JW Embser & Sons Funeral Home and Sedan Ambulance Service.

       In about 2003, I went to Embser's Funeral Home with a bit of nervousness. The last time I had gone it was to preplan a funeral but this time it was looking for a story. Still, walking through those doors brings back memories of every time I entered the building. 
     This visit was interesting and made me feel better about every funeral ahead of me. Did you know that it was once Embser's Funeral Home and Ambulance Service?  They had an ambulance but also could hook up sirens and lights to the hearse if they needed to use that.  They drove people from accidents to the hospital and transferred patients from Jones to Buffalo or Rochester.
       At the time, Jones was the Jones Homestead, a Victorian house near the current site.  There was a dumbwaiter in the building that could be raised to the level of the ambulance/hearse making it easier to get people out of the vehicle.  Sometimes people called for a ride just because it was an available transportation from out of the hills into town.

WELLSVILLE, NY:  As a child growing up in Buffalo, I saw sleek, station wagons speed by, chasing cars to the side of the road with their flashing lights and screaming sirens. These wagons had a special function, not for soccer moms or grocery delivery but for medical purposes, they were the ambulances of the 1950s and ‘60s. Painted in varied designs and colors to indicate their operators, they were owned and operated by hospitals in Buffalo. At that same time, in small towns like Wellsville, funeral homes met that need. In Wellsville, one operator was JW Embser & Sons Funeral Home and Sedan Ambulance Service.
     Why connect a funeral home and an ambulance service? Well, both had vehicles that could accommodate a person needing to lie down in the back.

