Funeral home holds on to its legacy

Amityville parlor reopens, keeping ties to past owners, African-American community activists

BY CARRIE MASON-DRAFFEN | Newsday Staff Writer

January 16, 2007

Joseph A. Slinger, owner of Joseph A. Slinger-Hasgill Funeral Services Inc. in Amityville, has renovated the home and hopes to emulate the Hasgills, who ran it for decades until 2004. (Newsday / Dick Yarwood / October 14, 2006)

Joseph A. Slinger may have a new business, but he's pinning his hopes on tradition.

He has bought and renovated Hasgill Funeral Home, a fixture in Amityville for more than 50 years.

The home was closely identified with its original owners, Richard and Helen Hasgill, not only because of its name but because of their close ties to the African-American community.

In the 1960s, Helen Hasgill hosted Saturday etiquette classes for children in a room over the funeral home, said Eugene A. Burnett, a retired Suffolk County police sergeant who lived in Amityville for 10 years.

"There's a whole generation of adults that participated in that program," he said.

Richard Hasgill also was active in community affairs. He led successful boycotts to protest school segregation in Amityville, according to his 1979 obituary in Newsday. He served as president of the Central Long Island chapter of the NAACP when it was considered the most powerful branch on Long Island.

"They were leaders," said Burnett, who said he still feels loyalty toward Hasgill Funeral Home. "That's where I am going to finally lay my head out of respect for them."

Loyalty and word of mouth are coins of the realm in the funeral industry, which is still dominated by small operations. Despite the high-profile consolidations of the past few years, 89 percent of the country's estimated 21,000 funeral homes remain family-owned, versus 11 percent in corporate ownership, according to the National Funeral Directors Association in Brookfield, Wis.

African-American funeral homes account for 4,500 of that total, according to the National Funeral Directors & Morticians Association in Decatur, Ga. Two of Amityville's three funeral homes, including Slinger's, cater to African-Americans.

Slinger, 36, who has lived in Amityville since he was 5, hopes to emulate the Hasgills' community links.

Building on tradition, he has incorporated the Hasgill name with his own and now calls the home Joseph A. Slinger-Hasgill Funeral Services Inc.

In October, he held an open house to give the community a look at the refurbished two-story building, which now sports a cream-colored stucco finish. It was the first time the building, which sits on Sunrise Highway, was open to the public since it was heavily damaged by fire two years ago, when the Hasgills still owned it. A grand opening scheduled for Oct. 21 was abruptly canceled after an improperly installed plumbing valve broke, flooding the basement and part of the chapel, Slinger said. After repairs, the parlor opened in late November.

One of the neighbors at October's open house was Ellen Anderson Holliday, who grew up in Amityville and still lives a block from the funeral home. In 1964, when she was 15, she attended Helen Hasgill's "charm school" sessions. For a year she and others were dazzled by the African-American professionals who taught them how to present themselves in public, and they attended the coming-out party held afterward.

"They really worked hard to help us become developed," Anderson Holliday said.

The Hasgills handled the burial of her maternal grandparents, an uncle, a cousin and her daughter, who died at 14 in 2000. She is pleased with how Slinger has restored the home.

In a sense, Slinger has come full circle with the Hasgill family. When he was looking for a career, family friends urged him to try the mortuary business and to check out the Hasgills. After working with them a few months in the early 1990s, he enrolled in a mortuary science program at Nassau Community College. He graduated in 1995.

Following an internship at a Hempstead funeral home, he freelanced for the Hasgills and other homes. After the Hasgills' daughter, Edwina, who ran the home, died, Helen Hasgill, who now lives in Florida, sold Slinger the business in 2004.

Now Slinger runs the funeral home where he got his start.

"It feels good that I can be here and serve the community that I grew up in," he said.