Funeral director Bill Shea’s love affair with the people of Grays Ferry
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
When Bill Shea was in his teens, he had a conversation with his father that stuck with him. It was such a simple thing. He asked a question and got an answer.
Shea’s father, John W. Shea, was an attorney and the funeral director of Shea Funeral Home, a business that was started by his own father in 1895. The buildings of the business stand across from St. Gabriel Church, in the Grays Ferry section of South Philly.
“We were riding home from the shore, I guess. I was in high school,” Shea remembers. “I asked him which he preferred, being a lawyer or a funeral director. He told me definitely, without question, if he had to choose one, it would be funeral directing.”
At the time, in the 1950s, young Bill had been thinking about becoming a lawyer. “It made an impression,” he says now.
Not long after the talk in the car, his father, only 53, died suddenly of complications of heart disease. He left behind a wife, Margaret, and four children. Bill was 16.
He has fond memories of his father, an accomplished man who attended University of Pennsylvania Law School. “He was a very good handy man, and when we would spend time together, he would show me how to do things.”
His father had written a will on the back of an envelope, stating his wish that the funeral home be left to his sister, Mary Shea, “with the proviso that it stay in the family,” Shea explains.
He adds that he felt “a desire to continue the Shea Funeral Home” — that he didn’t want it to end then because of him. It wasn’t a hard decision, he says. But because he was raised in Southwest Philly, he hadn’t spent lots of time at the family business. “It wasn’t in my blood,” he says, before quickly adding, “But as it turns out, it was in my blood.”
William J. Shea closed the Shea Funeral Home’s doors on March 31, after some 54 years in his family’s business and several decades at the helm. His long, lean figure, impeccably dressed and clad in the customary black or gray overcoat, will no longer be seen walking up and down the aisle of St. Gabriel Church during a funeral, “conducting,” as Mary Burke, 68, who grew up in the parish, calls it.
There were no successors to the family business. Shea and his wife of 52 years, Grace, sold the property, which changed hands in June. It will no longer be a funeral home.
Shea is still there for what he and his wife call “our families,” the people of not just St. Gabriel Parish but the larger neighborhood. He is keeping his funeral director’s license active, and these days is often at the John R. Deady Funeral Home, located near 12th and Oregon in South Philly, to meet neighborhood families. He is referring business to trusted associate Frank Lamantia, who runs Deady.
In many cases, neighborhood families, including those from the now-closed St. Aloysius Parish, can’t imagine using the services of anyone but Bill Shea, not just to bury their loved ones, but themselves.
Patrick McCann, now in his 40s, grew up in St. Gabriel Parish, and worked for Bill Shea from the time he was a teenager. “I was talking to my mother, who is 73, and she said, ‘I’m so sad it’s not there anymore,’ and I knew what she was saying.”
Grace Shea, a registered nurse, has helped run the funeral home office and taken the calls of people with fresh tragedies on their hands. Many in Grays Ferry know her name, just as they know her husband’s. She and Shea watched the funeral home sign come down, the day before settlement. “It was bittersweet. There were definitely tears,” Grace says.
Spring was spent cleaning out files and going through mementos. There were several boxes of thank you notes from clients. The poster reading “Happiness is being married to your best friend” was removed from the office wall on the second floor. Their three daughters, whom they raised in Southwest Philly and Drexel Hill, helped out.
Not given to talking about himself, Shea is a reluctant, if warm and gracious, interview. Seated on the first floor of the funeral home a few weeks before leaving the building for good, he and Grace seem at peace with what’s going to be a major change in their lives. “We prayed over this. It was not an easy decision,” Shea points out.
But he is 76 now, and Grace is an incredibly young-looking 75. Running this uniquely on-call business doesn’t seem to have taken a toll, though. Shea married someone who shares his easy way with people, his devotion to service and a deep affection for the neighborhood.
“They are one of a kind,” Shea says of the residents, and pauses. “They have your back,” Grace finishes.