        John Embser remembers riding along with his dad in their ambulance. For John, those rides had all the drama a kid could want with the pulsing red light on the roof and the wailing siren behind the grill. John especially remembers one trip to Scio to take an eight-year-old boy to the hospital. John, about the same age, sat in the back with the boy to hold a cloth against his bleeding forehead. This was all before the days of EMTs, biohazard fears or even seat belts.
            David Gardner, John’s uncle, remembers the ambulance days differently. His memories are of the responsibility of transporting injured or ill people at all times of the day and night. He said that sometimes they’d sit down to eat dinner and the phone would ring and someone would call out, “Well, there goes Dad again.”
            The passengers in David Gardner’s ambulance went to an early version of the Jones Memorial Hospital. While most people went to Jones in a private car, people without cars or those with serious illness or injury would call Embser’s for transportation. 
            These trips were tough work when people needed to be carried down steep, narrow stairs on a stretcher. Generally, David Gardner would call someone to ride along and help. Often it was a car mechanic interested in earning a few extra dollars. Sometimes it was a friend willing to get up at two in the morning and drive across the county to help carry a heavy person.
            Occasionally the drive was a scheduled event, bringing someone to Buffalo or Rochester but more often it was a sudden event. It was meant to be discontinued when actually ambulances available through the fire department or through an ambulance service but when older customers called Emser’s to ask for a ride to an appointment with a specialist, they were never turned down. Courtesy has always been a pillar of the Embser family.
            The Embser Funeral Home and Sedan Ambulance Service grew from a business started in 1913 when JW Embser left his job at Rauber’s Furniture and Undertaking to begin his own funeral service. At the time, furniture builders supplemented their income with the construction of caskets. They also had the extra chairs one would need during a wake. The connection between funeral service and furniture was common for a long while. An Allegany County Directory from 1905 shows 18 funeral homes with 12 of them also listed as furniture stores.
     JW’s first hearse was drawn by horses, flanked by lanterns with stylish drapes over the side windows, and filled with all that was needed.  JW had learned embalming as he worked for his employer. People generally died of illness or accident, usually at home. Maybe a doctor would be there, maybe not. The family would call the undertaker and he would “under take” the arrangements for home, church and cemetery.
     In the bedroom, the body would be washed and prepared. A gravity feed system would drain the body and siphon the embalming fluid (a formaldehyde solution to control moisture and, one must say, odor) into the body. The fluids removed from the body would be carried by bucket to the privy for disposal. Afterward, the deceased would be washed and dressed.
     The next big task was to prepare the parlor. JW had a service wagon in addition to his hearse. The service wagon carried drapes for covering the windows, satchels with a crucifix and candles, and a special table to hold the casket. Chairs were carried in the service wagon, packed in canvas, six to a bag. When the room was properly arranged with all in place, the mourners would arrive.
     A religious service was generally carried out at home but often there was a second service in a church. The horse-drawn hearse transported the body there and, while the clergy comforted the mourners, JW would go to the cemetery and erect a tent over the hole, paying $3 to the hole diggers. JW arranged chairs there, too, and installed the apparatus for lowering the coffin.    
     Afterwards, JW returned to the home to remove the service table, chairs and drapes, reclaim things from the cemetery and tackle the paper work of death.  All of his efforts brought him $20.
     The first service performed by J.W. was for an infant, Pearl Van Kuran. Pearl lived from August 26 to September 6, 1913 and was buried at York’s Corners. Paging through the old book shows that business was slow at first but by 1917, the influenza epidemic had his funeral service bustling. Gravediggers were earning $13 and casket makers asked for $100.
     Eventually, the horse-drawn wagon and hearse went into long-term storage and JW purchased a new, gasoline engine hearse. This hearse maintained some of the style elements of the old horse-drawn buggy with faux pillars along the side windows and the same stylish curtains over side windows.
The new hearse strained the business financially because, while a wagon could be traded for another wagon, it wasn’t something that the automobile dealer was interested in.
     The second generation of Embsers in the business, brothers Walter and Richard, worked in a different world. They learned their trade through formal classes as well as experience. Walter and Richard expanded the operation by introducing the sedan ambulance service.
David Gardner ushered in the third generation after he earned certification as a funeral home director, through formal education  in 1962 and John Embser joined later.
     Generation four, Walter Gardner, earned one degree at SUNY Canton and another at SUNY in Utica. Canton’s program offers a Bachelor of Technology degree in Health Services Management:  Mortuary Science. The program, including a full year of internship, shares several courses with nursing students so that funeral home directors are now more knowledgeable about anatomy than ambulance drivers were a generation ago.
     Earning a degree isn’t the end of it, either. Funeral directors must participate in continuing education seminars and renew their licenses every two years. They develop and maintain proficiency in the embalming process as well as with aspects of business, rules and laws.
     alking with multiple generations of practitioners makes it easy to see how the profession has changed. The embalming and the ceremonies have moved from the home of the deceased to the funeral parlor. The caskets are no longer standard items but are available in virtually unlimited materials, designs, colors and themes. The cost has changed too. Rather than having one flat fee, there are itemized charges for each service, many of which simply pass over the funeral director’s desk. For example, the charge for opening a grave goes directly to another agency. The job, once costing $3, now fetches $350.
            A major change seems to be the option to preplan a funeral. The planning can be done at any time and with any amount of detail. The advantage is that a person can make their wishes known, state their preferences, and remove stressful decision making for family members. All of this can be done leisurely, without the huge, emotional impact of death.
            The whole funeral scenario is serious business but checking some of the coffin styles offered over the Internet shows that some people put creativity into the situation. One website offers a casket painted to look like a set of golf clubs.  Others were painted with sport or religious themes. There are standard models in a wide range of colors. I also found a not-so-standard model that comes outfitted with shelves. It can be used as a bookcase until needed as a coffin. The shelves come out and a liner with pillow pops in.
         Of course, for those who choose cremation, there is a world of urns including those privately made by potters or other artisans who make the item for a specific person.

     The thing that seems to have remained the same in this business over the years is the emotional impact of dealing so regularly with death. All of these funeral agents feel that it is hardest to work with the families and bodies of children. Some of the preparations that they have made haunt them. Sometimes one of them, overcome by emotions, has had to call for help. At other times, dealing with a long-time friend, they feel that their work is an act of kindness that gives them comfort as they work as carefully and respectfully as they can.
     At the time of this essay, Ember’s was nearing their 90^th year of operation. It is on West State Street in what was once the home of JW and Agnes Embser. Their hours are simply any time you need them. them.  
 
      For more on the history of the Jones Memorial Hospital: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/MediaLibraries/URMCMedia/jones-memorial/services/images/JMH-History-booklet_1.pdf
      For more on the creation of the modern paramedic program listen here: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-222-the-paramedics-6-8-2023

The Little Gallery's New Space

WELLSVILLE: The Little Gallery is in a new place but the mission is the same, support for the Hart Comfort House in Wellsville. Barb Graves, owner of LaGra Salon and DaySpa started the Little Gallery in November 2015 in order to help a friend. Carol Riggs had a small shop in Cuba but she took off a month to have surgery. The month turned into a year because the surgery turned into a major struggle taking so much time that the business fell away from Riggs but her inventory remained.

                Barb Graves knew, at the time, that the florist in her building was moving to a new location so she had the idea to offer that space in friendship but needed more to fill the area. She asked a member of Allegany Artisans for help and so encouraged, moved forward. The florist was out on a Saturday and the Little Gallery opened on Monday, nameless but determined to work out the details.

