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The new Bates Family Funeral Home, dedicated August 30, is owned by former TFDA President Robby Bates and his son Robb, the third generation to join the family business.

Like his father, Robb attended mortuary school in Dallas, graduating in 2004. He worked at J.E. Keever in Ennis, until joining his father in July of this year.

The new building, designed by Terwisscha Construction of Minnesota, was built by a DeKalb contractor and has 6,555 square feet of heated/cooled area, roof coverage of 8,000 square feet and 31,000 square feet of concrete parking.

Two doors—one on the east side and the other on the west side of the building—allow visitors to converge into a spacious lobby with a fireplace. This space can also accommodate overflow from the funeral home’s chapel, which seats 176.

“The main thing we wanted was a building that would be warm and inviting to the public,” said Robby. “We welcome our guests with a coffee lounge just off the lobby. We don’t have a set-aside family room in our chapel because so many of our services are done at local churches. In our chapel, the family is able to sit with their friends and are not secluded in a side room.”

A remote-control camera in the new chapel serves three purposes:

¨ “When we have a large service, the camera can transmit the service to those seated in the lobby,”

Robby explained.

¨ “We also have the capability of showing our memorial video tributes to the overflow crowd in the lobby…”

¨ “The camera also handles regular television programming.”

Bates said they located the building deeper into the property to minimize road noise. The placement also allowed them to save an old pecan tree, which now stands directly in front of the funeral home.

“The property also had an existing 140-foot deep water well, so we use that to irrigate our flower beds and our lawn,” he said. “We also have a faucet connected to the well we use to wash our vehicles.”

The response, thus far, from the community has been extremely positive.

“They do say they feel its warm hospitality,” Robby said, “and the credit for that goes to my wife, Betty, who did the interior decoration for the new facility.”

The Bates are making their new facility available for the community to use and have offered their chapel, with its drop-down screen and overhead projector for memorial videos, to the local volunteer fire department and other community groups to hold training sessions and other meetings where they require audio-visual equipment.

The funeral home has been busy, even before it was dedicated.

“We received our permit and our license on August 26 and we had two services the day before our open house on Sunday, August 30,” Robby said.

On hand for the dedication service was TFDA President Paul Beaty, who presented the Bates with a resolution on behalf of TFDA’s board, officers and members.

The main speaker was Church of Christ Minister Billy Blakeney, who has had close ties with the family through the years. When the Bates family opened a “new” funeral home 45 years ago, in February, 1965, Minister Blakeney was on hand to dedicate the structure, and when Bates-Rolf Funeral Home was destroyed by tornado and rebuilt in 2000, the minister dedicated that facility, too.

Like the minister, the Bates have long been an important fixture in their community. Robby’s father, who was licensed in 1939, moved to DeKalb in 1946 and was a partner with Hanner Funeral Home. Robert Noble Bates eventually bought the funeral home in DeKalb.

After graduating from Stephen F. Austin State University in 1970, Robby shipped off to Vietnam, where he served as a chaplain’s assistant in the U.S. Army.

“When I came back, I started helping my dad at the funeral home again,” said Robby. “We were very busy over a weekend...and on that particular weekend in April, 1973, I had a lot of people telling me how much they appreciated what I did and that I was good at it. That’s when I felt the call to become a funeral director and entered mortuary school in the fall of that same year.”

The reason the funeral home was so busy that April weekend was because it was handling the arrangements for one of DeKalb’s most prominent citizens, Dan Blocker, who starred as Hoss Cartwright on the popular television series, “Bonanza.”

“My father directed his service,” Robby remembers, “At the time, Dan Blocker’s mother still lived here and they had brought his remains here for the service. Dan Blocker was the largest baby ever born in our county, weighing in at more than 14 pounds.”

The Bates family also handled the services for Blocker’s father, who had died 13 years earlier. Robby says the Blocker family plot, where Mr. and Mrs. Blocker, Dan and his little sister Virginia (who died as a child from pneumonia) are buried, is very austere.

“Mr. and Mrs. Blocker were very discreet and simple and there was no extravagance about them at all,” Robby said, “but year-end and year-out, people come to DeKalb and the Woodmen Cemetery, adjacent to the new funeral home, to see Dan Blocker’s grave and to remember the popular television series.” (Editor Note: Gravesite shown in the last issue of The Dead Beat, pg 31.)