PEORIA MAGAZINE June 2022

S P O T L I G H T

A FRIEND AND FLORIST FOR EVERY OCCASION After 44 years at Gregg Florist, Dan Callahan is moving on, but not away

BY MIKE BAILEY

B usiness was brisk at Gregg Florist in Peoria Heights on Mother’s Day Eve as owner Dan Callahan scurried about the shop, preparing arrangements, taking payments and last-minute orders, working the room. Many customers greeted him by name, and not uncommonly, he responded with theirs. “This is kind of like ‘Cheers,’ where everybody knows everybody,” he says. Post-COVID, just about any business owner will confess that busy is infinitely better than not, but it was also a bittersweet moment for the 68-year oldCallahan. This pastMother’s Daywas Callahan’s last at his Gregg Florist pulpit, from which he’s dispensed no end of compassion and counsel over the years.

On May 31, he closed on the sale of the property he’s owned at 1015 E. War Memorial Drive for the last 44 years, to make way for a gas station and a convenience store. The business itself remains on the market, the doors may remain open until everything is gone, but as for Callahan, he’s looking forward to his next chapter and will soon start on that journey. “Forty-four years, it’s a good run,” Callahan says. “There’s never been a dull moment.” It was 1978, disco was still a thing, and a 24-year-old Dan Callahan was not long out of the University of Illinois with an architecture degree when an opportunity came along to buy a little flower shop in Peoria Heights. “One visit to the bank, that’s all it took,”

he recalls of the loan he took out to buy the business for $50,000. It was a different era. Things were simpler then. They were about to get a bit more complex when Pabst announced that it would be closing its iconic brewery in Peoria Heights. That was 1981, and suddenly the futurewasn’t quite coming up roses. “This was a neighborhood business, at that point. There weren’t as many people coming from across the river,” said Callahan. “That was just devastating.” Callahan persevered – really, what other choice was there? – calling on a character trait he describes as more “eternal optimist” than entrepreneurial. Some might have downsized. He expanded.

20 JUNE 2022 PEORIA MAGAZINE