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Obituary

New vocation kept longtime love in bloom

By MARTY CLEAR
Published July 6, 2007

SEMINOLE HEIGHTS - In 1975, William Kaplan retired after 20 years with the Tampa Police Department. He figured he'd take it easy for a while.

His wife had other plans.

"Listen, buddy boy, you're going to come help me at the flower shop, " Evelyn Kaplan remembers telling him. "He was at work the next day."

He did more than just help out. He began a second career. For the next 20 years, the Kaplans worked side by side running Friday's Flower Shop on Armenia Avenue. For most of that time, they lived in an adjacent apartment.

"A lot of people couldn't be together all day like that, " Evelyn Kaplan said. "I won't tell you every day was perfect, but, all in all, it was a wonderful experience."

Mr. Kaplan passed away June 29, 2007, at age 86. He suffered from Parkinson's disease and had been in declining health for several years.

Most people who knew Mr. Kaplan thought he was a native Floridian. Not so, his wife said.

"He grew up in Staten Island, " she said. "He didn't want anybody to know that. He wanted everybody to think he came from here. I don't know why."

But he did spend most of his life in Tampa. He came here as a young man to take a job at MacDill Air Force Base as an airplane mechanic.

A few months after he arrived, he was shopping at the downtown Maas Brothers when he first saw his future wife. It was love at first sight.

"We met and married in two weeks, " she said. "I looked at him and he looked at me, and that was it."

They thought it would be romantic to run away to get married. So Mr. Kaplan sold his old Plymouth for $60. The next weekend, they took a bus to Sarasota and asked a cab driver to take them to the courthouse.

One problem - it was Saturday. Mr. Kaplan and his bride-to-be were so young they didn't know courthouses weren't open on weekends.

But the cab driver happened to know a judge. They went to his house, and he took them to the courthouse and performed the marriage. The matron from the jail upstairs served as the witness.

It was an unorthodox beginning to a marriage that lasted 64 years.

The newlyweds settled first in South Tampa. After Mr. Kaplan returned home from World War II, they settled in Seminole Heights, where they raised their son, who died in adulthood, and daughter.

Mr. Kaplan took several jobs before joining the Police Department in 1954. He and his wife opened the flower shop just before he retired, and she ran it alone until he joined her in 1975.

Mrs. Kaplan had worked at another flower shop previously, and the owner started calling her his "girl Friday."

People in the flower business picked up the nickname, and the Kaplans decided to call their shop Friday's, which led some customers to believe Friday was the couple's last name.

The shop was an immediate success. The first day it was open, a family drove up and bought every single flower in the entire shop to take to a nearby funeral home.

The Kaplans ran Friday's Flower Shop until 1995, when Mr. Kaplan was in his mid 70s. They sold the store, but Friday's didn't last long without the Kaplans at the helm.

"The man who bought it told me I didn't know what I was doing, and he was really going to make it into something." Evelyn Kaplan said. "I think it was six months later that it closed."

The Kaplans spent the last 12 years relaxing and being together all day, every day, just as they had for the 20 years when they lived and worked at the flower shop.

"For us to be together for 64 years, you know he had to be a hell of a man, " Evelyn Kaplan said. "And that he was."

Besides his wife, Mr. Kaplan is survived by his daughter, Kitty Johnson; a sister; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

[Last modified July 5, 2007, 08:10:17]