When Charles F. Evans Jr.'s family got into the funeral business, there was no such thing as a funeral home.
People died in their homes, and horse-drawn carriages brought the coffins and mourners to the cemeteries, Evans said. It wasn't until after World War II, he said, that the idea of a funeral home came to be.
A century and a half since Evans' great-grandfather started the family business, a lot has changed in the way the dead are celebrated and buried. That business, Evans Funeral Chapel & Cremation Services, has been on Harford Road in Parkville since the 1950s. It also has locations in Monkton and Forest Hill.
Evans, who represents the fourth generation of his family to lead the business, said he wasn't always certain he'd join the family trade. But it was a natural step — he had grown up around death and funerals, after all.
How have you seen the funeral business change?
The business has changed just in the same way and manner as society had changed. The type of families we take care of and deal with today are different than the families that, let's say, my father may have taken care of 35 years ago or 45 years ago.
Today, half or more than half of the society is — let's use the term "not church-affiliated." That doesn't mean they don't want a service or a minister, but they don't have one.
Families are not as close. They're spread all over the place. It's not uncommon today that people will want a service and you might have to wait a week or 10 days for people to fly in from other parts of, not necessarily the country, but the world, to be able to attend a parent's funeral. There was one back in the winter where people were coming from Japan to attend a funeral.
What was the business like 150 years ago?
My great-grandfather started it. When he started it, we didn't even have a physical funeral home. It was just a shingle on a house in East Baltimore.
Everything then was done from home. People died at home, people were prepared to have their funeral at home. The viewing was at home. They left the home when they were going to the church for the funeral, or, if the service was at home in the living room, they left to go to the cemetery. It was horse and buggies. I have a photograph of my great-grandfather doing a horse-and-buggy funeral.
The first physical funeral home, my grandfather owned that, and that was on Mount Royal Avenue. I would say prior to World War II, people still had their funeral services to a very large degree from home. It was during World War II that it started to transition from people having their services at home into the funeral home, per se. My father shared that with me.
When he came into funeral service as a kid, World War II interrupted that, and he was away four or five years, and when he came back, that's when things were moving toward people using funeral homes. We had cars then, too.
What are some things people might be surprised to know about the funeral business?
What would surprise an individual or a family that's never been through this are the extent of the details they have to go through. Not only during the funeral service, when they have to come in and meet with a funeral director and make funeral arrangements, but also what they go through post-funeral in settling somebody's affairs. It can be a long, grueling process, not in a bad way, but there's a lot to it.
You can't take 85 years of life and think you're going to be able to memorialize and honor that life and close all the affairs out of that life lived. It's a lot involved to it. That's our job: to hold people's hands to go through all that, to give them the advice and send them to the right people if we can't help them with their wants or needs or problems.
Look at how families have changed. There are a lot of marriages, kids, divorces, new kids, our kids, your kids — and then you sit down and make funeral arrangements with that, and you've got to be careful.
One of the things that has always amused me about funeral service — and I'm proud of it, too — is who can you call 24-7, 365, and have them at your door in a suit? I don't know who else will do that for you. To me that's mind-boggling.
What are a funeral home's biggest expenses?
The biggest expense, it's no different than any other business: It's your staff. Secondly after that, it's health coverage and benefits. I think that's pretty much the same in any business. We're not much different.
The unique thing is, our staff, they have time off and vacations and so forth, but this business, there's no time off, there's no day off. Death is 24-7 and so is the way the business is run. It's maintained and staffed all of the time. Are the cars we use expensive? Yeah, they are, but when I think about the question I go back to, it's staff, it's benefits, it's health coverage.
It's a specialty thing when you talk about the cars we use. In any line of work when you're dealing with things that are a specialty, and sure, you pay more for it. A hearse isn't an everyday car, so it's a specialty piece of equipment and, yeah, you're going to pay for that. It's just the way it is.
Did you always think you were going to go into the family business?
I'm one of five kids. My dad really brought me to work just to get me out of my mother's hair. The business was much, much different when I was a kid. We're very fortunate our business has grown tremendously. My dad brought me to work, and the thing I remember the most is we had these white decorative stones around the building, and kids would throw the stones in the parking lot. My job every day was to sweep them up with a broom and toss them back in the flower beds.
It was a gradual thing. I grew up in it. It was a way of life to hear the phone go off and for my father to go out. I thought for a while I wanted to be a history teacher, but as I grew up, by the time I had graduated high school, I knew then, "Hey, I think I want to give this a hard look."
Even prior to graduating high school, when I got a driver's license at 16, my father used me to run flowers to whatever cemetery. I used to chauffeur limousines. There was nothing to it. It didn't faze me in any way, shape or form. It's what we did. I used to ride shotgun a ton of times when I was a real little kid, if we had a hospital removal or something like that, or if they were going to the medical examiner's. My dad and uncle allowed me to ride with them, but I never got out of the vehicle.
I can remember the first time I ever helped my father. I was probably 12 years old, it was on a Saturday afternoon, it was wintertime, and a lady had died in a retirement home out in Western Maryland. And I remember, here's this old lady, she was in her recliner.
"What do I do, Dad?"
"Son, just take the ankles."
"Sure, Dad."
Charles F. Evans Jr.
Title: Owner, Evans Funeral Chapel & Cremation Services
Hometown: Towson
Residence: Street
Age: 60
Education: Towson University; Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science, 1978
Family: Wife, three children