There are easier places to conduct an interview than inside a working flower shop. Phones ring, deliveries come and go, buckets need filling, stems need trimming and arrangements have to be finished before someone arrives to carry them into birthdays, anniversaries, hospital rooms and funeral homes.
But after sitting down with Steven James Farber and his wife, Kathryn “Kathy” Watson Farber, inside Fleur-de-Farber Florist, it was difficult to imagine a more fitting place to hear their story. Because beneath all of the flowers is work.
And beneath Steven Farber’s candidacy for Denham Springs City Court Judge is a story that stretches much further than an election year. It is one of a young man who once thought he was supposed to become a pharmacist, a Denham Springs girl who built a business around some of life’s happiest and hardest moments, two children raised through local public schools, decades of public service, youth sports, a devastating flood and a marriage that has spent more than three decades learning how to simply keep going.
“I think what I’m trying to say is that we are very much accustomed to hard work,” Kathy said.
Steven’s journey to Denham Springs began on the West Bank of New Orleans, where he grew up in the Gretna and Terrytown area. He attended West Jefferson High School before spending his final two years at Missouri Military Academy in Mexico, Missouri. There, he played football during championship seasons in 1984 and 1985, and decades later, his team was inducted into the school’s athletic hall of fame.
The two married July 25, 1992, while Steven was still making his way through college. He earned his degree from Louisiana State University in 1995, studying sociology with a concentration in criminology and a minor in psychology, before earning his Juris Doctor from Southern University Law Center in 1998.
Law, however, had not always been the plan. Steven grew up around family businesses. His father was a pharmacist, and for a time, Steven assumed that was the route he should follow too. But the deeper he went into college, the clearer it became that it was not where he belonged.
“I was trying to be my dad, not myself,” he said. Kathy noticed before he was quite willing to admit it. “I told him, ‘Steven, I can tell you’re not happy,’” she remembered. “I finally asked him, ‘What do you want to do?’ And he said, ‘I would love to be an attorney.’”
The idea had been sitting in the back of his mind since childhood, thanks in part to Judge Joseph Wapner and The People’s Court. “I would watch it every day,” Steven said. “I was fascinated with law.”
Eventually, he chose his own path. His father lived long enough to see Steven graduate from law school, a memory that remains particularly meaningful to the family.
By then, another family business was already taking shape. Kathy, who grew up locally and attended Southside Elementary, Denham Springs Junior High and Denham Springs High School, opened her first flower shop on College Drive in Baton Rouge while Steven was in law school.
The arrangement gave Steven what may be one of the better job titles ever held by a law student. “I’d go to law school, then come back and deliver flowers,” he laughed. “We always joked that I was the most educated delivery driver in Baton Rouge.”
The Farbers moved to Denham Springs after Steven finished law school in 1998, and in 2012, Kathy brought the flower business home too, opening Fleur-de-Farber Florist in Denham Springs.
“It was wonderful to be able to come home,” she said. “You get to see people and talk to people and just be there for them, whether it’s a good time, having a baby or a birthday, or a sad time.”
There is an interesting parallel between their professions, she said.
“In a flower shop, you see all types of people at all types of times, good and bad,” Kathy said. “Attorneys do too. In a way, they’re very similar.”
While Kathy built Fleur-de-Farber, Steven built a legal career largely within public service.
After passing the Louisiana Bar Examination, he joined the Louisiana Department of Public Safety, where he spent approximately 11 years handling legal matters involving Louisiana State Police and the Office of Motor Vehicles. The job sent him across Louisiana and into courthouses throughout the state.
“I’ve been in just about every courthouse in the state,” he said.
He later worked with the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice and today serves as Director of Legal Affairs and Compliance for Metropolitan Human Services District. Altogether, his career spans more than 27 years across criminal, civil, administrative, juvenile and behavioral-health law.
His professional service has also included the Louisiana State Bar Association’s Government and Public Law Section, House of Delegates and Children’s Law Committee, along with work involving human-trafficking initiatives and legal ethics. He has received both the LSBA Citizen Lawyer Award and Pro Bono Publico Award.
For Steven, however, service has not always happened inside a courtroom.
As Watson and Carson Kate Farber grew up in Denham Springs, he spent years coaching local children through PARDS baseball, softball and basketball, along with youth football programs including the Denham Jackets and Southside Patriots.
“One of the benefits of working for the state is I had set hours and my weekends,” he said. “So growing up, I was able to coach my kids.”
Those children are grown now.
Watson, a 2018 graduate of Denham Springs High School, is in his third and final year at Southern University Law Center, preparing to enter the same profession his father eventually found. Carson Kate, a 2020 Denham Springs High graduate, earned her master’s degree from LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans and is pursuing the next step toward a career in forensic psychology.
“They both went through public schools here,” Steven said.
And then there is Maximus Farber.
Max, the family’s English bulldog, was born February 14, 2020, a Valentine’s Day birthday that is simultaneously adorable and slightly inconvenient when your mother owns a flower shop.
“We never really get to celebrate his birthday,” Kathy laughed. “We’re a little busy.”
The Farbers’ roots in Denham Springs were tested severely in August 2016.
Their flower shop flooded. Their home took approximately five and a half feet of water.
“We lost everything,” Kathy said.
The financial reality that followed was nearly as overwhelming as the water itself. So they worked.
Steven continued his state job. Kathy rebuilt her business. And when the regular workday ended, both climbed into their cars and drove for Uber.
“For two and a half, almost three years, Steven and I drove Uber after work,” Kathy said. “You did whatever you had to do to make things work.”
Steven remembers one late-night pickup near the LSU Lakes. He assumed the passenger carrying luggage was heading to the airport.
She was going to Biloxi.
He drove her there in the middle of the night, then turned around and drove home.
“It ended up being about a $500 run,” Steven remembered. “And I thought, ‘Wow, I really needed that today.’”
Those years reinforced something both Farbers return to often: very little worth building comes without work.
Farber said his decision to seek the City Court judgeship was not made quickly. For months, he wrestled with it.
“I’d wake up thinking about it,” he said. “I kept feeling like I needed to run for judge.”
Kathy initially pushed back. Their children were entering adulthood, and after years of raising a family, running a business and rebuilding from the flood, life was finally approaching a quieter season.
“I discouraged him,” she admitted. “I told him, ‘We’re finally at this point where we can start bringing everything in a little bit.’”
But she could see the idea was not going away.
Steven describes the decision as a calling. His campaign focuses on fairness, efficiency, modernization and fiscal responsibility, along with court management and communication.
“A judge must be fair, prepared, independent and respectful of every person who comes before the court,” he said.
For now, the campaign remains grassroots, with signs, meet-and-greets, conversations and plenty of handshakes as Farber introduces himself to voters ahead of the November election.
And maybe that is why Fleur-de-Farber feels like exactly the right place to tell his story.
Around us were the tangible pieces of other people’s lives. Flowers for celebrations. Flowers for grief. Flowers marking beginnings, endings and everything in between.
In the middle of it all sat Steven and Kathy, married since 1992, still telling stories over one another, still laughing about his days delivering flowers after law school, still talking proudly about Watson and Carson, and still showing up for whatever comes next.
Before the campaign signs and legal titles, the Farbers are a Denham Springs family that has spent nearly three decades working, raising children, coaching ball teams, building a business, rebuilding after disaster and putting down roots in the community they chose to call home.
Surrounded by fresh flowers inside the shop Kathy brought home to Denham Springs in 2012, that feels like the right place to begin their story.
