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Forget multiple locations. Forget large, full-time staffs. Heck, even forget paid advertising.
"My big thing is service," declared Gayle Graham, owner of W.T. Shumake & Daughters Funeral Home on Newburg Road.
Graham believes the emotional instincts of her gender embrace caring.
"We (women) want that support group," she said.
Graham, 45, preacher's daughter and second-generation funeral director and embalmer, followed in the family footsteps of her mother, Doris Shumake, who was licensed in both areas in the 1970s.
Her father, the Rev. William Shumake, has been pastor of Community Missionary Baptist Church, on nearby Indian Trail, for 42 years. He is 74.
After graduating from Thomas Jefferson High School, now a middle school, in the Newburg area, Graham earned a business degree at the University of Kentucky.
Starting out in retail management
In the late '70s, she was in a management program for a large discount store chain when she "got sidetracked" and married Greg Graham.
Then a supervisor clued her into the conventional "wisdom" of the day: The wife was expected to follow her husband's career, not the other way around.
The subtle message that Graham said she heard. As that she might not want to stay in the management program because she wouldn't be able to uproot her family and climb the corporate ladder as easily as a man could.
Graham said that when she received that advice," she decided to leave the company.
"I quit and decided to go to morticians school," she said. Graham earned her licenses in 1984, before starting to work at Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. in the mid-'80s. When she left Brown & Williamson in 1998, she was a supervisor for customer service.
While at Brown & Williamson, Graham helped from time to time at her parents' funeral home, Shumake Funeral Home. The elder Shumakes decided to start the funeral home in 1981, constructing a new building, to fill a need for a funeral home catering mainly to African-American families...