Edit: The Last Harmon Standing

Headline *

Subtitle / Deck

Author Name *

Author Title

Category

Read Time (min)

Featured Image

Excerpt

Story Body *

Use ## for section headings · Use ## for pull quotes · Use ![alt](url) for inline images with captions

The embalming room smells like formaldehyde and dish soap and something underneath both that you stop noticing after a while, Ray Harmon says, or maybe you just decide you have. It is 7:15 on a Thursday morning in late November, and the temperature outside is eleven degrees and dropping, a flat gray sky pressing down over the Pratt County courthouse four blocks north. Ray is in his office, which is really a converted parlor with wood floors and a window that looks out onto Fourth Street, reviewing a death certificate that came in wrong from the county clerk. He catches it before the family does. He almost always does. This is most of the job — not the grief, not the ceremony, but the thousand quiet administrative catches that keep a family from finding out at the worst possible moment that someone filed the wrong middle name.

He has been doing this for twenty-three years. His father Harold did it for thirty-one years before that. His grandfather Eldon did it for thirty-eight years before that. His great-grandfather Vernon Harmon — who came back from France in 1919 with shrapnel still lodged near his left hip and a calm that his family would later describe as the war's only useful gift to him — opened the original location on Main Street in 1922 with a borrowed $400 and a hand-painted sign. The sign is still there, behind glass in the entryway. The wood has gone the color of strong tea.

## What Vernon Started

Vernon Harmon was not a sentimental man, by all accounts. He was a carpenter before the war and a mortician after it, and the transition made a certain logical sense to him — both trades required patience with materials that did not cooperate, and both required you to set aside whatever you were feeling and focus on the thing that needed to be done. He took a correspondence course in embalming. He rented a narrow building two doors down from the hardware store. He charged $28 for a basic burial in 1922, which was roughly what a week's wages looked like for a field hand, and he never charged more than a family could pay. That last part was less policy than character, and it has remained in the business for a hundred years through various expressions — a sliding scale here, a deferred payment there, a bill that was never sent at all when the family had nothing.

Ray talks about Vernon with a kind of careful respect, the way you talk about someone you only know through photographs and stories repeated enough times to feel like memory. "He never talked about the war," Ray says. "My grandfather said he mentioned it once, in 1944, when Eldon was shipping out. That was it." What Vernon did do, apparently, was work. He was in the building six days a week and available the seventh. He lived upstairs for the first eleven years, until he had saved enough to buy the house on Elm Street where the Harmon family would live for the next four decades.

Eldon took over in 1958 when Vernon's heart gave out at sixty-nine. Eldon had grown up in the business the way farm kids grow up around equipment — it was simply part of the landscape, nothing to be precious about. He ran it through the sixties and seventies and handed it to Harold in 1979. Harold, who was quieter even than his father, expanded to a second location in Stafford in 1971, twenty-five miles southeast on Highway 61, because the Stafford funeral home had closed and there was no one else. That was Harold's way of explaining it: there was no one else. Not a market opportunity. Not a growth strategy. No one else.

## The Son Who Almost Left

Ray was not supposed to come back. That is not quite how he says it, but it is what he means. He went to Kansas State in 1991 on a partial academic scholarship, studied business administration, and graduated in 1995 with a 3.7 GPA and an understanding that he had options his father had never really considered. He worked for three years at a distribution company in Salina, which was not exciting but was fine. In 1998, a corporate funeral home group — one of the mid-sized regional chains that SCI and its competitors were systematically acquiring throughout the late 1990s — offered him a management trainee position in Wichita at $42,000 a year, which was nearly double what Harold was paying himself out of the Pratt location. Ray took a week to think about it. He accepted the offer on a Tuesday. He was supposed to start the following month.

On a Saturday in between, Harold Harmon had a triple bypass at Wesley Medical Center in Wichita. He was fifty-eight years old. He survived, but the recovery was long, and the Pratt location had no one to run it. Ray drove down from Salina that Sunday evening with a single bag, thinking he would stay a month, maybe two, until Harold was back on his feet. He called Wichita and asked them to hold the offer. They held it for six weeks. He never called them back.