Shea doesn’t often get emotional. But at one point, talking about the coming separation, he stops to compose himself. “I couldn’t have asked for a better place to have done this. This neighborhood is in my heart.”
The Neighborhood Lore
The Shea Funeral Home is a big part of the lore of Grays Ferry, a South Philly neighborhood originally made up largely of the storytelling Irish. Shea and his three siblings were raised in Southwest Philly, but both his parents were raised in Grays Ferry and St. Gabriel Parish.
Until recently, above the door of the vestibule of the funeral home was a piece of stained glass removed from the original entrance to St. Gabriel Church. It depicts, as cherubs, three children from the parish when it first opened. One of those faces is that of Bill Shea’s father, John.
The parish was officially established on Oct. 30, 1895. A chapel was quickly built to serve while an impressive church was constructed at 29th and Dickinson Streets. The building of a grade school, rectory, and convent got under way.
The foundations of the permanent church were dug by parishioners, “with picks and shovels so that the magnificent edifice remains to this day” proclaims a City Council resolution presented on the parish’s centennial. A best-kept Philly secret of beauty and design, it is frequently called, by people in the know, “the cathedral of South Philly.”
In the farewell sermon for the beloved but temporary chapel, in 1904, the first pastor, the Rev. Patrick J. Mellon, said, “The worst I have yet heard of the New Church is it is too large and too grand for the neighborhood. As if Catholic piety and devotion ever build but for the Most High who delights to dwell with the children of men.”
Bill’s grandfather, William E. Shea, ran Shea Funeral Home from a site at 30th and Wharton Streets for its first few years, starting in 1895. He purchased property on the northeast corner of 29th and Dickinson streets and moved the business there in 1901.
William E. lost his wife, Bill’s grandmother, to the flu pandemic of 1918, which was spread across the globe largely through ports by the military. Philadelphia was the hardest hit American city, with the highest death toll, and the Navy Yard employed lots of Grays Ferry people.
Burke and her sister Kathy Burke White, 67, grew up hearing stories of bodies stacked up outside of Shea Funeral Home during the crisis. Shea confirms that he heard this himself growing up, and seems to recall a photo.
There are lots of stories that involve a Shea or two. There was the nun at St. Gabriel School who lectured White’s class that the worst thing wouldn’t be ending up at Shea’s Funeral Home, but being caught there, by the dignified funeral director Mary Shea, wearing torn, unsightly underwear.
Mary A. Shea, who ran Shea’s for over 20 years and never married, was by all accounts an elegant woman. She was respected in Grays Ferry as a serious businessperson and strong social ally. White, whose mother went to school with Mary, says, “She wore Chanel suits. She was always pulled together.”
Miss Shea was especially known for her hair and makeup skills — on the deceased. According to White, “The women around here used to say, ‘I want to die so Mary can do my makeup.’” White laughs. “She made them look better dead than alive!”
Their Sunday Afternoon Date
Bill Shea met Grace Amati at a dance in 1959. As they were falling in love, they bonded over Shea’s younger brother Johnny, who was developmentally disabled.
Shea says, “John was — and is — a big part of our lives.” Grace mentions that there’s a portrait of Johnny in the entry area of their house. “He had a beautiful smile,” Shea continues. “It’s hard to put into words — I would just love to be with him.”
During their courtship, Bill and Grace had a standing “Sunday afternoon date” with Johnny. They’d pick him up and take him with them for drives. Johnny lived until his 50’s — and spent the last part of his life living with them. Grace looks at her husband. “We say our last date with Johnny,” and her voice breaks just a bit, “was driving him here.”
Though he is extremely self-effacing, Shea allows that he’s “great at lists.” In fact, he often begins a description of an event with “Step one,” and continues accordingly. And as he arose, often at 5:30 a.m. through more than five decades of the funeral business, he was often going through a list in his head before his feet hit the floor.
Funeral directors are entrusted with a lot of particulars, and he had a lot to remember. “If people are expecting flowers, and the flowers don’t get there, it’s not good.”