                Formally, it is The Little Gallery Arts and Antiques and now it has a front row presence in the LaGra building. You still need to enter through LaGra but instead of walking through the salon, just pass the desk and turn right. The doorway there once led to Curves then became a pop up shop but now it’s The Little Gallery, Wellsville’s giving place for Christmas.

                For all 3 years of this enterprise, Graves has asked for nothing from those selling in her store. She covers the total cost of the area, the utilities and advertising and asks only that a portion of each sale to be donated to the Hart Comfort House.  If you do some of your Christmas shopping there, you can make the total donations made by vendors pass $4000 by the end of this year.

                Rather than listing vendors by name, let me say that you know many of them as Allegany Artisans, Wellsville Art Association members or from their work with the Allegany Arts Association. You’ll find all the names at the store so let’s focus on items. For your home or to gift there are hand-woven kitchen towels, hand sewn dolls or table runners, fabric bowls or wall hangings and handmade pottery and hand painted glassware.  

                Personal adornments include fabric purses and leggings or hand-woven scarves, hand assembled jewelry as well as totally handcrafted upcycled jewelry or the last of a group of handmade plastic pins (you’ve smiled when noticing them on people).  There are ornate, fabric purses and a small collection of music boxes. On the walls are framed photographs and original watercolors or oils or prints of other original paintings or maybe a few things handcrafted anonymously ages ago.

                A beekeeper brings in honey and related products and there is another person who makes soaps and lotions and balms. What else? Antiques. There are some people who have bought and sold antiques but others who have bought and bought now in need of emptying their homes so offer antiques from cast bronze to hand painted china or toys and hand-blown glass.  Occasionally there is furniture and right now there is a lamp with a handcrafted shade and a large cupboard as well as some smaller wooden items.

                There are also items that were purchased for Carol Riggs’ little store in Cuba, the inventory that started the whole idea. The merchandise range is wide and worth a look. The Little Gallery is only open when LaGra Salon is open and that is Tuesday through Saturday opening at 9 am but sometimes sooner. The shop is open till 8 on Thursday but only till 4 on Saturday and till 5 on other days.

                Are you wondering about what will happen to the space behind the salon? Barb Graves, a woman of ideas, will be doing some work to make a large and comfortable gathering area so that wedding parties can eat breakfast and talk as they all get hair and makeup done on that special day.

                Reach LaGra Salon at 585-59301321 or go in person to 21 East State Street in Wellsville. You might check www.lovelagra.com . The Little Gallery is present on the website or a facebook.com/ TheLittleGalleryArtsandAntiques.

                Shop Small. Shop Local. Shop to support The Hart Comfort House.

Earrings by Elaine Hardman

Upcycled at StoneFlowerPottery

Our first upcycled object was an old fire extinguisher. It became a lamp because we had neither money nor lamp. That was in 1974 and we’ve reused, reworked, rebuilt, redesigned, repurposed hundreds of objects since then. 

Generally, I enter the house at the back door where a seasonal decoration made of aluminum cans hangs on the door. This month it’s still the Valentines hearth.

Inside is a door we carried home from someone’s trash pile. The glass was broken but it’s the door to our basement so Rick put a wooden backing in and I made a tile sunflower to fill the space.

The old wooden ironing board next to the door was perfectly reworked to be our house gnome. Someone did a marvelous job creating her. 

We hang hats & jackets on a coat rack made from part of our upright piano and some vintage hooks. Above the rack is a mirror from discarded vanity. We took off the side wings to make it fit. On the wall opposite is what Rick calls my mess and I call my international bell and brush collection.

 I think of them as being upcycled because they were all meant for work, not for décor. There’s a scrub brush that I bought in China. Nobody ever meant to that to be admired. It’s not a work of art but of utility still, it’s no Brillo pad and so interested me. In my mind is an image of the. Another brush from China is a huge calligraphy brush. It’s likely that was meant to be admired and maybe treasured.

 We’ve a wooden Thai sheep bell and some wonderful mental donkey bells from Peru. They are all handcrafted and marvelous, at least to me.

 There’s a small typewriter cleaning brush. Are you old enough to remember typewriters? The keys would get clogged with dust and goo from the ribbons (remember ribbons?) and they needed to be cleaned to make the images sharp again. I wonder if clogged keys made tracing typewriters difficult for police or if that ever mattered.

