A different childhood: GROWING UP IN THE FUNERAL HOME

Most folks today probably think of funeral homes as somber places where the hard fact of death is a constant presence. But for a certain bunch of Gainesville kids who grew up in the 1950s and '60s, Clinkingbeard Funeral Home was a fun place where we shared way more laughter than tears.

It was a place we loved because it was more than a business where the dead were mourned and honored. It was a home, and the couple who lived there and managed it, Bob and Cleta Usrey, were professionals who knew how to serve grieving people with dignity and kindness. And they were also parents of three little girls, twins Pam and Vicky and their younger sister, Missy, who were our friends and playmates. 

Later, for us as teenage girls, the funeral home was where we hung out with Pam, Vicky and Missy to listen to the Beatles and have fun-filled sleepovers and taco suppers.

Now, 70 years later, the three sisters – Pam McGinnis, Vicky Evans and Missy Foster, still Gainesville residents – remember growing up in the funeral home as a wonderful life full of love and fun, plus maybe a little mischief. 

Creating a home at the funeral home

Pam and Vicky were 14 months old in 1952 when their parents moved to Gainesville after Bob became manager of the funeral home, which was (and still is) owned by the Clinkingbeard family in Ava. Bob was 29; Cleta was 24. 

He was a World War II veteran who was reminded every day of the life-threatening injuries he'd sustained when a hand grenade was thrown into his combat tank. "He was the only one in the tank who survived," Pam said, "but it almost blew off his legs." 

Bob's legs were saved, but he carried shrapnel in them that caused pain the rest of his life. The girls remember that sometimes his knees would lock, and he would be unable to stand or walk until he got his legs working again. 

After the war, he completed embalming school and became a funeral director. He married Mountain Grove resident Cleta Crewse in 1950, and after working briefly elsewhere, they moved into the Gainesville funeral home, where Bob would be the business manager, funeral director and embalmer. It was a one-man operation, with Cleta tending to the girls and helping Bob when she could. 

Then and now, the north end of the Gainesville funeral home, on what is now South Main Street, included a front office, large chapel, casket display area, multi-vehicle garage, embalming room and covered carport on the driveway. The home part of the building was separated from the funeral-business part by a door between the office and living room. That front room adjoined a kitchen and a single bedroom with bathroom. 

For the first few years of their lives, the twins, and their parents, slept in the building's only bedroom. When Missy was born in 1955, the Usreys created a cozy bedroom for her in the hallway that connected the living room and bedroom. It was tiny, and her bed was "more like a rollaway," Missy said, but she loved it. 

By then, another bedroom had been built onto the living quarters for Pam and Vicky.

Mischief, fun . . . and death

In those days before cell phones and other modern communication methods, an adult always had to be at the funeral home in case a death call came in. The funeral home also operated the county's only ambulance back then, and someone always had to be ready to drive it when a call came in from the sheriff or a doctor's office. Occasionally, the hearse would be used as an ambulance too when two were needed. And the town's red "fire phone" sat on the desk in the funeral home office. When it rang, Bob or Cleta would answer it and then relay the information to the town's volunteer fire chief. 

The girls remember how, each morning, their dad would walk to the east side of the square for a cup of coffee and conversation with Lister Drug Store owner Roy Lister. After he returned home, Cleta would walk to the drug store for her coffee. They couldn't go together because they couldn't leave the funeral home telephone unattended.  

Whenever both Bob and Cleta had a day or night off, caretaker/babysitters stepped in. The late Pete and Alice Lord were regular substitute caretakers during most of the girls' lives in the funeral home. If a call came in, Pete left in the hearse or ambulance while Alice stayed to watch the girls and tend the telephone. 

The funeral home's big back yard / parking lot was the girls' playground and hijinks area. Most misdeeds were blamed on Pam. "She ran over me with her bicycle and poked a pencil in my eye," Missy said recently, clicking through the list of injustices. Pam also hit Vicky in the head with a ballbat. (Pam insists it was an accident.) That last incident resulted in a trip to the nearby office of Dr. Arthur Beard, who diagnosed the exaggerated injury as fully survivable. 

Bob and Cleta's work meant that their lives revolved around others' death, but that didn't mean they were hardened to the death of their own loved ones and friends. Pam remembers seeing her mother standing in the funeral home kitchen, leaning against the refrigerator, sobbing, when Alma Luna died. "They were best friends," Pam said.

And then there was the time when Pam and Missy thought it would be fun to crawl into a couple of the display caskets and pretend to be dead. "We hollered for Vicky, and she came in and saw us and just cried and cried," Pam said. "Then she ran to get Mom."

Just for fun, the girls and their friends also staged elaborate pretend funerals in the chapel when it was unoccupied by a real dead body.

