from the ajc....

Workers at children's casket company "deal with what nobody else wants to"

By DREW JUBERA
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/27/07
Griffin - You work inside a single-story warehouse painted sea-foam green, just up the two-lane from a roller rink and hamburger drive-in, and try your best each day to accommodate the unspeakable.

Maybe you work in upholstery, a brightly-lit room where women line wooden boxes with pleated fabrics, or use a pneumatic staple gun to apply, say, a gingham cover.

Or you paint, relishing those moments when you can spray pink highlights on a creamy all-white box.

Or you work in the woodshop.

"This is about as simple as it gets," says Ricky Cavender, a woodworker here, off-and-on, for about 18 years. He points to a small pine rectangle. It's about a foot long, with a lid.

"Like a shoebox built with wood," Cavender says.

You talk easily about your work inside this cozy, 40,000-square-feet warehouse that's one of the only places in the country devoted solely to building caskets for children.

Outside the warehouse, it's another story. When somebody asks what you do while you're waiting in a grocery line or sitting in a restaurant, you pretty much know what's coming next. So you start with the basics. You just say you work at a casket company.

"If they think it's adult caskets, it's okay," says Gina Alford, 33, who has worked in upholstery for about seven years. "It's when they ask that next question..."

It's only when outsiders press for more details that you say you work at a place that builds caskets for children. That's when you get... the reaction.

Cavender remembers one guy suddenly getting upset and telling him, "Leave me alone. I don't want to talk to you." Norman Haynes, a painter here for 14 years, says people have waved their hands in front of their faces, as if to ward him off.

Alford said she was at a hospital once, waiting to have blood drawn, when a receptionist asked if she could touch her hands.

Alford recalled that after letting go of her fingers, the receptionist said, sounding surprised, "I thought they'd be cold."

Mike Mims gets it. A former Baptist minister and hospice executive who is now president of the 67-year-old Cherokee Casket Company, Mims says most folks don't know what to say or how to react when the subject turns to children dying. Some shiver just thinking about it. It's as if the mere mention of other children dying somehow puts their own kids in jeopardy.

Yet kids die. They need to be buried.

"We deal with what nobody else wants to," says Mims, whose company ships about 10,000 caskets a year across the country and around the world, from the Netherlands to New Zealand.

"And that's okay," he adds. "We're proud of what we do. It's reality."

Leaving the warehouse parking lot each evening, you head home and maybe relax a while in front of the TV. Sometimes you catch the news - local, national, doesn't matter - and there's a story on about a kid who has died. Maybe been killed.

It always gets your attention.

"When you're watching news stories like that, you know when you go to work the next day, that order's going to come," Alford says.

More than 38,000 children aged 14 or younger in the U.S. are buried each year in a casket, according to the Casket and Funeral Supply Association of America. That's only about two percent of the more than 1.7 million total caskets bought annually.

Of those 38,000 children, almost 28,000 are under 1.

Funeral homes rarely keep more than a couple children's caskets on hand; most handle only one or two such funerals a year. Fewer than a handful of the nearly 150 companies that manufacture caskets in the U.S. build them exclusively for children.

"There is a greater sensitivity surrounding [children's caskets] because often that loss is all the more tragic," says Mark Allen, executive director of the Casket and Funeral Supply Association. "Some companies are reluctant to get into that market because of that sensitivity."

You and the 20 or so other employees at the warehouse in Griffin rarely, if ever, know the circumstances behind the casket you've built. Cherokee is a wholesaler that deals with funeral home directors, not grieving families.

"I can deal with this end of it. I couldn't deal with it as a funeral home director," says Lawanda Radekin, 60, a Cherokee customer service representative. "My husband has worked at a funeral home for 30-plus years and he still doesn't like dealing with children's deaths. You never get used to it."

All you or anybody else at Cherokee knows from an order that comes in is the style, the size — caskets range from 11 inches long to five-feet, six-inches long — and the location of the funeral home where it is being shipped.

A quick glance at the shelves in one room stacked high with caskets shows how far and wide the work inside this little warehouse about 35 miles south of Atlanta reaches: Glendale, Cal.; Mesquite, Tex.; Mahwah, N.J.; Pine Mountain, Ga.

There are also special orders. There are unpainted orthodox caskets for Jews and Muslims, put together with wooden pegs. There are biodegradable caskets — no metal hardware — for the Netherlands, where burial plots are re-used every decade or so.

There have been orders for twins. Sometimes the request is for a double-long casket, so the two tiny bodies can be placed end to end. Other times the casket is built so they can be placed side by side.

"We don't want to know the circumstances," says Mims. "It would be too emotionally draining."

You've worked here about two years. Before that you were a forklift driver, a truck driver, a security guard, a cook at a rehab center. But you were looking for something different when you saw an ad for a job at Cherokee. Something about it felt right.

Your 17-year-old son was killed during a drive-by shooting in 1999. Your wife was murdered by a visiting relative eight months before that.

"We've all had family members, young and old, taken home," says Slayton Goodman, 54, who buried his son in Chicago and his wife in Barnesville, where he lives. "But when I think about these precious kids leaving this world, and what they'll be leaving in for the last time, I give them my all."

Despite the roomfuls of little caskets, most folks who work here rarely think about death or dying while doing their jobs. Those who do don't last long.

"Some have started and couldn't continue," Mims says. "I tell them that after 90 or 180 days, if you're still here, then Cherokee is for you."

Cherokee Caskets has always been family run. It was founded in the early 1940s by Sarah Betts, who started it inside her house in nearby Batesville. Long lengths of lumber were hard to come by during World War II, but shorter scrap pieces were available. Betts used them to create her own niche: caskets for children.

It wasn't long before the company moved to Griffin and began to sell its wares outside of Georgia. In a male-dominated business, Betts never let up.

"She was a real go-getter kind of woman," says Tom Moore, her grandson. "She drove all over the East Coast, into the Kentucky coal mine areas... She went after the business."

Betts died three years ago at age 94. A small woman, she was buried in a five-foot, six-inch Carolina poplar casket built by the company she founded.

There are lots of histories inside this green warehouse on the edge of town.

"I get a welled-up feeling in my heart when I think of my son or wife," Goodman says, taking a break in a back room. "It's not like when I was a truck driver, delivering stuff, picking stuff up.

"This is a job, but it also has meaning," he adds. "It's hard sometimes when you think of the people these are going to. But it gives me something to know I'm benefiting someone besides myself. I'm helping to ease someone else's pain."

He then returns to work, fastening a handle to a silver casket.