Three generations. One front door.
If you've lived in Sterling Glen for any length of time, you know the name. Our grandfather Tom started the funeral home in 1947 in what had been his cabinet shop. Three quarters of a century later, the chapel is still in the same building, the apartment upstairs is still where the kids grow up, and the people answering the phone are still Caldwells. That hasn't changed, and we don't plan to change it.
Tom, 1947.
Tom Caldwell was a cabinetmaker before he was anything else. He came back from the Pacific in 1945, married our grandmother Ruth at First Methodist on the corner of Maple and Pine, and went back to his shop. He'd built coffins on the side for a couple of years already — you did, in a town like Sterling Glen, where the nearest undertaker was twenty-six miles away in Bellefonte.
By 1947 the coffin work had grown into the chapel work, and the chapel work had grown into a license. He hung out the sign in November of that year. He'd done six funerals before Christmas. He used to say he hadn't planned any of it; he'd just kept saying yes.
He ran the firm until 1972. He was a quiet man. He drove the hearse himself. He kept a ledger in pencil in a soft leather book that's still in the office. We won't tell you what's in it, but we will tell you that his prices for the families who couldn't pay were always lower than the prices for the families who could.
Bill, 1972.
Our father Bill took over from Tom in 1972, the spring he turned thirty-four. He'd grown up in the apartment over the chapel, gone to Penn State, come home, and never seriously thought about anything else. He was a deacon at First Methodist for forty years. He sang bass in the choir. He coached Little League the summer Sarah was eleven.
He ran the home through the 70s, the 80s, the 90s. He saw cremation go from rare to half-the-time. He saw the cost of a funeral go from five hundred dollars to ten thousand. He saw the corporate chains buy up half the funeral homes in Centre County and then he saw most of those chains sell them again to bigger chains, and a couple of them close. He was offered serious money to sell, more than once, and he declined each time without thinking about it much.
He retired in 2008, the year Sarah came home. He still drops in on Saturday mornings to drink coffee in the kitchen and tell us we are doing it wrong. He is mostly right.
Sarah, 2008.
Sarah went to mortuary school in Pittsburgh straight out of college and went to work at one of the big regional chains. She lasted three years. She has politely declined to elaborate on what about those three years she didn't like, but she will tell you that the day her father called and asked if she'd like to come home, she said yes inside of a second.
She came back to Sterling Glen in 2008. She married Mike Hayes — another licensed director, a young one who'd been working at the hospital in State College — in 2009, and they took over the firm together. Mike took her name. They moved into the apartment over the chapel because where else were they going to live. Their first child, Henry, was born up there in 2010.
Sarah handles the arrangements and the front of house. Mike handles the cemetery work and the pre-planning visits. They share the on-call phone. They have done somewhere over a thousand services together, and one or the other of them has been at every single one.
Henry, Emma, and the apartment upstairs.
Henry is sixteen now, Emma is thirteen, and they are growing up in the same apartment over the chapel where Bill grew up before them and Sarah grew up after. Henry has started helping with simple tasks — setting up chairs, washing the hearse, walking out flowers after a service. Emma plays the piano at the visitations sometimes, when a family asks. Whether either of them takes over, we haven't decided and won't push. The chapel will pass to whoever wants it. If no one in the family wants it, it'll go to a director from town who will keep the name on the door, and that's all right too.
The chapel is the size of a country church. Most weeks we have one or two services. Some weeks none. Some weeks four. Sterling Glen is a small town and we are the only funeral home in it.
Come by.
Stop by any afternoon. The coffee's usually on, and there's almost always somebody in the kitchen. If you'd rather call first, the number is at the top of every page — that's our number, not a service.