Greenlawn follows community's lead for 100 years

If ever a business was tied to a community, the funeral home and burial business is it.
Greenlawn Memorial Gardens was created 100 years ago because the Springfield community needed burial grounds. And 61 years later, Greenlawn opened its first funeral home to again meet the needs of those living in the area.
Unchanged through these events is the company’s ownership, started by Greene County Judge Ben Diemer and now under his great-grandson Jake Diemer.
With four funeral homes, a crematory, a cemetery and a monument company, Greenlawn Funeral Homes employs nearly 60, averages 400 burials a year and holds approximately 1,450 visitations annually. While ownership declined to disclose revenues, marketing director Jim Spackman estimates that the company handles more than 50 percent of Springfield’s funeral home business.
The company is again responding to the community with its fifth funeral home in the early stages of construction at 3540 E. Seminole St. The new 23,000-square-foot funeral home will have two chapels and eight visitation rooms, a family lounge, indoor monument display area and a gift and flower shop, marking Greenlawn’s first venture into the floral business. Construction by Howard Bailey Co. is expected to be complete in November.

Beginnings
The business began in 1905 with Greenlawn Memorial Gardens, the cemetery located at the northern end of National Avenue on the edge of Springfield. Judge Diemer began the 15-acre cemetery to fill the community’s need for a burial ground.
“At that time, National Avenue was really one of the main drags in Springfield … and by coming from the city all the way out here, the cemetery was kind of like the end of the main drag. It was a perfect location,” Spackman said.
In the early to mid-1950s, the Diemer family took the next logical step and began producing their own monuments and burial vaults. The service added a higher level of convenience and cost effectiveness that could be passed on to customers, Diemer said.
The monument company is located at 3506 N. National, on the same property as Greenlawn North, the first of the family’s funeral homes.
Greenlawn North was opened in 1966 by Jake Diemer’s grandfather, Harry, and his father, Jack, to fulfill the requests of families served by the cemetery, Diemer said.
“All we had before that was an office at the cemetery, and people kept asking if we were ever going to own a funeral home. Then my grandfather, he was friends with a builder here in Springfield who kept asking my grandfather, ‘Well, Harry, when are you ever going to start a funeral home?’ And after enough times, my grandfather said, ‘How about tomorrow? Is that soon enough for you?’” Diemer said.
In its first year, the funeral home faced an uncertain future. Diemer, who was 12 years old at the time, said that there might have been between 40 and 50 services that year. He remembers a struggling business, and he remembers a story that continues to impact the way business is conducted today.
Funeral Director and Manager John Cox, who is now semiretired after 41 years as a Greenlawn employee, had only been working for two months when he suggested a sales tactic called price-advertising. It was unheard of in the local funeral home business.
“And the rest is history – that’s how we got going,” Diemer said.
Greenlawn still advertises the cost of funerals, and fully lists them on its Web site. Many of its services are done in-house, and the buildings and property are owned outright, Diemer said, helping the company to keep fees competitive.

Adapting to population shifts
By the 1970s, it was becoming obvious that the culture of Springfield was changing, and the Diemer family again expanded the company’s services to meet the requests of the community.
Greenlawn opened the first crematory in southwest Missouri in 1974, Diemer said. Before then, the funeral home made arrangements to ship the deceased to Kansas City, St. Louis or Tulsa for cremations.
“The crematory became valuable to this area with the moving of the West Coast toward Springfield. It was actually a popular item in the West Coast before it got to Missouri,” Spackman said.
Around that time, the migration trend began to work both ways: West Coast natives were moving to the area, while more and more children of local families began to move away from the area. The effect on the business could be seen most noticeably in the cemetery, where family plots that once averaged 12 graves became increasingly less popular.
Today, the average family plot consists of four graves, though Greenlawn makes an effort to keep open space nearby for family members that may move back home, Spackman said.
In 1976, Springfield’s population was on the upswing, and a second location was added at 441 W. Battlefield. The Branson funeral home followed in 1986, and 10 years later the company acquired Pitts Chapel in Bolivar. It now goes under the name Pitts Chapel-Greenlawn Funeral Home.
More recent shifts in the population have expanded the range of religious and cultural influences Greenlawn must take into consideration, Spackman said. Accommodating the wishes of families has become more challenging, but the company has adapted – down to the software it uses to produce monuments. It can now produce multilingual characters for headstones.

The next Diemer
Jake Diemer took over ownership of the company after his father passed away in February, 1990. Ownership will move into the next generation with Diemer’s son, Jason. Now 21, Jason Diemer has worked in the family business since he was 12 years old.
In his short time learning the business, the younger Diemer has noticed the introduction of technology.
“The funeral business may have been one of the last to use new technologies, but we’ve finally caught up,” Jason Diemer said.
New software allows Greenlawn to produce in-house presentations, including a DVD slide show of family photos set to music that can be played during visitations.
The company has prepared for the future in more ways than personnel.
Two years ago, Greenlawn Memorial Gardens opened two sections, equaling five acres, for development. The cemetery has 70 acres developed and another 120 acres that can be developed in the future.
There is no concern about running out of land: “Not in my lifetime, and not in his,” Jake Diemer said referring to son Jason.
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