"I don't think I made a decision," Ray says. "I think I just stopped leaving." He pauses. Outside the window, a truck moves slowly down Fourth Street. The courthouse clock reads 7:45. "Harold never asked me to stay. He wouldn't have. That wasn't how he operated." Ray took his funeral director's license in 2001. Harold retired formally in 2007 and died of a stroke in 2014 at seventy-one. Ray was the one who handled the arrangements. He did not farm it out to the Stafford location or call anyone in from outside. He did it himself, the way his grandfather Eldon had done it for Vernon, the way Harold had done it for Eldon. It is the one job in the building you cannot ask anyone else to do for you.

## The Offer

Service Corporation International is the largest funeral home company in North America. It operates under the Dignity Memorial brand and owns roughly 1,500 funeral homes across the United States and Canada. It is publicly traded. It has a market capitalization in the billions. It has a process for acquiring independent funeral homes in smaller markets, and that process is thorough and professional and, by most accounts, not unkind. In 2019, a regional SCI representative contacted Ray through a broker. The offer was not disclosed publicly, but comparable rural acquisitions at the time were running between three and five times annual revenue. Ray's revenue that year was just under $1 million.

Ray sat with the offer for thirty days. He had good reasons to take it. The county population had declined by roughly 20 percent since 2000. Cremation rates in rural Kansas had climbed from 18 percent of cases in 2005 to 71 percent by 2019, compressing margins on every arrangement — a burial generates roughly three to four times the revenue of a cremation, and the shift had been fast and nearly total. Two funeral homes in neighboring counties — one in Kingman, one in Medicine Lodge — had already sold to SCI. He was fifty-seven years old. His wife Diane had put in twenty years alongside him. His daughter Maddie was in college, studying something unrelated to funeral service. There was a number on the table that would have let him stop.

"I kept thinking about what they'd do with the name," he says. Not with the building, not with the staff, not with the revenue stream — with the name. "Dignity Memorial is a fine brand. It's fine. But it's not from here. It doesn't mean anything here." He stops. "I know every family in this county. I have buried their people. Some of them, I've buried three generations of their people. They call me when someone dies at 2 in the morning because they know I'll pick up. That's not a product offering. I don't know what you call it." He said no in October 2019. The broker called back twice. Ray was polite both times.

## The Adaptation

Saying no to SCI did not solve the economics. The cremation shift was real and it was not reversing. Ray understood that resenting a change in consumer behavior was not a business strategy. He spent the winter of 2019 and 2020 — before the pandemic, which would complicate everything — building out a cremation facility on the existing property. He financed $180,000 through a Pratt County community bank he has worked with for fifteen years. The retort went in March 2020, three weeks before Kansas issued its first COVID restrictions. The timing was, depending on how you look at it, terrible or exactly right.

The pandemic years were unlike anything in the business's history, including what Eldon had described of the war years. Volume spiked. Staff got sick. The rules around gatherings changed week to week. Ray handled 162 arrangements in 2020, up from 118 the year before, with half his normal support. "You just work," he says. "You don't think about it while you're in it. You think about it later, and then you try not to." Diane, who manages all of the administrative and financial operations, worked seven days a week for most of that year. She does not discuss 2020 as something that happened to them so much as something that passed through them.

Coming out of it, Ray made two moves he had been thinking about for longer than the pandemic. He hired a licensed grief counselor — a woman named Teresa Ohlde, who works twelve hours a week out of a small room off the chapel — because he had watched for years as families left the building with the paperwork done and the ceremony scheduled and nothing else, no structure, no follow-up, nothing. "We were good at the logistics," he says. "We were not equipped for the rest of it." He also formalized partnerships with three hospice organizations operating in central Kansas, which now account for a meaningful portion of pre-arranged services and give families a point of contact before death, not after. Neither move has transformed the revenue model. Both have changed what it means to walk through the front door on Loomis Street.

## The Work Itself

On a Tuesday in late November, Ray is preparing for a graveside service at the Pratt Cemetery at 2 p.m. The deceased is a seventy-eight-year-old farmer named Gerald Bieker, who died at home on Sunday with his wife present. Gerald had pre-arranged his service eleven years ago, which is increasingly common — Ray now handles pre-arrangements for roughly 40 percent of his annual cases. The folder is thin and specific: no embalming, direct cremation, no viewing, a graveside gathering for immediate family and neighbors, a reading from Psalms chosen by Gerald himself, and a request that Ray say a few words if he is comfortable doing so.

