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Photo by Austen Smith
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From left to right are Martha, Shelly and David Brown from the David C. Brown Funeral Home in Belleville. The business is celebrating 25 years this week.
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Many business owners nowadays have very little or no connection at all to the communities they serve.
For longtime resident and respected business owner David Brown, his business is the community and the community, his business.
"It's been a long journey, but it's been worth it," says Brown as he relaxes in one of the conference rooms at the David C. Brown Funeral Home, located at 460 E. Huron Drive.
Brown and his family will celebrate 25 years in business - to the day - as the David C. Brown Funeral Home was first established April 5, 1982.
What started as a family owned and operated, one-chapel facility has grown into a vast and unique operation that offers extensive service and products to grieving families including arrangement services, markers and stones, international shipping and even grief counseling at a separate facility.
David and his wife, Martha, founded the business in what David described as a "start-up situation."
"We had to buy the equipment, we had to borrow money. It was tough to get started," David says. "As a matter of fact, being here for 25 years is an accomplishment in itself."
Martha later received a bachelor's degree in social work from Eastern Michigan University in 1993 and now manages the Brown Family Center, a facility that provides extensive aftercare services, pre-need counseling and monuments and markers in an off-premise site to better serve families. The family center was opened in 1994.
Before establishing the business on East Huron, the original facility was located down the road just a bit at the site of the current Belleville Moose Lodge.
But David didn't always run his own funeral home, he cut his teeth in the business at the former Roberts' Brothers Funeral Home from 1975 to 1981 and served as manager from 1978 to 1981.
David says they are one of the few funeral homes that offer grief counseling along with normal arrangement services. While not always cost effective, he says, it is worth it to see families being helped in their time of loss.
"How do you measure cost effectiveness? You measure it by satisfied families," he says.
"We kind of thought people would appreciate it because if they have a death and they want to seek grief counseling, they don't especially want to come back to the funeral home. So, it works out pretty good.
Daughter Shelly, 31, is the director of the home. She says they receive a lot of positive feedback regarding the full line of services provided for families.
"(Families) come back and they do their own pre-arrangement after they have experience with us," Shelly says.
"People like the fact that we're carrying it all the way through (from the time of death) all the way to the funeral. Not only was one of us on the phone when we go to pick up (that family's) loved one, but the next day they meet with one of us to make the arrangements.
"So they're seeing the same person over again. They're familiar with us, they feel more comfortable leaving their cherished, loved one with us. It's a little cold if you don't carry it all the way through," she says.
The hallmark of the David C. Brown Funeral Home - customer service and independence, David says.
"It's just experience," David says. "I passed my experience onto my daughter, she passes hers to other people on staff and every case seems to be different.
"This business gives you a good background on how to deal with people because it's a touchy situation for these folks. That's why we value our customer service so highly," he says.
Shelly says they are different from some of the "conglomerate" funeral homes available. Being a longtime resident and highly involved in the community shows in their work.
"When you eat, sleep and breathe Belleville, it makes a difference," Shelly says. "We bank here, we get our groceries here, we go out to eat here; that's all we do. We very seldom go out of town.
"And for us to be here for 25 years seems like a huge thing because a lot of (family owned) funeral homes do sell. There are a lot of things we do here in the community, so for us it's just so special to have served the community for the last 25 years."
In the community
It is because of the Brown family name and their strong ties to the community at large, that they have established a solid and reliable reputation, Martha says. It makes her proud to run into families they have helped in the past and receive positive feedback.
"When you can walk around downtown and know that you haven't done a disservice to someone, that's something to be proud of," she says. "We have a good reputation around here, and that's how most people look at us."
Originally born in Muskegon, David settled in Belleville in 1975 and has been here since. David received his education at Worsham College of Mortuary Science in Chicago, where he graduated in 1974. He had received an associate's degree in pre-mortuary science three years earlier.
David was licensed as a funeral director in Michigan in 1974 and in Illinois in 1975.
In Muskegon, David says he was searching for a career path while in high school and one day received, what ended up being, a life-shaping tip from his father.
"My dad knew a fella who worked at a funeral home, and at that time all funeral homes had ambulance service. So I figured that I had two choices - if I didn't like one, then I would do the other," he says.