Making the Pottery Studio more inviting

The floor was the biggest problem with lumps and holes and very rough patches that were impossible to mop or sweep. Floor leveler helped to even it out after we patched the holes with a few bags of concrete. Rick and I did this before Jay came to help us.







The walls were stone at the start.









Jay and Rick parged the walls to make them more even. Jay also filled in several large holes in the walls between the basement rooms. Rick has been avoiding this for several years.











Then they were painted. None of these were fast or easy steps. Notice, the clock spontaneously started working again after the wall was painted. Nice.














Rick patching the lumpy wall over the work bench.










Rick Painting the wall.







There are some leaf stamps on the dungeon door to dress it up. It's already dusty again from the concrete work going on.








The floor is coated in an epoxy paint that has to sit to get ready for 30 minutes and then allows a 2 1/2 hour work period followed by a 12 hour drying period. We painted the floor in 2 sessions and did every other stair each time. It was important to remember which stair to walk on.





The walls look nice after they are repaired and painted. Not gorgeous, but nice.










This is the basement phone when clean.












These are the storage and ware shelves. The 2x4 supports were never painted until now.






The shelves will stay a bit tidy for a while.


















The basement stairs are much more inviting now with the epoxy paint. The paint chips keep it from getting too slippery.







This cupboard was originally in our kitchen. It now holds kiln shelves on the right and posts in the drawers. The top is our old kitchen counter that was replaced with Corrian a few years ago. Another chunk of that counter is an extension in the table saw.



The new shelves are from Linens N Things. Sad to see them go but these are nice strong and clean shelves.






This small collection of junk may inspire me or I may never use them.




























Diagram of location of glazes and raw materials.

Dumpster Diving

Story Jar April 2 2008

It was called garbage picking when I was a kid, then dumpster diving and now the Freegan movement. It’s the fine art of giving rebirth to discarded objects. Karrie, an artist, says that people should look at nearly all trash as opportunity. Our house is full of great opportunities.

My dumpster diving days began when I moved into my first apartment in Greene, New York. All that I owned fit into a Volkswagen bug and this was an unfurnished apartment so when I saw an abandoned, maple drop-leap table nestled between the trash cans I gleefully dragged it upstairs to my empty kitchen. Not long after, I discovered a brass floor lamp in the same place. With a new wire threaded through and a lampshade added, it became a treasure. Now antiques, both are in Emilie’s Boston apartment.

The next major treasure was found in Binghamton in the late 70’s. I was jogging past a huge carriage wheel placed near the curb. It was clearly garbage with two rotted spokes but it was a "treasure" nonetheless. I rushed home and dragged Rick to our station wagon. Grumbling, he came along and found that the wheel was larger than the car, a Chevy Vega. The only way to get it home was to roll it.

Inconveniently, we lived at the top of a steep hill. It was so steep that on an icy winter day, Rick stepped into the road to put the garbage at our curb, slipped and flanked by bags of garbage, slid down the hill past about ten houses before he could stop.

Rick considered the wheel unworthy of further attention but I started rolling it. In a short distance, it became clear that I was a lousy wheel roller. Thankfully, Rick felt sorry for me and, grumbling a little more, took over the rolling while I drove the car. I cheered him on. He growled.

That wheel came with us to Alfred and again to Wellsville (with additional growling). Jay dressed up in Daddy's hat and stood in front of it once for a photo before several more spokes finally gave way to rot and we put it at the curb. In just a few minutes someone else began rolling that wheel away to their house.





My dresser was once trash. The mirror was gone and a few pieces were broken. We bought it at an auction with few people bidding in competition. They didn't see potential the way we did. With the discarded wings from an old vanity making a frame for a new mirror and a few other pieces of wood it has provided decades of service.






Rick once trashed a narrow, paneled door but I pulled it back into the garage and he eventually built a wonderful blue cupboard around it. Sometimes, the reflection of the cupboard can be caught our half-round window.




Once part of the Wellsville High School, it now is part of our kitchen along with some discarded oak cabinets from Andover School. Andover also gave us a glass lamp found resting on a pile of old light bulbs and Alfred State College "sold" oak book cases for $5 - not far from a dumpster price. Things made of oak, beveled glass or brass just aren’t meant to be garbage.















I rescued a 1972 dress model with wheeled cast-iron feet, stamped metal arm and neck plates and a fancy cast-iron finial. Discarded by the girls moving out of Jay’s Cherry Street apartment, it now stands in our living room in an outfit made (and discarded) by members of Thailand’s Karen Tribe. Leaning against the wall are some fly fishing poles that Jay rescued for us from another Philly apartment. You just can’t find stuff like that in a store.

