By Khalida Sarwari
Looking ahead to his future, 16-year-old Alan Anthony Alameda figured he had one of two options: join his family’s dairy farming business or, because he was infatuated with cars, try his hand in auto mechanics.
Unbeknownst to him, though, a new industry was emerging in the early 1900s, and Alameda eventually became a mortician.
Saratogans may recognize the name from Alameda Family Funeral & Cremation on Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road, a funeral home that the Alameda family established in 1968. What some may not know is that the Alameda family has been one of the primary funeral home owners in the South Bay since the early 1930s.
“Our grandfather started the first business in San Jose,” said Heather Durham, a community outreach coordinator for the funeral home. “He was the first Portuguese funeral director in the state of California and the longest-working funeral director to this date.”
Initially, Alameda (originally the Portugese spelling, “Almeida”) had objected when a mechanic he’d been seeking employment from told him there was no future in auto mechanics and suggested he consider becoming an undertaker instead. But then the mechanic’s message about how home parlors were being replaced by funeral parlors started resonating with him, and he left his home in the Central Valley for a job as an apprentice embalmer and funeral director at a funeral parlor in Sacramento. There, he met his wife, Catherine Kelly, and the couple married shortly thereafter.
Three years later, Alameda became a California licensed embalmer at the age of 22. At that time, the embalming was done at the family’s home, where the funeral service would also take place. The deceased would then be carried out of the home in a casket on a horse-drawn hearse on the day of the burial.
After stints at other funeral homes in Lodi and Modesto, Alameda eventually moved to San Jose and took a job at Monahan Mortuary, working briefly for Thomas Patrick Monahan, a well-known politician at the time. He then teamed up with the Rancadore family to open up Rancadore and Alameda Funeral Chapel, which turned out to be a successful venture for both families as it was heavily patronized by Italian, Portuguese and Hispanic families. They were so successful that in the mid-1930s they broke ground on a new state-of-the-art mortuary on Second and Reed streets in San Jose, which would become the Mission Chapel of Rancadore and Alameda.
Throughout his life, the bow tie-bedecked Alameda was active in several clubs and organizations in the county, including the Saratoga Lions Club. He kept his thumb on the family business up until just weeks before his death, and was known for his eloquent eulogies and sense of humor.
In the 1960s when Saratoga requested its own mortuary and petitioned the local funeral homes to come to Saratoga, the Rancadores stayed put, but the Alameda family took the offer. They opened the Saratoga-Cupertino Funeral Home on the site of an old chicken ranch, and Alameda’s daughter, Kathleen, managed and ran the business along with her husband, Robert Durham.
Alameda’s son sold the Mission Chapel of Rancadore and Alameda to a publically traded corporation in 1998, but that didn’t stop Alameda from visiting the funeral home every once in a while and personally greeting families–that is, until the new owners told him not to come anymore.
Alameda’s son, Adolph, and son-in-law carried the torch for the next generation. After Durham was killed by a drunk driver in 1980 and his daughter became too ill to continue to run the mortuary in Saratoga, Alameda would drive from San Jose to Saratoga almost every day to manage the business until his death in 2000 at the age of 97.
Today, the business is in its fourth generation of family ownership. Durham’s daughter, Zoe Alameda, is the current funeral director, and her sister Heather Durham does community outreach. Heather said the death of their father made her want no part of the family business until about three years ago, when her sister asked her for help in running the business and she obliged.
“Even though it’s been 35 years, it still seems like yesterday that I lost my father, and I can relate to others that have had similar tragedies,” she said. “It’s really a great thing to be able to help others that have had loss like I did.”
The family will commemorate serving the South Bay community for 85 years with a celebration on Aug. 15, noon to 4 p.m., in the Saratoga Gateway Business District. The event will be hosted by several businesses in the Gateway, starting at Prospect on Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road near Peet’s and ending near the Pool Guys. There will be live music and food trucks, and participants will be encouraged to share stories of how they arrived in Silicon Valley, said Durham.
Kathleen Alameda Durham, Zoe and Heather’s mother and one of the founders of the Saratoga funeral home, will also be in attendance.
Link: Auto mechanic turns mortician, and the rest becomes family history
