Friends and family gathered to celebrate Claudia Reeves last Friday in Maysville as she marked her retirement from Winans Funeral Home, where she has worked as office manager for more than 39 years.
Reeves started at the family- owned business in the early 1980s, working first for John and Bobby Lou Williams, and then later for their son John Winans Williams and his wife Theresa, who purchased the funeral home in 2015.
Initially hired to serve as secretary half a day, twice a week, Reeves said the job quickly turned into a fulltime office manager position.
In those early days of her employment, the funeral home also operated the town’s ambulance and Reeves said she helped with that as well, becoming licensed to work as an EMT on the ambulance in 1983.
“It was very busy. You know, you run the funeral home, and then you’ve got an ambulance call, or there’s a fire and you have to go blow the fire whistle – ‘cause it was in their house,” Reeves said. “Things were a lot different back then.”
The funeral home gave up the ambulance service in the mid-1990s, but Reeves continued to serve as office manager.
In her time with the funeral home, Reeves said she has shared countless meals, vacations, heartbreaks, and triumphs with those around her.
“I’ve made a lot of memories with the people I work with,” Reeves said.
When asked if she has a favorite memory of her time working for the funeral home, she thinks for a moment, then with a twinkle in her eye counters with, “What about the worst memory?”
That would be December 19, 2015, the day the funeral home burned.
Reeves was in Oklahoma City with Bobby Lou and John Williams when the fire broke out.
“We’d called John and he said it was just a little fire in the library and it had been put out everything was fine,” Reeves said.
It was a message she repeated to friend and News Star employee Judy Baker when she called shortly after.
“She said, ‘No, it’s not, Claudia.’ And so, she sends me a picture of this total engulfment in the front,” Reeves said. “We had made it probably about halfway back, and I just started crying. Bobby Lou and Johnny Bob, they said, ‘It’s okay. You know, we can rebuild,’ and all this stuff. I said, ‘It’s not that it’s that. I had my Christmas money in my drawer!’” Reeves said she had $1,800 in cash – money she’d been saving for Christmas – in a file in her desk drawer when the fire broke out. The funeral home was a total loss, but Reeves was able to locate and salvage the cash from her desk drawer. The edges had been singed, but the bills were intact.
“The insurance man, he took it all and laid it out on the shrubbery and took pictures of it, and then he told me I could take it to the bank.”
The bank had to call the Federal Reserve but was able to replace the money by that afternoon and Christmas was saved.
The funeral home was rebuilt, too, though the process took about three years.
In the interim they held viewings and funerals in a temporary building a couple of blocks away.
Reeves said everyone in the community and surrounding areas pulled together to make the situation work.
“We had several funeral directors reach out and say, ‘What can we do? How can we help you?’” Reeves said.
She said that sense of community and looking out for one another is one of the things that she values most about the time she has spent working for Winans Funeral Home.
“I want to say, this job has really been a ministry to me,” Reeves said.
She explains when someone loses a loved one, they often need support, love and tenderness and working at the funeral home has given her an opportunity to minister to others by providing that to people.
“I feel like since we are Christians that’s a need that God’s looking to us to fulfill. And this has been a fulfilling job,” said Reeves, who adds she’s looking forward to taking some time for herself and her family now that she’s retiring.
“I’ve made lifetime friends. Not only in the people I worked for but also the people we have had services for over the years,” Reeves said. “It’s been a good experience.”