Ray knew Gerald. He knew Gerald's father, whose arrangements Harold handled in 1998. He knew the farm, had driven past it on Highway 54 ten thousand times. At the graveside, in twelve-degree wind, he says a few words. He is not a formal speaker. He talks about Gerald's reputation for arriving first and leaving last at every harvest, about the year Gerald drove forty miles in a blizzard to pull a neighbor's truck out of a ditch and didn't mention it to anyone for six months. The family — a wife, two adult children, four grandchildren, a neighbor couple from the adjoining property — is quiet and small in the flat winter field. Nobody cries dramatically. In Pratt County, grief tends to present as stillness rather than sound.

Afterward, back at the building, Ray's apprentice Caleb is on the phone with a family in Stafford. A case came in overnight — an eighty-three-year-old woman, natural causes, nursing home, family requesting cremation. The second apprentice, Marcus, is reviewing paperwork at the front desk. Diane is in the back office on a call with their insurance carrier, sorting out a billing question that has been going on since September. This is a Tuesday. This is most of what the building looks like most of the time: four people working through administrative reality, with the ceremony when it comes.

## The Fifth Generation

Maddie Harmon is twenty-seven. She got her funeral director's license in September after completing the required apprenticeship hours, most of them logged at the Pratt location starting in 2022 when she moved back from Kansas City, where she had been working in healthcare administration. She had not planned to come back. This is, as far as Ray can tell, a family tradition.

"I didn't ask her to," he says, for the second time in two hours, about the second child who made this decision. "She showed up." He allows himself something that is not quite a smile but is in the neighborhood of one. Diane, across the room, does not look up from her screen. "She showed up," Diane confirms, without inflection.

Maddie works the floor — she does the intake calls, the arrangement conferences, the first conversations with families who are still in shock when they walk through the door. She is, Ray says, better at that part than he ever was. "She sits with people differently. She stays in it." He is not diminishing himself. He is describing a specific skill he has watched her demonstrate and is relieved she has. He is fifty-two. He is thinking, without sentimentality, about the shape of the transition ahead — not a crisis like Harold's bypass, ideally, but a deliberate handoff over several years. He has not told Maddie this in any formal way. He is not sure he needs to. The Harmons have historically communicated through proximity and consistency rather than conversation.

The question of whether the business will survive Maddie's generation is one Ray will discuss only in economic terms, as if the emotional stakes are self-evident and therefore don't require stating. The county will likely continue to shrink. Cremation rates will likely hold at or above 70 percent. SCI is still in the region. "If she wants it to survive, she'll figure out how to make it survive," he says. "That's all any of us did."

## What It Costs to Stay

Harmon & Sons took in $1.1 million in revenue in 2023 across 143 arrangements. That is a modest number for a business that has been operating for a hundred and two years. Ray pays himself and Diane a combined salary that he describes as comfortable and that people familiar with the Pratt market would describe as unremarkable. He has not raised his prices above the county median in twenty-three years of running the business, which is either a values statement or a competitive strategy or both — he does not distinguish between them. His two apprentices earn $38,000 and $41,000 respectively, plus benefits. His two part-time drivers earn hourly rates above minimum wage. Nobody is getting rich. Nobody is broke.

The mortgage on the cremation facility addition will be paid off in 2031. The Stafford location runs thin but covers itself. The grief counseling service does not generate revenue directly and is not intended to — it costs roughly $28,000 a year and Ray views it as a cost of operating with integrity, the same way Vernon viewed the bills he never sent. "There's always been a version of this business that could make more money," he says. "My great-grandfather knew it. My grandfather knew it. You just have to decide if that's what you're doing."

Outside, the temperature has dropped to eight degrees. The courthouse clock is not visible from this angle but you can hear it if you are quiet enough, which Ray is, on most days. A gray-brown sparrow lands on the windowsill for a moment, then goes. The phone on his desk rings — a cell, not the office line, which means family. He lets it ring once before he picks it up. He says yes. He says when. He says he'll be there.

He reaches for his coat before he has finished the call.

Pull Quote

Pull Quote Attribution

Status

Cancel