Funeral Home's Business Steadily Going Downhill ? CBS Baltimore

By BRICE STUMP
The Daily Times of Salisbury

BIVALVE, Md. (AP) ? There are family photos on the wall and side table.

A few decoys and a skipjack model add an Eastern Shore flavor to the living room with its comfy sofa and inviting fireplace mantel.

From a chair, someone can see the open room beyond where so many caskets have come and gone over the years. This is where Glenn Messick, and his mother, Jean, continue to put their home in the Messick Funeral Home business.

Visitors and family to a funeral here can sit a spell in the family?s living room and reflect on the life of the departed. There?s often a plate of cookies or cake on the honey-colored oak dining room table.

Seated on the sofa in the quiet living room, Jean glanced out the open window curtains bright with the warm light of an afternoon sun. Bivalve is the kind of quiet community where a teenage girl can ride a skateboard on the main road and feel secure. It?s where birds chirp as lawn mowers, in the distance, harmonize while eating grass. There is the fresh smell of country, with wide open spaces and the lore of the nearby river. Neighbors still wave, and linger for a bit of socializing at the shoe box-size landmark post office at the bend near the funeral home.

Yet there is a changing character of Bivalve, typical of so many Eastern Shore rural communities. It?s the same story ? the older residents have died and the younger generation, in search of jobs, leave, and there are a steady influx of ?come heres.?

Problem is, the core of the business for the Messick Funeral Home is solely dependent on traditional neighborhoods of old. The families who for generations have dealt exclusively with the Messicks have dwindled to a precious few.

There is the feeling of an impending death in the family, and now Jean, 75, finds herself with tears in her eyes. Glenn listens as his mother details how they are coming to terms with the end of an era, the end of a way of life that has been shared by five generations of Messicks.

In 1859, cabinetmaker and carpenter Affra Dozie Messick opened the neighborhood?s first funeral business on Texas Road, just a bit up the road from the present site.

?They made caskets there, too,? she said. ?There was a millinery shop upstairs, owned by a distant relative, and the ladies lined the caskets. The men built the wooden caskets downstairs and they were lifted to the second floor by a hand pulley. My late husband?s cousin told me told me how the women
stitched and tufted the linings. There was a barn there, too, where the Messicks kept the horse-drawn hearse and horses, one white team for children, one black team for adults.?

The Messicks also made oyster shaft tongs on the first floor.

?I think they got into the funeral business because someone, knowing they were carpenters, may have asked them to build a ?box? (casket),? Jean said. ?Even from the beginning, the Messicks always made oyster tongs.?

Using the wooden hand tongs, some of which were almost 30 feet long, was so physically demanding, some watermen called them ?widow sticks.? It was the making of shaft tongs that was the ?other job,? along with house carpentry and boat building, that the Messick men relied on to make ends meet.

When Affra?s son, Cornelius Gustavus ?Gus? Messick, took over the business, he, too, continued making tongs and the tradition of burying black families.

?We have handled generations of black families,? Jean said. ?We have probably been the only biracial funeral home since the inception of the business in 1859. We are the oldest family-owned and -operated funeral business in Wicomico County.?

This relationship has always been crucial to the financial health of the business.

?Way back, people had the body and funeral in their homes, in their parlors,? Jean said, ?but the Messicks had the caskets, hearse and horses at the shop on Texas Road. They used ice to preserve bodies at first, then embalmed them, right in the homes. Later embalmed bodies were moved to churches or funeral homes for services.?

Funeral homes in the traditional sense are becoming a thing of the past.

?As children, growing up in this house, it was normal for us to have a body in the next room while we watched TV and carried on our normal living,? Glenn said. ?We are one of the last funeral homes still in existence. Traditionally, funeral homes meant the funeral director and family lived in the home where funerals were conducted. This is different than the standard mortuary where you turn the key at five o?clock and leave and there?s no one there. It (is) kinda comforting to people knowing someone is with their deceased family member all the time. They get a great deal of comfort, too, knowing they can come to our home, even as late as 10 p.m., to visit a relative or friend.