The south edge of the funeral home's backyard dropped off into a deep ditch that ran alongside what was then busy U.S. Highway 160. Before the city of Gainesville installed a municipal water and sewer system, the nearby laundromat's warm, soapy water drained through an underground pipe that opened into that ditch, providing a perfect (although forbidden) water-play spout for the girls and their friends. 

In winter, the steep bank that dropped into the ditch was also a delightfully dangerous sledding challenge on snowy days. When the girls and their friends came inside with muddy, snow-soaked clothes, Cleta stripped them all down to their underwear and washed their coats and clothing. Then she dried the kids' clothes in a clothes dryer – one of the first ones known to exist in Gainesville.

The clothes dryer and at least one other modern convenience made many of the girls' friends think the Usrey family was wealthy. "I can't count the number of times I heard people say we were  rich  when we were growing up because we had air conditioning," Missy said, laughing. 

The early climate-control system was a necessity in the windowless funeral home chapel; the rest of the building was air-conditioned too. In winter, the building was warmed by wall-mounted heaters the girls used for other purposes as well. Missy remembers lying on the living room floor in front of the wall-heater's bottom vent to dry her hair. 

"All these years later we realized Daddy had a hair dryer back in the embalming room," she said.

It was a handheld blow dryer, a rarity long before handheld blow dryers became an everyday thing. "It was green and weighed about 500 pounds," Missy said. 

On a recent visit to the funeral home, she asked if the old hair dryer was still there in the embalming room. It was.    

Frightful moments

The girls grew up having no fear about the dead body, or bodies, that might be lying in caskets down the hall. "It was just our home. It's all we knew," Vicky said. They, and their friends, learned to be quiet whenever viewings and or other funeral home business was being conducted. And they had to stay in their bedroom during funeral services. 

But there were frightful moments. They laugh now, remembering Cleta's story about going to a home, alone, to pick up someone who had died one night when Bob was out on another call. She efficiently moved the body from the hearse to the worktable in the embalming room by herself. Then, when she bent over to pick up something she had dropped on the floor, the corpse's hand fell off the table and hit her back. "It scared her to death," Missy said.

Doing laundry could be a little scary for the girls, they admit, because the washer and dryer were in the dark garage, just past the embalming room. Whenever they had to do laundry or get something out of the dryer, "we would walk real slow down the hall to get there – and then run back," Pam said.

Missy remembers being spooked one night when she was sent to turn off the two pole lamps that stood on either end of a casket in the chapel. "I didn't think. I turned off the lights – and it was pitch black," she said. "I couldn't see anything and was trying to get out. Then I was trying to find the lamp again and bumping into the casket . . ."

Teenagers in the funeral home

In 1963, when the twins were in sixth grade and Missy was in second, Bob and Cleta divorced, and Cleta moved with the girls into a house that stood on the northeast corner of the square. Routinely, the girls walked down what is now Second Street each weekday to attend school in the building that adjoined what today is the Gainesville post office. "I remember Mom telling us that morning, 'When you come home from school today, come to the new house,'" Vicky said. "When we got there, she said we needed to go tell Daddy good-bye. And when we did, Daddy had no furniture. It had all been moved to Mom's house."

Cleta soon moved with the girls to Willow Springs, where they lived about 18 months. Then, when the twins were in eighth grade and Missy was in fourth, Cleta remarried and moved to Wichita, Kansas, and the girls returned to Gainesville to live in the funeral home again with their dad.    

The funeral home had a single phone line then with extension phones in the office, bedroom and embalming room. Whenever Cleta called from Wichita to talk with her daughters, they all raced to grab a phone, hoping they wouldn't be the one stuck using the extension back in the embalming room. 

The single phone line became a problem when the girls were teenagers and tied up the line with longwinded calls to friends and boyfriends. In response, Bob splurged and had a second, separate line installed in the twins' room. In 1971, that second line was disconnected when Vicky, the last of the three girls to leave home, married Ronnie "Skid" Evans. When he unhooked the phone, telephone company employee Kenneth Terry asked Vicky if she'd like to take the number with her to her new home with Skid. She did. And even though Vicky and Skid lived in several different houses in the Gainesville area in their 52 years together, she still has that same land-line phone number she and her sisters had in 1971.

As teenagers, the girls became more helpful around the funeral home. They sometimes handed out the funeral leaflets as people arrived, and they hung tags on the family members' cars that said, "Please turn on your headlights." In those years, instead of the cushioned pews that now fill the chapel, funeral attendees sat in folding chairs that the girls set up and took down so the floor could be cleaned. Sometimes they stood in the chapel doorway during the service, ready to assist anyone who needed help. At Christmastime, they stuffed Clinkingbeard desk calendars into envelopes for mailing.

Other times, Bob would call on the intercom from the embalming room to say he needed help lifting a body into a casket. All three girls helped wherever they were needed. 

"You hear people say today, 'I had to work, growing up.' I say I worked growing up too, helping put bodies in caskets," Pam said.

