“For all my years in funeral service, I feel honored for the confidence that the public has placed in our family,” said H.A. Roberson.
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H.A. Roberson may have been destined to be a funeral director — he was born in a funeral home in Jamesport on Jan. 30, 1933. It might have been an unusual place for his mother to have a baby, but it was home.
“My folks lived in the upstairs of the funeral parlor,” he said. “It was cozy and quiet.”
That first Roberson Funeral Home was located east of the Jamesport school. A pole barn sits there now. The funeral home burned in 1936 and a new place was purchased at the current location off of Highway 190.
When he was a boy, H.A. was not very enthused about getting into the death business.
“I didn’t like the work,” he said. “Funeral directors have to be available. We had to stay home all the time.”
So he was not that upset when his father sold the funeral home at Jamesport in 1942. During this time, his father, O.L., was a farmer, an engineer on the Rock Island Railroad, and worked part time at the funeral home.
H.A. went all through school at Jamesport. As he got older, his ideas changed and he became interested in the funeral home business. His father bought the funeral home back in December of 1951.
But H.A. was not able to take over the family business right away.
When he turned 19, he found out he was #10 on the draft card for the Army. This was during the Korean War.
“Six of us from Jamesport went to join at the same time,” he recalls.
H.A. enlisted and was in the air force from 1952-1956. He was an Airman First Class.
He was stationed in different parts of the country, and wherever he was, he liked to walk into the local funeral home and ask if they were hiring.
“They always said ‘no’,” said. H.A. “Then I’d ask them if they’d take free help. After they got over the shock, they’d say yes.”
“How we bury people doesn’t change much,” he said. “But how we treat people does. Some funeral homes don’t ask what you want, they dictate what you want.”
He said the experience he gained was priceless. He was most impressed with a rural area of Alabama.
“They were very relaxed and open about it,” he said. “If you died today they’d bury you tomorrow. You’d pull into a church in the country, find the preacher, dig the grave, and have the visitation, the service and the burial, all in a day.”
After getting out of the Air Force, H.A. went to Trenton Junior College and then to Gupton College of Mortuary Science in Nashville, Tenn.
H.A. married Suzanne Dickinson in 1957. After receiving his embalming license in 1959, he came home to help with the family business.
The Robersons also co-owned the Spillman Vault Company in Jamesport through the early 1930s. They bought the vault company in 1957 and had it about three years.
At one time, the vault company employed 12-14 people and was one of the biggest employees in town, along with Reed Seed.
The Robersons sold the vault company and in 1959 bought a funeral home in Pattonsburg. H.A. and Suzanne moved to Pattonsburg where they lived for eight years. They moved from Pattonsburg to Bethany in 1967.
They have two children, a daughter, Linda, and a son, Alan. Linda married Bryan Polley. They own the Roberson-Polley Funeral Home in Albany. Alan married Wyvonne Weddle. They operate the funeral homes today located in Jamesport, King City, Stanberry, Bethany, Eagleville, Princeton, Pattonsburg, and Lineville, Iowa.
“Anymore you have to own one nice funeral home you can operate by yourself or you’ve got to have quite a few. It’s like farming.”
H.A. retired in (1995). He misses the people he worked with every day.
“I liked the business,” he said. “Nobody likes to see somebody lose a loved one. But I like what you can do to help them when they need it the most.”
He has handled 7,000 funerals in his career.
He says the saddest experience has been “Children. I don’t know how people go through it. The experts say it’s harder to lose a spouse than a child, but I can’t feature that.”
H.A. never got lost during a funeral procession, but he took a lot of scouting trips to make sure he knew where a cemetery was located.
“I wish we had G.P.S. and cell phones when we were raising the kids,” he said. “We’d have had more time to spend with them.”
Since retiring, he doesn’t have much to do with the business anymore. He jokes that his kids pay him to stay away.
During his career H.A. has been President of the Funeral Director’s Association; received the Robert Knell Leadership Award from the Missouri Funeral Directors; the Sam Walton Business Leadership Award in 1999; served on the Trenton Junior College Foundation Board for nine years; and was a Distinguished Alumni in 2015.
After retirement, H.A.’s hobby has been John Deere tractors. He had four. Now he has two antique tractors, a 52AR John Deere and a 1935 B John Deere, which was the first year the company made the B tractor. Yellow Book News did a feature on him called “HA Roberson and a Family Legacy of Funeral Service in Missouri.”
Sometime in his youth, H.A. decided to embrace the funeral business and he has never regretted the choice. None of use will live forever, and H.A. has his own funeral planned. He will be buried in Miriam Cemetery.
“I’ve got a monument there with my name on it,” he said.