This Christmas don't blow it - pick a Booger Mountain tree.

This Christmas, don't blow it - pick a Booger Mountain tree

No more family fights over which tree to buy. No more cold feet. No more sap on the car roof.

Just dial the Sears 800 number, 24 hours a day, seven days a week from anywhere in the country, and you can have a Booger Mountain Christmas tree delivered to your doorstep.

"We've got high hopes," says Booger Mountain Tree Farms owner Hal Johnson. And well he might. Ads for the Jefferson-based business's award-winning Fraser firs are in 11 million copies of the Sears Wish Book, the Spiegel catalog and Hammacher Schlemmer's upscale Christmas Traditions shopping guide, which offers to ship the trees to Hawaii and Alaska - for an extra charge.

Johnson, who expects to ring up new growth on sales of about $2 million this year, is gearing up to sell an additional 10,000 to 15,000 trees by mail order. He sold 40,000 trees last year, so that's a healthy increase. He has already invested about $100,000 to purchase a new building, more land, new computers to handle orders and a machine to box the trees. "We're really the pioneers on this," he says.

Although Sears avoids mentioning the tree grower's unique name, Hammacher Schlemmer puts it in the first sentence of its blurb offering 4-foot firs for $49.95 and 7-footers for $79.95 - $35 more than at Booger Mountain's retail lots. It costs about $10 to $12 to grow a tree, Johnson says.

Rather than follow the example of Smucker's, whose jelly ads apologize for its unlovely name, Johnson has capitalized on the Booger Mountain moniker. His logo shows a ghost behind a Christmas tree, and he's written a short account of how the bogeyman carried a cantankerous old coot off the mountain one night.

"It's a name you remember," Johnson says. "The kids love it."

Business schools

begin to think pink

As crazes go, Gorby-mania could be the hula hoop of the 1990s - a big, brilliant fad that bombs into oblivion.

Maybe that's why so many North Carolina business schools suddenly have commies on campus: They want to capitalize on Soviet President Mickhail Gorbachev's program of perestroika before it's history.

First out of the bloc were 20 Soviet managers who came to Winston-Salem. Wake Forest University's Babcock School of Management billed its three-week session with the Soviet as the nation's first management-education program for Russian administrators.

The 20 wide-eyed Soviets watched capitalism at work at places such as R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., Sara Lee Corp...