The only time Rick gives any discarded stuff a glance is when he notices my pottery. Once he took an enormous but perfectly ugly bowl out of our trash and shipped it to a gallery near Chautauqua where it sold for over $200 – a record. I’m still astounded.




photos of other rescued items are at flickr

Story Jar - Rummage Sales

The Story Jar Published July 4, 2007 in the Patriot and Free Press
copyright Elaine Hardman

One could skip the length of our attic today. Two weeks ago there was a maze of suitcases, boxes, a large train board, a dozen pair of skis and some striking orange ski boots that stopped all progress from door to window. In the intervening time, I’ve had a rummage sale.

My first involvement in a rummage sale was on Willets Avenue in Belmont at Rain’s house circa 1984. Rain invited people to bring things to her house, cover the lawn and driveway with merchandise and think marketing. Prior to the invitation I’d shopped at flea markets but this was different - a glorious experience. People took away things I no longer needed or wanted leaving me with money and space. It was like meeting someone and knowing we’d be friends for life.
Charlie called it

The Neighborhood Exchange because during the “set up” on Friday, we’d each find things we liked – wanted – NEEDED and we traded this for that gobbling up within our own group the best of the best. Before we put up the “open” sign, it was a success though the sales were great too. The purchases people were inspired to make and the amount of money one can gain by collecting quarters are both grand.

During the sale, we talked about marketing and display. We changed things constantly hanging a choice shirt in a tree or moving a large item toward the road to catch a driver’s eye. Visible things help bring shoppers and shoppers bring more shoppers most of whom leave with good stuff, stuff we would never move again.

Over the years Emilie and Jay had lemonade stands and learned to choose what
to sell and how to price. Counting money was no mere math exercise. It was serious work, well-rewarded. More than once, they earned their new school clothes by working at the rummage sale. The deal was that they could buy anything they wanted but they only had the money in their envelopes. The money was strewn throughout the Galleria Mall. Those were the best school-shopping years.

A few rummage sale items stand out among the thousands. One year we had about a dozen extra doors to sell then there was a Kohler sink purchased for $200 and rejected by every rummage attendee. It stayed in Rain’s garage for a couple of years and was finally dragged to the solid waste transfer station to begin its 100 year exercise in decomposition on county land.

I remember a beautiful wool skirt offered by Gail. I tried it on thinking it looked big enough for me though I clearly had 20 pounds on Gail’s well-exercised frame. A woman scooped it up as soon as I returned it to the table. “Do you think it will fit me?” she asked holding it at her waist with inches of hip shouting on each side of the skirt.
“It’s too small for me. Why don’t you try it on?” I suggested.
“No,” she said, “It’ll fit.”
Maybe none of us can see ourselves well.

There were years when we had bets about what would be the first item sold or which item would make someone the happiest. Sometimes Pat would recite over and over, "Someone has to buy that couch."

Once Rick took a load of trash to the dump before a sale started but this stack of plastic lawn chairs didn’t fit in the truck. He left them near the porch planning on a second garbage run but by the time he returned, I had given them to someone for their camp.

A few years ago a man paid for a set of maple chairs but he had to go home for his truck. He left the money and the chairs and never came back. The chairs waited for him on the porch for a month or more and then, well, what could I do? I sold them again. Now if someone can’t take a purchase with them, I keep their phone number or sometimes we deliver.

Once I offered a dresser we had purchased but never moved past the clean-it-up location in our garage. I priced it low so it would sell. People looked, thought, measured and offered half the money. I took a name and number as a back-up deal but near the end of the sale I moved boldly and raised the price to what we paid. The first man down the driveway wrote a check for the full amount.

When I retired I filled the van time after time to empty the classroom of my personal items - tables, chairs, a microwave, a small refrigerator, lots of games and puzzles and more books than even I could believe. It was the year that Emilie earned her Master’s from Brandeis but she didn’t want an audience at graduation. She wanted us to celebrate instead by being in the audience at Cirque du Soleil. The rummage sale turned books into cash for our family trip to Cirque in New York.

“Your rummage sales are legend,” Judy told me. I’m not sure what that means but I’m sure that we still have extra stuff in the garage and there are 2 closets in need of cleaning. Are you interested in a Singer treadle machine or an HO railroad board with tracks, switches and power supply? Where else could you find a blue shark’s skin suit from the 60s? Meet me near under the apple tree and we’ll make a deal.