Funeral Homes Get Personal

It’s a matter of growth and death.

As Northwest Arkansas’ population continues to grow, so does the area’s funeral home business. The number of funeral homes in Northwest Arkansas has almost doubled in the last decade to 18.

Nationwide, the $9 billion a year death-care business is flat with about 2.5 million people dying annually. Advances in medicine have extended life expectancy for the 78 million baby boomers — from age 68 in 1940 to 77 in 2001.

The U.S. death rate dipped by 7.3 percent last year but increased by about 3 percent in Northwest Arkansas. So far this year, it’s up about 6 percent in Northwest Arkansas, said Scott Berna, owner of Nelson-Berna Funeral Home in Fayetteville. Part of that increase is due to retirees moving into the area. They’re older than the general population and therefore a bit closer to their expiration date.

Prices vary, but the average funeral in Northwest Arkansas costs about $6,000. That amount includes burial vault and cemetery fees, but not a headstone, which can run from $200 to several thousand dollars.

Funerals appear to be part of the human psyche. Some 60,000 years before Christ, Neanderthal man buried his dead with animal antlers and flowers.

Contrast that with the funeral for a Fort Smith duck hunter who was flanked in his casket by two shotguns. His neck was adorned with duck calls, and a duck blind was draped over the casket.

“You’re seeing a lot of personalization, both on the funeral side and the cremation side,” said Berna, who worked the Fort Smith funeral.

Karla Tedford, owner and funeral director of Benton County Funeral Home in Rogers, said it’s not unusual for men to be buried now with a favorite fishing pole.

Cremation Nation

As Northwest Arkansas becomes more urbanized, ideas about funerals have been changing. Cremation accounts for about 35 to 40 percent of all funeral services in Northwest Arkansas, according to three area funeral directors. Nationwide, the rate of cremations to deaths has risen from about 3.5 percent in 1960 to 28 percent today, the Cremation Association of North America reported.

The cremation rate in Northwest Arkansas is considerably higher than in the Delta (as low as 1.4 percent in Lee County) and throughout the rest of the South, where traditional funerals hold sway.

Many people opt for cremation because their families are scattered across a large geographic area.

Others do it to save money. A cremation costs about $1,000 in Northwest Arkansas. The cost is about $2,500 for cremation and a service in a rental casket.

Tom Stockdale of Stockdale Funeral Home in Rogers said cremation rates are also higher in cities and among populations of people who are highly educated.

For some church congregations in Bella Vista, the cremation rate is 99 percent, Stockdale said.

“We have such a large concentration of people from up north in Bella Vista,” he said. “They have certainly brought their traditions with them.”

At one time, cremation wasn’t allowed by the Catholic Church, but now it is. Apparently, some traditional religious groups are still uncomfortable with the idea of cremation. They believe the body is necessary for ascension into Heaven.

Several Bible passages refer to God opening graves and taking people with him to Heaven. Ezekiel 37:12 states: “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: O my people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them … I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land.”

But ideas about cremation are changing.

“You are going to turn back to dust eventually,” Stockdale said, referring to the phrase in the funeral passage from The Book of Common Prayer: “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” The passage is taken from Genesis 3:19, which states, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

As cremation becomes more popular, the prices have been increasing. Stockdale said he recently raised his price for a cremation from $850 to $975 but his costs have been climbing at a faster clip.

In Arkansas, cremains are considered inert, so they can be buried or scattered by the family in a remote spot in the Ozark Mountains.

Stockdale said he urges family members to have a body embalmed and a funeral or viewing before cremation. The company has a rental casket for such services.

Stockdale said that, psychologically, it’s important for family members to see the body before burial.

“There’s a real key to this grieving process called visualization,” he said. “Seeing is believing.”

Rise of Independents

Stockdale was going against the corporate trend when he opened Stockdale Funeral Home five years ago in a 1,200-SF house on Walton Boulevard. In 2002, he moved the business to a 2,700-SF building in Rogers.

“There were funeral homes in the area that laughed and scoffed at us because we started in such a small building,” he said. “We are bucking against the big corporations. We’re just doing what we do and trying to do the best we know how.”

Stockdale handled 49 funerals that first year and expects to do 100 this year. Rollins Funeral Home in Rogers was the busiest in the county with 281 funerals last year, he said.

Stockdale said he will turn his first profit this year. He wouldn’t reveal his revenue numbers, but some number crunching indicated it would be more than $300,000 this year.

“One of my ministers told me, ?You don’t go into business, you grow into business,'” Stockdale said. “We are only as good as the last service we did.”

Besides Stockdale, Wasson Funeral Home in Siloam Springs, Benton County Funeral Home and Bella Vista Funeral Home are the other three independently owned funeral services in the county.