Of a life spent on call, truly at the whim of fate — other people’s — he says simply, “There’s not a lot of down time.”
Not that he’s cavalier. He used to say “Hail Marys” in what funeral directors call “the preparation room,” and considers the job that became his life’s work “a calling.”
“I feel like I’m a servant. I’m there to get people through one of life’s tougher times, to soften that journey and make it more tolerable.”
Still, one senses that he’s aware his life could have gone another way. “I don’t picture myself a funeral director,’’ he says softly. “I’m Bill Shea.”
Shea’s Aunt Mary took the reins of the business after her brother’s death. Young Bill attended Villanova University, receiving a bachelor’s degree, majoring in business. He did the customary one-year of mortuary school before taking the state boards to get his funeral director’s license. He was brought on board.
He points out that the apprenticeship that aspirants go through is supposed to help them see if they like the funeral business. For him, interested in keeping the family business going per his father’s wishes, “Like had nothing to do with it.”
But it soon became apparent that he had a natural ability to comfort people. Courtly, intelligent, and organized, he inspired trust. He both took care of the practicalities — “the business of having somebody die” as Mary Burke puts it — and offered a firm shoulder to lean on.
That talent is spoken of by generations of Grays Ferry residents. Patrick McCann, 43, became one of Shea’s assistants in 1986. In sales now, he continued to help out — picking up the deceased, greeting people at the door during wakes — pretty much until the home’s closing. McCann’s brother Joe began working for Shea about 15 years ago, full-time at first, and then occasionally, until the closing.
The brothers reminisced recently. “My brother and Bill went to the home of a little girl who had died of leukemia,” Patrick says. “There were relatives there, and they wanted to help” with the removal of the girl’s body, he explains. Shea got them involved. “This was a house filled with men, 9 or 10 strong men, who were all crying,” Patrick says. “My brother stayed back, just beyond the door. Bill Shea walked that room and comforted every one of those men. How many people could do that?”
Joe McCann, 51, confirms the story and adds, “What I learned from Mr. Shea, that respect for people, I try to bring to my profession now.” Joe is a police officer and currently drives what is called “the wagon,” an assignment that frequently involves removing and transporting the bodies of people’s loved ones.
Joe McCann points out that Shea is known for not up-selling. That was the experience of this writer, who grew up in Grays Ferry and St. Gabriel Parish. When my father died in 2010, my sister and I called on Bill Shea. There didn’t seem to be any sales tactics. And he kept us on track with grace, humor and professionalism.
Pushing Caskets Through Windows
It’s been a long time since 22-year-old Bill Shea arrived to help his aunt, who died in 1983, with the family business. The business has changed, certainly: It’s been decades since Shea Funeral Home has organized and held services from someone’s home, pushing caskets through living room windows. And cremations are fairly common where they were unheard of before. More often, services are held completely in the church, including the viewings. Shea remembers the grumbling that went on when he stopped allowing smoking in the funeral parlor.
The neighborhood has changed in ways both subtle and dramatic. People who grew up here, from the ’40s to the ’70s, remember lawyers, dentists and several doctors practicing here. And the doctors made house calls. There were beer distributors, gas stations. “You never had to leave,” says Eileen Kirk Moran, 67, who was raised, and still lives, here.
Those businesses gradually left. Burke attributes that change as one that began with “the ubiquity of the automobile.” She feels it has negatively impacted the neighborhood’s youth. “Back in the day, all the professions were around,” she says. “Kids could see what you could be.”
Less gradual changes were in store. There were racial confrontations in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s that received a lot of local press. When white residents began leaving the area in the ’80s and ’90s, outside investors bought up homes, and along with The Philadelphia Housing Authority, began flooding the area with Section 8 tenants. The program’s absentee landlords allowed houses to crumble. House values plummeted, drug use and violent crime rose.