?The new people coming into the area (are) not aware of the history of this place, this family,? Jean said. ?There are people living in Salisbury, and other towns across the Shore, that do not (know) about a traditional funeral home. When the family that owns the business lives in the business, the customer is going to get something different there they won?t get anyplace else. The public has gotten away from the ?home? feeling of a funeral, and I think we have to get back to that. When people from outside the area come here for funerals, they can?t believe what they see. The usual question is, `You do this here in your house???

When she married funeral director Cornelius Glenn ?Corney? Messick Jr., in 1955, the funeral home was suddenly her home, too.

?This was just a bungalow. Corney?s bedroom, when he was growing up, was next to the embalming room. Then Corney, and his brother, Wilbur, also a carpenter, enlarged the place,? she said. ?It was small; my in-laws raised five children and took care of a few older relatives in this house.

?I wanted a phone put in for the business, and Corney, who was a volunteer with the West Side Fire Department down here, and who would be chief for 25 years, had all the ambulance and fire calls for Bivalve routed to come here, too. The siren was on our garage. I had a light switch to turn it on to activate it. Then I had to get back on the phone and call about 30 firemen and tell them where the fire was.?

By the time they married, Corney?s father, funeral director Cornelius Glenn Messick Sr., had died at 54, and his widow, ?Miss Amy? was running the business with sons Corney and Wilbur.

?Mr. Walter Holloway, from the Holloway Funeral Home in Salisbury, stepped in and helped run the business for the family a few years,? Glenn said. ?Wilbur worked hand-in-hand with my father for many years, even
up until I graduated in 1982 from mortuary college,? said Glenn, 55. ?He worked all the funerals and helped dress and casket the bodies. He did that until I was old enough to come in and help out. My Uncle Wilbur had another job, too. He was postmaster down here for years and years. I got my license in 1982, but started in the business when I was 14, helping my dad prepare bodies and doing funerals. When you are the fifth generation coming up in the business, there wasn?t a whole lot of room for argument, ya know.?

Glenn, has pursued another interest as EMS captain for the West Side Volunteer Fire Department, but he is devoted to the family business, and has been since he started working at the funeral home.

Even from the beginning, Jean knew business would be tough.

?There was never enough, financially, for one person much less two, to be paid for the hours they put in this business. The men always had another job to fall back on. It (is) unusual, that through the family history, that most of the Messick men were all so talented when it came to carpentry and construction,? Jean said.

?Over the years, several funeral directors have tried to buy the business. The Messicks were the kind of people who couldn?t see themselves working for someone else,? Jean said. ?This is a very, very stressful business. We can?t just lock the door and walk away. We must always be available. This is a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week, always-on-call job. It?s not like we have several funeral directors on board and can take time off. It has always been a financial struggle, always.?

?It has always been hard for people around Bivalve to make a living. We have on record where families paid for funerals by trading labor, chickens, a cord of wood, guns and silver dollars. The last trade we took was a real old Ford LTD convertible that was my second car,? Glenn said. ?I have heard that during the 1940s and 1950s, if customers owed us money, they paid their bills, maybe a couple bucks every two weeks. You could trust people then. Nowadays, things have really changed, even in the industry ? caskets come COD. It is very hard for us to cover costs and extend credit.?

There were attempts to have a satellite facility in Salisbury, and for several years Corney operated what was then the Wallace Funeral home, which later became Zeller?s. Plans to build a Messick mortuary in the city failed. Pressure from competitors, Jean speculated. Another factor was subtle racism.

?The Messicks were burying black people, and that didn?t go over with some people in Salisbury at that time,? said Jean?s sister-in-law,Barbara Messick Benedict, 86.

By the time Corney died in 2005, the family knew they faced a bleak future.

?Families are not living and staying in a certain area, anymore,? Glenn explained. ?Children move away. When there is a death, you have families trying to arrange a funeral that is central to everyone. That location may not be here in the country at a traditional funeral home anymore.

?Black funerals accounted for 75 percent of our business at one time and that community, too, is steadily disappearing down here,? he said.

The loss of so much business has brought the rural funeral home to the point it now faces. Yet older residents here, like Laurence Elzey, 82, just can?t believe the end of a way of life is at hand.

?Mr. Glenn Messick Sr. buried people that didn?t have a penny. He knew they didn?t have it, but he had a funeral for them and buried them,? Elzey said. ?He loaned them money ? no, gave it to them, because he knew he was never going to get it back. He never refused to bury anyone. The Messicks have always been a friend of the community, a friend of the area. They have buried all my family and they shall bury me.?