Karla and Jerry Tedford bought Benton County Funeral Home in January when the corporate owner, Prime Succession Inc. of Erlanger, Kan., went out of business. Prime Succession had a second location in Bentonville, but the company let its lease lapse on that building. So the Tedfords purchased Prime’s two-story, 7,600-SF funeral home in Rogers.

“Some people have financial problems, and the big companies would say, ?No, we’re not going to help you,'” said Karla Tedford. “But now we can help them and give them some options.”

Funeral homes have had a long tradition of doing charity work. If a family can’t pay for a funeral, funeral homes often perform the service anyway for little or no charge.

“No matter what stage in life you’re in, helping people is what counts,” Stockdale said.

Karla Tedford said she doesn’t charge for infant funeral services, just for the casket cost and cemetery charges.

“There’s a reason for us to be here,” she said, adding that as long as she pays the bills, she’s happy.

Upon graduation from high school in Greenfield, Mo., Karla Tedford moved to Springdale to work for Sisco Funeral Chapel. State law in Missouri required funeral home employees to be 21 years old, but Arkansas law didn’t. And Karla Tedford already knew what she wanted to do with her life.

After two years with Sisco, she worked for Nelson’s Funeral Home in Fayetteville from 1984 to 1992. From then until Prime Succession sold her the business, Karla Tedford worked for Benton County Funeral Home. She said the funeral home did about 120 funerals last year.

Fascinating Business

By being local and independent, Stockdale said, “We can react to a situation instantly. We don’t have to call and get someone’s permission … We have more flexibility than in a corporate situation.”

After working for 12 years in Wal-Mart’s home office in Bentonville, mostly as a buyer of automotive products, Stockdale left in 1984 to work in the funeral business.

“This funeral business is absolutely fascinating,” he said. “You have to have a heart for it. You have to have a calling.”

Part of that calling is a deep desire to help grieving family members preparing for and during a funeral, Stockdale said.

“We feel like it’s a ministry,” he said. “That’s how we approach it.”

Stockdale said it’s essential to have a woman working for a funeral service. His wife Jan is also his business partner.

“Any funeral is emotionally charged,” he said. “Jan brings a peace to that.”

Until the 1970s, it was considered bad taste to ask about funeral prices. “There was a lot of gouging going on,” Stockdale said. “Some people would charge $12,000 for a little bitty funeral.”

All that changed in 1984, when the Federal Trade Commission forced funeral homes to comply with full-disclosure regulations. Even though many funeral homes were already doing that, now price lists are made available to all funeral home customers.

Profit is only about 7 percent of the total cost of a funeral, Stockdale said. Karla Tedford confirmed that.

Walton Funeral

Stockdale became interested in the business while working for Harvey Funeral Home in Ardmore, Okla., during high school and college. Stockdale earned a degree in physical education from Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant, which the offensive guard attended on a football scholarship. The whole time, though, he was wishing he was in mortuary school.

After leaving Wal-Mart, he spent seven months with Burns Funeral Home in Rogers, then a year at the Dallas Institute of Funeral Services earning his mortician’s certificate before returning to Burns for another seven months. Stockdale then worked for 12 years for Callison-Lough Funeral Service, which has funeral homes in Rogers, Bentonville and Gravette.

Before Sam Walton died in 1992, he asked that “his friend Thomas” handle his funeral arrangements. That included a church service, memorial service for employees of Wal-Mart’s home office and public service at Tiger Stadium in Bentonville.

In 1998, Loewen Corp. of Canada, the world’s second-largest funeral services company, bought Callison-Lough in a wave of corporate acquisitions and began cleaning house.

“I knew they were going to can me,” Stockdale said, “and sure enough they did.”

Stockdale got a bank loan and opened his own funeral service a few months later.

Since then, Loewen filed for bankruptcy and emerged as a leaner company called Alderwoods Group.

Berna Buys Nelson

In 1981, while a senior in high school, Berna worked for Edwards Van-Alma Funeral Home in Van Buren. He slept at the funeral home, answered telephones and washed cars.

He served as funeral director at Edwards Funeral Home in Fort Smith from 1984 to 1994. In 1991, that business sold to the Sentinel Group.

Houston-based Service Corporation International, the world’s largest funeral services company, bought Sentinel and moved Berna to Longview, Texas, then Oklahoma City.

“In 1999, I lost my home in that big tornado over there,” he said.

Berna took the opportunity to move to Fayetteville to become funeral director at Nelson, which was founded in 1936.

Duane Nelson sold the funeral home to Equity Corporation International in the mid-1990s, and SCI bought ECI in 1998.

After SCI started having financial troubles in the late 1990s, Berna saw an opportunity to own his own funeral home.

