In a normal year, Cloverdale’s annual Day of Remembrance leaves Cloverdale high schoolers walking away from their lunch period with a bouquet of 16 daffodils and a tag with the names of the people the daffodils are meant to honor — young people, former Cloverdale High School (CHS) students, who lost their lives to cancer. This year, the annual daffodil day looked different. With CHS students learning at a distance, no students were there to receive the bouquets. Merle Reuser and a devoted group of volunteers adapted, splitting up and walking throughout Cloverdale, handing bunches of daffodils to people downtown and dropping them off on door steps.
“We’re going to disperse like a covey of quails, going all directions,” Reuser said before the March 3 event. “We’re just going to walk the streets of Cloverdale until everybody has given everything they have away.”
Reuser was joined by four groups of between two and three people who all split up based on a divided map of town. They had 300 bouquets to give away — totaling nearly 5,000 daffodils.
The weather this year, while not good for rain totals, was good for daffodil growth, Reuser said.
Cloverdale’s Remembrance Day began as Courtney Davis Day, to honor Courtney Jade Davis, who died from cancer in 2008 at the age of 16. Her age is the reason behind putting together bouquets of 16. After a few years of celebrating Courtney Davis Day, the event morphed into one that honored the lives of more Cloverdale kids who died from cancer.
As bouquets are cut, collected and put together, a tag listing the names of six former CHS students — Courtney Jade Davis, Phillip McCutchan, Andrea Perez, Justin Rainwater, Mariah Roat, JoAnna Lynn Wegene — is added to each bunch of flowers.
For Reuser, giving out daffodils is a way to continue a promise he made to Margaret Kohler Adams. Before Adams died in 2000 at the age of 104, Reuser promised her that he would maintain her tradition of giving away daffodils — something that her and Reuser did together while he was growing up.
According to previous Reveille reporting, in the 1950s and ’60s, Adams gave away bouquets of daffodils from the field around her property, oftentimes with Reuser in tow. Throughout his younger life, helping give away Adams’ daffodils was a regular occurance. However, after Reuser graduated high school, fewer daffodils made their way into the hands of Cloverdalians, and in the 1990s, he began handing out the flowers again.
Since 1999, it’s been Reuser’s plan to give away one ton of daffodils. The daffodils are provided by the estate of Adams, and are also donated by Ann Elston and Larry Lossing.
Adams’ and now Reuser’s tradition of giving away mass amounts of daffodils has resulted in Sonoma County being named the “Daffodil Giveaway Capital of the World,” according to a 2015 article from the quarterly Daffodil Journal.
Since Reuser’s pledge in 1999, he’s logged all of the daffodils that have been given away. By the end of the 2020 daffodil season, the count was up to 251,244 given away in the 21-year span.
Despite the slightly different Cloverdale giveaway this year, Reuser said that “it couldn’t have gone any better.” Within an hour, all of the groups walking around town had given away all the flowers they had.
Reuser can be seen during daffodil season giving out flowers in Cloverdale and around other parts of the county — this past weekend, he gave away around 100 bundles in Santa Rosa. This year, not even a pandemic could keep him from continuing to make good on his promise to Adams.
