After 58 years, Dave Dicken sells iconic funeral home in downtown Elyria

ELYRIA — For nearly 80 years, the people of Elyria have come to their door on their worst days. They sought help and dignity for their loved ones' final repose at the Dicken Funeral Home and Cremation Services at the northwest corner of Middle Avenue and Fourth Street. Longtime owner Dave Dicken, who has worked as a mortician for 58 years, sold the business last fall. It was time, he said. He is 80, as is his wife, Sandy. "I thought, 'If I die all of a sudden, and I own this funeral home, what the heck is my wife going to do,'" he said. "She can't take care of all this and you can't hire people to do this for you forever. I have to do something so my wife is not overwhelmed." He had offers from other mortuary businesses, but he turned them down. Whomever took the business has to be someone he respected in the industry, he said. It wasn't just his business he was turning over; Dicken had spent his entire life there. Pamela Reber Jones bought the funeral home on Oct. 29. A sign displaying its new name — Dicken, Dovin and Reber Jones Funeral and Cremation Center — just went up in front of the iconic rambling white building. "I liked the history of the home, I respect Dave for what he's done for the families. He truly is just a remarkable man. As a person, as a business owner, he is just a great guy," she said. Reber Jones said the transition was kept "on the downlow, not intentionally, but we just kind of wanted to come in and make some changes, just freshen it up a bit." Dicken still will be involved, meeting with people. He's a part of the business, and a part of the town itself. In 58 years of working as a mortician, Dicken estimates he "has worked with" 8,000 or 9,000 families, his respectful way of saying how many bodies he has prepared. The business has been running without interruption, but will be temporarily closed this weekend to accommodate a private estate sale of many items from the building's long history as a funeral home. The four-floor home was built as a private residence in 1863 by William F. Wooten, a pharmacist who was the mayor of Elyria during the Civil War. The family lived there until the 1920s, and in the 1930s the rambling home with the iconic main staircase lined with two-story high stained glass windows became a number of things, including the headquarters of the Elyria Women's Club, before it acquired Monteith Hall, and the Green Lantern tea room. In 1938, Sidney "Stub" Nichols bought the home with the intention to make it a funeral parlor. The following year, Dicken's father Harold came to work for Nichols, learning from him while he attended college in Cleveland to earn his embalming and funeral director licenses in 1941. The times intervened and Harold Dicken served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He returned home and took up his old job, becoming a partner and then buying the business in 1948, according to old articles in the Chronicle-Telegram. He called it Dicken Funeral Home and promptly moved his wife, Beverly, and 3-year-old son Dave in to the second-floor apartment. The family eventually added two more children — Ted and Sally — but the three-bedroom, two-bath apartment was the family's self-contained home for decades. Living in a funeral home was nothing unusual for the Dickenses and not for their friends, either. "Growing up there was just normal. It was just how we were all brought up. It was just part of life and death," Dicken said. There were, of course, certain house boundaries to follow. The first floor, full of ornate woodwork, was used for visitation space, the public meeting area. "We knew how to act, we knew to show respect. We couldn't carve our name in the woodwork downstairs and we knew to be quiet and respectful when there was a visitation going on, they couldn't hear our Beatles records playing," he said. "But it was like an open house every day. We had friends and kids and people coming and going all the time. They knew how to get in — there was a door that led to the back stairs to get up to the second floor." A large brick addition was added to the rear of the building in 1956, to house the casket showroom, offices, a garage for the home's limousine and eventually its hearse, and preparation rooms for the deceased, moving them from the basement. "That was a big change," Dicken said. There were other tenants in the building, too. The third floor also is an apartment, and Dicken said a woman lived there in the 1950s, before a couple moved in for a time. After that, his sister took over the space during her high school years. Living right downtown in those years is nearly unrecognizable to today's standards. The streets were full of shops and foot traffic and three movie theaters within a few blocks of Ely Square. The siblings went to the nearby Elyria High School, often stopping off at the Paradise Restaurant on Broad Street after for a 15-cent Coke, Dicken remembers. "It was a great area and a great place to grow up," he said. It was in college at Bowling Green University he decided to follow in his father's footsteps and become a mortician himself. He started in 1968, working alongside his father. He brought along his wife, Sandy, and they took the third floor apartment where they lived for 10 years. Sandy, like Dave's mother Beverly, would work in the family business, too. She worked during the day for the city school system and at night she would help with visitation services and handle bookwork, he said. They eventually moved out to a home in the Eastern Heights neighborhood when the neighborhood changed. "My son got older and things changed. It used to be where you could just go outside and leave the door open. People were always around, you could walk downtown, my wife would take Ryan when he was young down to the fountain. But it wasn't like that any more, so we moved over to the Heights," he said. They still live there. His parents stayed in the home, though, still on the second floor. "It's where they were comfortable and where they wanted to be. And someone was always here, we worked here during the day, and often at night, too," he said. Harold and Beverly lived there until they died, in 2001 and 2005, respectively. Their son saw to their funerals. "I have friends who work for me who did the actual physical preparations for my mom and dad and my grandparents, but I wouldn't have wanted to send them out to somebody else to do," he said. "My dad would probably still be haunting me if I had done that." The job of a mortician is an unusual one. It requires medical knowledge, business acumen, event planning skills, cosmetology skills to present a loved one as they were in life, and the ability to meet someone on their worst day and work with them through shock, grief or unimaginable pain. Even in the case of expected deaths, there are no joyful funerals. "We meet them in the worst part of their lives. Even when families are praying that their loved one is not suffering any more, a loss is a loss," Reber Jones said. "The sheer emotion we deal with every day is a lot." Dicken has taken care of thousands of the departed in his nearly 60-year career serving Lorain County. He has grown accustomed to knowing that many people he knows or will meet may eventually be someone he will bury. He has buried the old and the young, those taken by disease and those taken by the split second of a horrific accident, those who slipped away in peaceful old age and those taken violently by a murderer. These days he thinks of his friends, lifelong friends, who come to him to make their arrangements. "I have a lot of people — a lot — who come to me and say 'I want you to do this, physically to do this for me,'" he said. "Just for them to come and ask this, you get a sense of responsibility. This really is an honor, that you're the person they come to when it's that time. They know you have it in you to do right. People are giving you their whole being, everything they have, they are passing it on to you to help them," he said. "You've got to be low on the totem pole if you don't help them." Living up close to death for so long, he has come to hope there is something more awaiting us. "I believe, or I hope, there is an eventual better place. I see people and I hope, if there is such a place hopefully I'll see you again," he said. "Hopefully I'll make the curve.'' Contact Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.