SCI planned to close Nelson Funeral Home in 2002 and sell the 15,000-SF building at the corner of College Avenue and Joyce Boulevard.

“I got a good opportunity because they were just going to close the business anyway,” Berna said. “So whatever money they got from me was just a bonus.”

With the purchase, Berna also got an onsite crematory and the 27-acre Fairview Memorial Gardens cemetery on Mission Boulevard. One acre of cemetery can accommodate 1,000 burials, depending on the lay of the land.

Berna sold the old building, which was built in 1969, to Walgreen Co. and built a new 7,800-SF funeral home in Fayetteville at the corner of Zion Road and Arkansas Highway 265. Walgreens tore down the old Nelson Funeral Home to build a drug store on the lot.

At the new location, Berna changed the business name to Nelson-Berna Funeral Home. He said the business did 180 funeral last year.

Because he owns a cemetery, Berna said he can offer better prices than some of his competitors.

“It’s just like any business,” he said. “If I know all the dollars are coming to one business, then I can work with the family on cost.”

Berna said Fairview and Benton County Memorial Park in Rogers are the only two state-monitored cemeteries in Northwest Arkansas.

He said that means they have a perpetual-care fund that can only be used for future maintenance of the cemetery and is annually audited.

With a budget in place, Berna said he’s already turning a profit at his funeral home. His wife Paula is his business partner.

“The funeral home growth I think will level off,” Berna said. “I really don’t see another funeral home coming in here anytime soon, but I think the death rate will continue to grow.”

Funeral Homes

•?Number in the United States — 21,872
•?Number with payrolls “beyond the owners” — 16,000
•?Total employees — 103,258
•?Average number of employees — three full-time and three part-time
•?Total annual revenue — $9.5 billion
•?Owned by families or closely-held private companies — 19,029
•?Owned by one of four public corporations — 2,843
•?Average funeral calls per year — 187

Source: National Funeral Directors Association

Burial, Embalming Have Ancient History

Neanderthal man, who lived from 100,000 B.C. to 40,000 B.C., was the first to bury his dead, said Marvin Kay, chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Arkansas.

Graves of Neanderthal man found in Shanidar Cave in Iraq indicated flowers were buried with the bodies.

“The question is why the flowers?” Kay said. “One explanation is they may have represented medicinal plants. They may have been a signature of what the person did in life, as a healer or shaman perhaps.”

Embalming dates to ancient Egypt, where it was believed the soul took a 3,000 mile journey before returning to reinhabit the body and live with the gods for eternity. Between 6,000 BC and 600 AD, the Egyptians mummified about 400 million bodies.

Early Christians borrowed their burial beliefs from the Greeks, Romans and Jews. Christians followed the Jewish tradition of not embalming their dead.

During the Civil War, however, Abraham Lincoln directed the military to embalm Union soldiers who died in battle so each body could be shipped to the soldier’s hometown for a proper funeral. After the war, embalming fell out of favor. But in the early 20th century, “undertakers,” people who under took to make the funeral arrangements, began embalming to allow families time to plan the funerals.

Cremation by State

State — 2001 deaths — 2001 cremations — % cremations to deaths

Arkansas — 27,786 — 4,192 — 15.1
Missouri — 55,006 — 10,402 — 18.9
Oklahoma — 34,733 — 5,283 — 15.2
Texas — 153,309 — 26,550 — 17.3
Louisiana — 41,808 — 4,696 — 11.2
Mississippi — 28,279 — 1,964 — 7.0
Tennessee — 55,223 — 2,730 — 4.9

2001 was the most recent year for which statewide statistics were available. Source: National Funeral Directors Association

Cremation by County

County — 2002 Deaths — 2002 Cremations — 2002 % cremations — 2001 Deaths — 2001 cremations — 2001 % cremations

Benton — 1,266 — 452 — 35.7 — 1,300 — 455 — 35.0
Washington — 1,223 — 318 — 26.0 — 1,169 — 276 — 23.6
Carroll — 233 — 74 — 31.8 — 258 — 80 — 31.0
Madison — 156 — 20 — 12.8 — 152 — 27 — 17.8
Crawford — 515 — 68 — 13.2 — 472 — 83 — 17.6
Sebastian (Fort Smith) — 1,115 — 176 — 15.8 — 1,134 — 200 — 17.6
Pulaski (Little Rock) — 3,234 — 521 — 16.1 — 3,324 — 512 — 15.4
Lee (Delta) — 145 — 2 — 1.4 — 140 — 2 — 1.4
Phillips (Delta) — 325 — 10 — 3.1 — 322 — 9 — 2.8

Source: Arkansas Department of Health Center for Health Statistics