After gaining some experience at the home in Muskegon, and then receiving the accreditations and degrees required, David arrived in Belleville in 1975 and the rest, as they say, is history.
The Brown family is active in a number of community events and organizations. David is a four-time director of the Belleville Area Chamber of Commerce, a member of Hospice of Washtenaw Spiritual and Bereavement Committee, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Oakwood Hospital Beyer Center Foundation and is the current president of the Belleville Rotary Club's Charles B. Cozadd Foundation.
He also is a member of the Central Business Community, Belleville Rotary, Moose Lodge, Van Buren Eagles and a former member of the Downtown Development Authority.
The funeral home was instrumental in bringing the Angel of Hope ceremony to town, an event that allows area residents to grieve over the recent loss of a loved one. They also are involved in the Thunder Roll Veteran's Memorial Day Celebration and the annual Tree of Remembrance ceremony on Dec. 1.
After 32 years living, sleeping and breathing in the Belleville community, Shelly says that she still loves the people and places that make this community great.
"We love it here," Shelly says. "I went away to college and came right back. I like the loyalty and camaraderie and the small community here Everybody knows you and it's comforting to have that around here."
The third-shifters
While David forged his career in mortuary science and funeral home services, it was daughter Shelly who fell into the profession.
After graduating from Adrian College with a bachelor's degree in business, Shelly was employed by Enterprise Rent-A-Car for several years but ran into problems with corporate management.
At that time, father David needed a secretary at the funeral home for about 20 hours a week.
Shelly filled in and interviewed for other jobs, but all that changed with a chance encounter with a grieving family.
"I had a family walk in and they didn't have an appointment. I tried to tell them that nobody was here to talk to them, but they just said, 'Well, you're here. Why don't you ask us the questions?'" Shelly remembers.
"I said that I just type this stuff up and I don't know the prices, or anything else - I didn't know what I was doing but they pleaded with me, saying, "Just help us.'"
In the end, Shelly was able to walk the family through the steps of funeral arrangement. She says they were very appreciative and at that moment she knew where she was headed.
"They told me, "You found your calling.' And I was just like, "I did?' So after that, I sat down and talked with my dad and asked what would I have to do, what would the journey be? We decided that this was something that I definitely wanted to do," Shelly says.
To become a licensed funeral director, Shelly went back to school and picked up the required sciences in addition to a year of mortuary school.
With the business degree already in hand, David says his daughter has an advantage over him. Shelly has worked alongside David for seven years and has been a licensed director for five.
"She's smarter than I am," David says.
The Brown's other daughter, Amy, is a 36-year-old kindergarten teacher at Tyler Elementary.
While Shelly has been heavily involved in the family business for more than several years, Amy is no stranger to working at the funeral home as the sisters were once known as the "third shifters."
When Shelly and Amy were about eight and 12, respectively, they were unofficially hired as the funeral home's cleaning crew after regular staff had left the building around 9 p.m. as the family lived in the apartment upstairs.
"These girls were the third shifters," David says. "I called them down about 9 p.m. every night to clean the toilets and do the routine maintenance and cleaning around the home, when nobody was there."
Shelly says that she has almost literally, worked at the home her whole life and it started with her experience as a third-shifter.
"(Staff) would work in the morning and then another group would work in the afternoons and evening and then went everybody cleared out, (David) would open the door up to the apartments and holler, 'Third shift!'
"And that meant it was time for us to come down and clean," Shelly says.
Martha says the experience was good for their growing daughters.
"They got paid, and we knew it was done right," she says.
Even though David, Martha and Shelly have little spare time - the funeral home employs only 18 to 20 staff, leaving the Brown family to do a lot of the work - they all have hobbies and outside interests that provide an escape away from work.
While Shelly and Martha agree that they love the outdoors - Martha says she is looking forward to getting out on the Lake this summer - David, despite his humble and incredibly warm nature, is a world-traveled hunter.
He says that he has been almost everywhere to hunt game except Alaska, because it's too expensive, and Africa, because hunters cant bring back their meat.
"I don't hunt anything if I cant bring it back and eat it," David says. "I don't hunt just for the kill."
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