Benedict recalls the family connection between the funeral homes of the era and the relationship of the family with the black community.

?When daddy (Glenn Messick Sr.) died, it was a black man, Granville Dashield, that embalmed him,? she said. ?He worked for the Holloway Funeral Home for years and years as an embalmer. Granville did wonderful, beautiful work.?

Dashield also helped special cases at the Messick Funeral Home.

At her husband?s funeral service, Jean involved the black community.

?We had five ministers from the white and black churches. I wanted a biracial choir and wanted two sets of pallbearers, blackand white. You couldn?t get another person in the church, and people came up to me and said, ?Thank you for that service; we did not know people actually live that way (in racial harmony)
anymore,? ? she said.

Now, it seems just a matter of time before a way of life is gone.

?This is the way the world is going with little funeral homes, little stores, little churches and our local newspapers ? disappearing. No more Eastern Shore way of living,? Jean said.

?It?s like what is happening with so many small businesses. People are gravitating to bigger stores, and a lot of mom-and-pop places are closing,? Glenn said. ?While the population is growing down here with retirees moving in, our work has slowed down. Now a lot of our work comes from Salisbury, Hebron and Mardela and outside work.?

By ?outside? work, Glenn also means the services he provides to other mortuaries. For decades he has worked as an embalmer with a number of funeral homes on the Lower Shore.

?I?ve worked with just about everybody at one time or another,? he said.

He may be the last Messick in the funeral business. His brother, Scott, who had a mortician license, and two sisters have no desire to carry on the tradition.

Glenn?s son, Neil, 26, a carpenter, helps his father with funeral work.

?But he has no interest in taking over the business, nor does my daughter, Dana,? he said. ?I may be the last one.?

In the meantime, he and Jean still rely on word-of-mouth to acquire business.

?People will come down here for a funeral and tell us ?It feels like home? and that they would like to have us handle their family?s needs in the future,? he said.

It is that ?home? appeal that can only be had by a business in a country setting and a family that is old-time Eastern Shore.

?Our funerals were different and still ours because they are personalized. Whatever the occupation was of the deceased, we worked to ?customize? the decoration of our home to reflect that,? she said.

Therein lies one of the unique Eastern Shore ways of doing business.

As so many of the deceased came from the community, some requests that may raise eyebrows someplace else, are met with understanding and compassion. There have been families that asked to have muskrat traps, shotgun shells, afghans, wrenches, cigarettes, letters, notes and cake mix, even bottles of liquor and
cash ? usually $1 ? be put in the casket with the deceased.

?They even make caskets now with a keepsake drawer,? Jean said. ?We had a funeral here for a man who liked to fish and hunt, so we had his hunting caps, fishing pole and geese decoys, hunting coat, marsh weeds and magnolia leaves around the casket.?

Compassion comes from an Eastern Shore heart.

?My CPA told me to shut the funeral home down. I said, ?You have to be kidding. I can?t do that. I?m sorry, every Messick in that family has carried on this business and it?s my responsibility now. I can not leave these people hanging out here. For the respect of my in-laws, my late husband and community I love, and the ones who have been so faithful to us, I cannot close down.?

?I am the outsider that came into the Messick family. They worked so hard from the 1800s on up to build this business. The times and the economy has changed, but I am still trying to hold on. I want the family to know I have earned my keep, that I have earned their trust. There are only two of the ?old-time? Messicks left, my sisters-in-law Jean and Gretchen. I want to do ?em proud. I want to do the community proud.?

She is seizing every moment to make her family and community proud.

She has had 25 surgeries in three years ? and spent a year as a hospital patient ? and felt sure death was at hand numerous times.

?I had a 10 percent survival rate. I?m just getting back to better health and fightin? like hell,? she said.

That people are surprised to hear that she is still living makes her smile. The death of her sister-in-law with the same name in 2007 had people mourning her passing.

?In the past five years, business has been steadily going downhill. Glenn is just about crippled with a bad back full of nuts and bolts, hard now for him to lift and drive,? she said. ?We don?t have a future. It?s day by day, penny by penny. What happens next is in God?s hands.?

(Copyright 2012 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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