It's not creepy. It's home.

By Nora Firestone

Growing up above her family's Newport News funeral home, Veronica Weymouth thought every kid's dad wore a three-piece suit for every occasion.

Not until she noticed a friend's father wearing khakis to paint did she question the difference between those who dressed down for household chores and hers, who'd dress to the nines for yard work.

Folks regularly dropped by her home unannounced for the undertaker's services, after all.

Weymouth's father, Thomas C. Weymouth, was always on call. She'd known it since age 5, long before the days when she could stay in the apartment upstairs alone while her parents tended funeral services. Or the days when her mother, Etta Weymouth, would dress her up and sit her in the back pew, where the little girl heard more funerals than most do in a lifetime, and where she learned to get comfortable chatting it up with strangers in mourning.

And since the days when the family "vacationed" in Hampton, a stone's throw from the funeral home's long-armed telephone.

Irony was the norm for Weymouth and her two sisters. Childhood memories include playing "funeral" instead of school with friends, learning to skate in the chapel and "outsmarting" their parents the year they found Christmas presents hidden in empty caskets.

At 9, Weymouth and a friend ate honeysuckle from the garden. Suddenly frightened that it might kill them, Veronica returned calmly to the porch with a pen and paper and proceeded to draw up their wills.

Exiting the school bus for home, the sisters rolled their eyes at the predictable, "Bye, Wednesday. Bye, Morticia!" A boy once asked Weymouth out, but reneged when he learned he'd have to pick her up at the funeral home.

His loss, she figured.

Weymouth's parents strived to make their home comfortable, not "taboo," for company. Her father brewed coffee for police officers. Her mom served Kool-Aid and food to Weymouth's high school track team, whose coach often instructed them to "run to the funeral home, drink some water and run back." Stuffed, the team always returned to school in her father's limousine.

At Halloween, her mom decorated the home's back entrance for trick-or-treaters.

Weymouth's sister, Janet Weymouth-German, now her business partner, recalled a storm that shut down the lights during a service. Her parents lit oil lamps.

"To younger people, that might have been totally creepy," she said.

But this elderly group expressed that the old-time lanterns comforted them.

Weymouth never experienced the supernatural occurrences that others feared. Instead, she witnessed the support her family provided to others in their darkest hours.

"In my 20s, I realized how many people cared for my parents. And it was because of the work they did," she said.

When her father passed away in 1995, Weymouth joined her mother in the business part time.

"That turned into full time, and I haven't looked back," she said.

Back in 1885, local undertaker Robert W. Baker sold made-to-order caskets from his furniture store in downtown Suffolk. With news of a death, he'd ride the horse-drawn hearse - casket and embalming supplies in tow - to visit the grieving family and prepare the deceased for parlor services at home.

Now his great-grandson, Robert N. Baker III, runs today's R.W. Baker & Co. Funeral Home and Crematory on West Washington Street. It's when his parents, Robert N. and Allie Oliver Baker, moved the family business to a large house with room to raise four children upstairs.

It's all Baker has ever known.

"I never really felt that it was any different from any other childhood," he said.

Except, maybe, that he had to be quiet coming through the back door and up the wooden staircase. During services, families needed solace, not scampering.

Baker and his friends would "just come and go," he recalled. "The only thing that would really have been different," he admitted, "is that sometimes we'd have caskets roll passed us to the elevator."

That same elevator also delivered the men who worked for his family for friendly ball games, bicycle-riding - and later driving - lessons and old-fashioned mentorship. He'd sometimes drive with James Butler, a man with a fear of garter snakes but not cadavers, to the train station to collect a body.

"Odd things were normal," Marie Baker, his wife of 13 years, noted. The couple lives in the apartment above the funeral home now.

"I think the challenge is trying to keep the family doing things together," she said. Vacations, holidays, dinners can all be cut short by the ring of the phone.

Young Baker's family did travel together for funeral directors' conferences, however. Once, Baker met Miss America during a pageant held at the same events center.

There's nothing predictable about a day in the life. It starts the moment Baker's needed and ends when he's not. If the phone rings at 2 a.m., he showers, dresses in a clean suit and parts to tend to a family and their beloved.

"It was certainly different from your average home environment," admitted Barbara Adams of Kitty Hawk, N.C.

As a child she'd often stayed with her grandparents, who lived above Sturtevant Funeral Home in Portsmouth.

"It was spooky there at night," she remembered.

Her grandmother had charged the young girl with locking up before bed. Adams recalled passing bodies in caskets.

"I didn't want her to know I was scared to death," she said.

But lying in her bed - positioned just above the occupied casket on the floor below - she'd remain sleepless, remembering stories of the unclaimed urns in the basement and the "dead" man who sat up because really wasn't.

Though by day, all was "normal," she said. With a sibling or cousin, even the casket room "was a great room to run and hide in."

Adams attributes modern-day unease to horror movies and a death- and-doom-centric media.

"It was just a warm family environment," she said. People accepted death as a natural part of life. "We didn't color it so dark."

On the coffee table inside Weymouth's parlor sits an album full of thank-you notes from families.

One reads: "You make sadness a little easier" - a profound compl iment to a funeral home owner.

Weymouth said she's learned a few things through her unique lifestyle: to see the humor in life's unusual twists; "to be strong for people"; to "make every minute count"; and to treat others with respect, understanding and compassion.

One recent day she'd been pulling weeds in a dress when someone dropped in to talk.

Suddenly, she realized, "I've turned into my father."

Nora Firestone, nfirestone@verizon.net