Missy and Pam were fascinated by the embalming process and liked watching their dad work. "But then I would go to bed and pray I wouldn't die," Pam admitted.

Missy said she regretted that she hadn't gone into embalming as a career. Vicky didn't share their interest in that part of the business. "Not me!" she said.

As the girls got older, their friends would sometimes stop by to visit with them and their dad. 

"One night we were at the table, eating dinner, and in walked Jack Blackburn and Darrell White," Missy said. "They had been racing on their way back from somewhere, and they had wrecked. Darrell had a cut on his head, and he needed Daddy to call his parents to come get him. So Daddy called, and Darrell's mother answered the phone. Daddy said, 'Maxine, this is Bob Usrey. I've got Darrell down here.' And I guess that's all Daddy got out before Maxine just lost it."

When she heard Bob say Darrell was at the funeral home, Maxine White screamed and dropped the phone, thinking her son was dead. Maxine's husband, Elbert, frantically grabbed the phone, and Bob told him, "No, no, no! Darrell's fine. He's just got a cut on his head."  

While Bob hadn't meant to scare the White family, he did have a mischievous streak of his own, and he loved sharing a good laugh. One of the twins' high school friends, Larry Donley,  liked to visit with Bob and the girls, but he wasn't at all comfortable in the funeral home.

"He would never come past the chair by the front door," Missy said. "One day Daddy saw him coming in, and he went back to the embalming room. After Larry came in, Daddy started moaning real low on the intercom – 'Whoooooooo.' Larry jumped up, and I swear his feet never touched the sidewalk. He jumped in his car and peeled out." 

Asked about the incident last week, Larry chuckled and said, "Them girls have laughed about that forever."

Leaving the funeral home

Pam and Vicky graduated from Gainesville High School in 1969. Pam got married that summer. Missy got married in 1970 when she was 15 and dropped out of school when she became pregnant. A few months later, she and her first husband had a baby; tragically, the infant boy died a few hours after he was born in a Mountain Home, Arkansas, hospital.

"I remember Daddy carrying Missy's baby out to the car," Vicky recalled sadly. 

Bob took his little grandson to Lyle Clinkingbeard at the family's funeral home in Ava for embalming. But Bob handled the funeral arrangements himself, and for the first time in her short life, Missy sat beside her then-husband on the front row in the funeral home chapel. All the girls would take their turns in that hard place as the years passed.

When all three were grown and gone, their dad left the Gainesville funeral home, sometime in the early 1970s. He worked awhile at the Clinkingbeard Funeral Home in Ava but then spent a year in the Missouri State Sanitorium in Mount Vernon after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. "They thought he might have gotten it from someone he embalmed," Pam said.

Bob remarried and moved to Willow Springs, where he died in his sleep in 1980 at age 56. His funeral arrangements were handled by his former brother- and sister-in-law, Tom and Celah Burns, funeral directors in Willow Springs. 

Cleta and her second husband moved from Wichita to West Plains, but after his death in 1991, she moved back to Gainesville to be near her daughters. She died in 2011 on her 83rd birthday at 2 p.m., the exact time her girls had scheduled a birthday party in her honor. Her funeral was in the Christian Church, with arrangements by Clinkingbeard.

Vicky's husband Skid died in June 2022. His funeral was at the funeral home in Gainesville. 

A blessing, not a hardship

The Usrey girls were the last children to live in the funeral home in Gainesville. Most of the subsequent funeral directors opted to live in separate homes they bought or rented. Current funeral home manager Gene Britt said the last person to live there was a man who worked with former Gainesville city police officer Ron Mahan, Mahan also worked for the funeral home. The man who worked with him rented the twins' old room to have a place to stay while he was gaining some law enforcement experience. 

Today the main bedroom is used as a conference room where Britt meets with family members who are making funeral arrangements. The twins' old bedroom is Britt's office. The living room is still a gathering place for friends, including Pam and Vicky, who stop by sometimes for morning coffee.

Thanks to cell phones and an answering service that has trained professionals taking after-hours calls and then alerting Britt, it's no longer necessary for someone to be at the funeral home at all times. The county now has a 911 system that routes emergency calls to the sheriff's office for dispatching to the professionally operated ambulance district or to one of the 14 volunteer fire departments that serve Ozark County.

Occasionally, someone these days asks Pam, Vicky or Missy, "Weren't you scared, living in a funeral home?" 

But the Usrey girls believe growing up in the funeral home was a blessing, not a hardship. "We had a lot of friends, and we were together there all the time. We weren't afraid of funerals, and none of our friends were either," Vicky said.

Seeing their parents work with those who grieved helped the girls learn respect, Pam said.  

"And sympathy," Missy added. "I think we deal with death better than some people do because we grew up with it."

Missy and Pam sometimes work as caregiver-attendants for the ill and elderly. "If we're someplace where somebody's dying, we know what role to take to help," Missy said. "We can say, 'You sit and cry, and we'll do what needs to be done.'"