of being a Flagstaff staple. While hundreds of businesses have come and gone in downtown Flagstaff, one has withstood the test of time. Sutcliffe Floral has been beautifying Flagstaff since World War II. For 75 years, Sutcliffe’s flowers have been worn as crowns by brides and bridesmaids in Flagstaff weddings, have been placed bedside in vases for Flagstaff births, have been handed in wrapped bouquets to Flagstaff graduates and have donned the deceased with ornate casket sprays for Flagstaff funerals. In 1947, three years after the flower shop opened in Flagstaff, Muriel and Howard Sutcliffe were tasked with putting together flower arrangements for the funeral of Chee Dodge, first chairman of the Navajo Business Council who had been named the “Head Chief of the Navajo” by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. When two planes collided over the Grand Canyon in 1956, all 128 passengers on both flights died — the largest commercial airline crash up to that point. The Sutcliffe’s made all the casket sprays for the mass funeral service held in Flagstaff. Mass funeral in Flagstaff for the victims of the 1956 TWA flights that crashed at the Grand Canyon. Sutcliffe Floral designed the casket sprays. Kelly Tulloss, who took over Sutcliffe as its sixth owner from Pete Stilley in 2005, said she found out a lot of Sutcliffe’s history after reading a letter that Muriel wrote to Stilley about the shop after it went into his care in 1989. Tullos said that the three-page letter from 1991, which was written on a typewriter, is “all about running a business back in the fall of 1944 and about how they built the refrigerator box and how they stored everything.” Muriel wrote about how she and Howard started the shop “on a shoestring” during the war where her husband was doing a preliminary survey for what is now Camp Navajo in Bellemont. Having studied floriculture in college, Howard noted that Flagstaff’s 5,000 residents could use an official flower shop. A […]

Source: azdailysun.com