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Alan Alameda and his granddaughter, Zoe Cowherd Alameda, run the family business, the Saratoga-Cupertino Funeral Home.
Saratoga boasts California's oldest practicing mortician
By Jason Baker
Alan A. Alameda could have been a dairyman. Dairy farming was his family's business near Stockton in the early part of the century, and it might very well have become Alameda's life's work--if not for the want of a milking machine.
"I kind of wanted to buy more cows and more land," Alameda said, a request that went unanswered. And a milking machine was simply out of the question for a Portuguese dairy farm of the 1920s.
So with two years of high school under his belt, Alameda set out on a new path at the suggestion of a friend. "He mentioned going into the funeral business. I told him he was crazy," Alameda recalls.
Now 96, Alameda serves as patriarch of Saratoga-Cupertino Funeral Home, locally owned since 1969 and one of a handful of family-run funeral chapels in the state. Believed by most to be California's oldest active mortician, Alameda no longer makes house calls. He can't lift anymore and seldom embalms.
"He's the overseer. He still spot-checks our work," said Zoe Cowherd Alameda, granddaughter of Alameda and funeral director and owner of Saratoga-Cupertino since 1994. "He's the wealth of knowledge we defer to in unusual situations."
The idea of the funeral business quickly took hold of Alameda, leading him to apprentice as an embalmer. In the days predating modern funeral parlors with on-site facilities, embalmers most often performed procedures in the home. Bodies then remained in the home until funeral services, usually at family request.
"Embalmers have different instruments today that we didn't have then. Today they have embalming machines; we had gravity," he said. Modern embalmers use a mechanical device to inject embalming fluid into a body. When Alameda began, embalmers held the fluid in a container above the body and allowed it to flow in through a tube.
Alameda worked at various funeral homes in Sacramento, San Jose and Stockton before starting what became Mission Chapel of Rancadore and Alameda with partners I. Rancadore and his son Sal in 1933. Alameda and Sal worked together until Sal's retirement in the 1980s. Alan's son, A. Alan Alameda, purchased the interests in Mission Chapel soon after.
As the Silicon Valley itself has changed over time, so has the funeral industry. "One major change is the amount of cremations performed these days," he said. "So many people don't have roots in California or ties to the community, which leads to fewer family burials and more cremations. Also, Jessica Mitford's book didn't help us any."
Mitford, the muckraking journalist, in 1969 penned The AmericanWay of Death, which took a critical look inside the funeral industry's sales and promotion practices.
But Zoe Alameda said Mitford's book might have done less harm to the industry than initially believed. "I came into the business when cremations were a norm," she said. "I didn't see [Mitford's book] as a hindrance. I think it opened the door to helping the average person understand the industry."
And while the funeral industry remains profitable, with profit come opportunists. Zoe Alameda decried the modern practice of corporate acquisition of funeral homes, often acquired from long-time funeral directors whose families have chosen not to continue in the family trade.
"Corporations look at funeral homes as easy money," she said. "The people that work at the homes typically care as much about the industry as they did when the corporation took over, but the corporations are lacking one component--compassion.
In addition to running Saratoga-Cupertino, Zoe Alameda is active as a member of the Cupertino and Saratoga chambers of commerce, the Junior League and the Montalvo Association.
Looking back in the autumn of his years, Alan Alameda has no regrets about leaving the dairy business behind.
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Saratoga, California Since 1975
