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January 29, 1999/12 Shevat 5759, Vol. 51, No. 18
Landscaper has an 'a-maze-ing' start
MICHELLE ACKERMAN
Staff Writer
David Goodman started off his career in landscaping with a lack of direction - figuratively and literally.
When he was 14, his mother Karen Wacker recalls, he hated to mow the lawn.
When ordered to mow the lawn, he rebeled by "mowing it into patterns," she remembers. "To him, there was no such thing as straight lines. It ended up looking like a maze. And then I would say, 'Great, go back and finish it,' and so (he would go back) and bump into irrigation heads. I think that's how he learned to put them back on, from knocking them off."
When he was in the 10th grade and looking to earn some extra money, Goodman accepted a job with Mountain Shadows Homeowners Association that included grounds maintenance, and he discovered he actually enjoyed landscaping.
Then when he was 17 and his grandfather gave him a station wagon, the young man who once hated to cut the grass borrowed an old family lawnmower and actually went in search of yards to mow.
"People began asking, 'Can you plant this, or put in this flagstone patio for me?' " the 33-year-old Paradise Valley resident says. "Over time, I just learned."
In 1984, he decided to officially launch Goodman's Landscape Maintenance. To help him get his business going, his grandmother placed an advertisement describing his services in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix. And for 15 years since, he says, his only other source of advertising, other than the paper, has been word of mouth.
Business has consistently grown each year, he says. Goodman now has a client base of 80-200 customers he services each week, and a staff of eight to 15 employees, depending on the time of year.
Currently, in addition to servicing existing clients, he is working on the Evanne Copland-Kofman Memorial Children's Biblical Garden at Temple Beth Israel.
The garden, located on the south side of the temple, is designed to look as ancient as possible.
"In the Bible, everything is stone. The Holy Land is rocks. So I told David I wanted everything to be stone and to look 2,000 years old," says Richard Zonis, project chair of the biblical garden and the man who created the initial sketch of what the garden was to be like.
The biggest problem this theme presented was finding a way to create a stone wall that would last, without using mortar to hold it together, says Goodman.
The solution was to place mortar in the center of the wall and pile stones around it. This provides the look of times past, but allows the wall to be sturdy enough to support children climbing on it.
The trees and bushes that will decorate the garden are those that existed in biblical times: fig, olive, echoic, pistachio, pomegranate, etrog (citrus fruit used on Succot) and date palm trees. A waterfall with rocks, currently under construction, will be the center feature, and Zonis plans to have an area where children can plant barley, wheat and flax. The garden is scheduled to be finished in February.
"We want to do something that many other people from other synagogues or even other faiths might come to look at because it's a biblical garden, not because it's at the synagogue," says Goodman. "It should attract people that are interested in plants ... (and) it'll be a great place when you need to take rowdy children outside during a service; the water will soothe them. They can play here. People who are (in) mourning or sad can have a place to go - to sit, to meditate.
"This is the kind of job I like," Goodman continues. "(Zonis) left it up to me to make it happen. I feel like I'm artistic. ... I was able to make changes as I saw fit."
Throughout the years, Goodman has donated his talents to help the Jewish community. He constructed a memory garden at Temple Kol Ami for free, in honor of a friend's daughter who had been killed in an car accident, and he volunteered for a day at Marcus House, a shelter for abused children, through the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix's Mitzvah Day program.
Goodman has taken courses in horticulture at Glendale Community College and has attended seminars and workshops. Now he's taking classes at Scottsdale Community College in landscape design and is hoping to expand his business even more. Beginning this March, he'll have an advertisement in the Yellow Pages.
Wacker, who works part-time for him doing his bookkeeping and office management, is confident he'll continue to succeed.
"Some of the customers he's had, he's had for over 10 years," she notes. "Personally, I feel good about that. It means that he's recognized for his work ethic, for what he demands of his own workers, and what he's willing to put into his business."
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