Days of Yore
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as recounted by
Bill Day
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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
that 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 an undertaker”, and I remembered that.