This site is dedicated to documenting various aspects of the Luxembourger greenhouse growers of Chicago in the early 1900s, principally, but not exclusively, drawn from the documents and oral history passed on to me by my father, John J. Kellen, and grandfather, Jacob A. Kellen.

I am a fourth generation (in the US, Chicago), Luxembourger and grew up working in my father’s greenhouse and flower shop (Kellen’s Country Florist in Mt. Prospect). As a young boy I remember being in all three Kellen Greenhouses (one in Rodgers Park, the second in Des Plaines and the third in Mt. Prospect). For kids growing up in the 1960s, the greenhouse was sort of like a playground. It is there as a boy I learned welding, pipe fitting, glass glazing, painting, carpentry, motor mechanics, electronics, cleaning out boilers and of course many of the things greenhouse workers did in the greenhouse, like wheeling and soveling soil, planting, watering, cutting and bringing shipments to the Chicago wholesale flower market. Greenhouse workers needed to be a jack of all trades.

For Luxembourgers in Chicago, greenhouses were not merely a workplace and a livelihood, but the center of life and the chief passion of the people owned them, ran them and worked in them. Like me, family members got pinched as children for low/no wage service as has been done by Luxembourg farmers for probably 1,000 years. The memories are nearly always fond and I do know that for the men and women who worked in these glass greenhouses, the attachment was deep and almost sacred.

Early in my career I worked for Florists’ Review magazine as an editor, and was general manager for a retail chain in Scottsdale and Phoeniz, Arizona (Cactus Flower Florists) in the mid 1980s. Since leaving that industry in my 20s, I pursued my love of computing and today I am the Chief Information Officer at UC San Diego and member of the CIO Hall of Fame. Over the past 30 years I have been writing on business strategy and computing topics, primarly for Cutter Consortium.

Today, I have two small greenhouses where I grow vegetables year round. I left the greenhouse work because it was hot and at times full of heavy labor, but mostly filled with long stretches of what I, as a young person, perceived as mindless labor. Today, I relish the time in my greenhouses and my fruit orchard (50 fruit trees) because, well, it is mindless labor. More importantly, as I mix dirt, plant vegetables, prune trees, fix the solar panels, repair benches and tend to my wireless automation, I get to ponder the lives of all the ghosts from the past who dwelt in these glass temples.

I guess things have come full circle.

Vince Kellen, PhD

Escondido, CA