Stretch
Funeral Home
Jim Stretch was an institution in Haddonfield for
years. Jim first came to town to visit a boy friend whose father
was the town’s undertaker. He would drive one of the horse and
carriages
in a funeral procession when assistance was needed. The
undertaker
died and the son inherited the business. Soon after the son died,
and Jim Stretch did something he had never dreamed he would do.
Jim
was raised on a farm outside Mullica Hill. As a boy one of his
duties
was to bury any of the chickens that would die on the farm. He
said
he had a forked stick with which he performed his task, and told how he
would not be able to eat supper that night as he would have lost his
appetite.
Jim’s funeral establishment was the other funeral establishment was the
other half of a double dwelling, the other side of which was the
Haddonfield
National Bank. This building was then to the rear of where the
rear
of where the bank clock now stands. It was a double house
then.
Jim knew everyone in town and his business was second to none.
Unknown
to most people, many of Haddonfield’s families received assistance from
Jim when illness had drained their resources. He was a confirmed
bachelor and an ardent antique collector. Howard Fisher once said
that Jim was one of the few persons in town who knew an antique
when
he saw one. He stood in George Day’s shoemaker’s shop on more
that
one occasion trying to get George to accept a blank check to secure the
little Pennsylvania Dutch settee that stood in his shop. George
would
say, “Jim, when you bring something in here that’s yours, when you sit
on the bench it’s yours at no price.” Jim would laugh and say he
would never get the settee. Mr. Herbert Gleeson remembers tat at
the rear of Ben Fowler’s store, at the exit on Ellis Street, Jim kept
horses
and four or five wagons which he rented out for a dollar a day on
Sunday.
The Catholic families in town would rent them to take the trip to St.
Rose’s
Church over in Haddon Heights as there was not Catholic Church in
Haddonfield
back in those days. During the week the wagons were funeral
processions.
When I was eight or nine years old my brother
used to be up at Jim Stretch’s taking care of his automobiles, and Jim
use to give me a dime and I’d cut the hedge, and he use to tell me
these
stories about “I never thought I’d be and undertaker”, and I remembered
that.