The two other parishes in the neighborhood, St. Aloysius and King of Peace, closed as the Archdiocese of Philadelphia downsized. The racial make-up of the neighborhood now includes Asians and Latinos, and blacks and whites live on many of the same streets. There are far fewer parishioners, and St. Gabriel School is no longer affiliated with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. It became an Independence Mission School in 2013.
The past 20 years have seen scores of drug overdoses, and in the late 1990s, a spate of drug-related suicides, in the area. Drug addiction and violence are still rampant problems there.
Though Shea had his head down running a business all those years, the nature of that business meant that he was privy, in an intimate way, to the loss — and tragedy — that beset Grays Ferry.
Joe McCann recalls Shea meeting with the pastor of St. Gabe’s during a rash of Oxycontin overdose deaths, to try and make a plan for assisting youth and preventing the tragedies. “He knew what was happening, ’cause he was burying them,” McCann says.
Shea was the Chair of the Grays Ferry Community Council’s Education Committee before being elected its president in the late 1980s. “My goal was to make Grays Ferry a drug-free zone,” he says with perhaps a little frustration.
Though Shea is not indiscreet, there are flashes of recognition in his eyes when names or incidents are mentioned. If anyone in this neighborhood has seen it all, it’s him.
In the late ’90s, amid lots of coverage by local media on Grays Ferry’s racial problems, a white teenager was shot to death by two black men in a corner store. Shea says, “It was a horrible time. The neighborhood was alive with animosity.”
There were media cameras across the street from the funeral home all the days leading up to the funeral. Shea recalls crossing the street to ask the reporters to respect the family’s privacy. “They never pulled back the cameras,” he says. “It was a challenge to me.”
The Pressure’s Off
A few weeks after closing, Shea says of doing so, “A whirlwind? It was more like a tornado. It was a lot of work.”
But now the pressure’s off. There’s more time to read books, “a joy,” he says. He and Grace will be spending more time with family at their Jersey shore house.
Shea’s middle daughter, Susie Miller, says she’s relieved her dad “is able to stay involved” at Deady Funeral Home. As for what it meant for her and her sisters to be brought up as the daughters of Bill Shea, funeral director, she says, “It made us not afraid of death, because we saw how it was handled. You just hope that someone does the same for you.”
A New Mission
As a searching young man growing up in Grays Ferry, Douglas McKay, now 62, used to chat up Bill Shea. He paid particular attention to Shea’s “gentleness.” McKay says, “He brought comfort and peace to people going through the toughest times. He impressed me so much that I wanted to be a funeral director — I didn’t think I was smart enough to be a priest.”
McKay was smart enough to be a priest (as well as an eloquent storyteller and writer of a book or two) and this past June, 32 years after his ordination, Father Douglas McKay signed paperwork transferring the buildings that housed Shea Funeral Home to Our House Ministries. A secular priest, he ministers to people in the neighborhood with substance addictions as well as recovering addicts.
He prayed with the Sheas over the decision to close. “It was very difficult for him,” McKay says. “He didn’t want to leave.”
Bill and Grace Shea say that the use of the buildings that were Shea Funeral Home is important to them and that Father Doug’s mission has made it easier to let go.
McKay says, “I told them, ‘You buried the dead. We’re raising the dead.’”
Those Golden Gates
Bill Shea is on the phone with this writer and he seems to want to tell a story.
“You know, the guys around here have a reputation for being rough and tough — and drinkers,” he begins.
“One day there’s a knock on the golden gates. St. Peter comes out to find seven or eight guys there. ‘We’d like to meet the Lord, say hello to Christ,’ they tell him.
St. Peter goes back to God, and says, ‘We have a bunch of characters from Grays Ferry here.’
‘Sure. Send them in.’
St. Peter leaves and comes running back. ‘They’re gone!’
God says, ‘They’re gone? Why didn’t they wait?’
‘No, the golden gates — they’re gone!’”
Shea pauses for a moment for a laugh.
Then he has to go. A family is waiting.
Jenn Carbin is a former Philadelphia City Paper staff writer. Contact her at jenn.carbin@gmail.com.
