Paula Matinchek helps to keep Middletown funeral home in the family

By DIANA FISHLOCK, The Patriot-News 
Her parents, Frank and Peggy Matinchek, would make a plan, pack up the car and then they get a call that someone had died. Vacation over.
Running a family funeral home wasn’t a 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday job for her family.

 Paula, now 54, and her brothers and sister grew up over the funeral home in Middletown, helping out at funerals, setting out flowers and greeting people. They learned to be respectful and quiet.
“There were people who were sad. We understood that,” she said.
She also grew up knowing she’d go away to college to become something else, like a nurse. But her freshman year at college, she started thinking about working in the family business.
“I went behind my parents’ back and researched what I needed to do and had it all outlined what I would have to do before I told them. I thought I was going to shock the hell out of them,” she said.
She was right.
Being the oldest, she saw how hard her parents worked to make the business a success. She didn’t want someone outside the family to take it over, she said.
Frank Matinchek and Peggy, his high school sweetheart, worked hard to make that happen, buying an old church parsonage for a funeral home and adding sections to it when money allowed.
“My first year, I did only three funerals,” Frank Matinchek said. To make money, he drove a school bus, worked in a furniture store and sold Fuller Brushes.
Peggy worked even while she was pregnant. “And paying bills [by playing] eeny, meany, miny, moe,” she said.
When Paula became a licensed funeral director and began working there full time, Frank Matinchek changed the name of the business to Matinchek and Daughter Funeral Home and Cremation Services Inc.
Frank still works. “I have my retirement day planned: The day after I die,” he said.
Now three generations of Matincheks run the business. Old-timers still ask for her father when they call, even though Paula has worked there full time since 1993.
When she went to mortuary school, there were three women in her class. Now classes are more than half women.
Like Paula, her son, Jon Graham, 29, and nephew, Zachary Matinchek, 27, grew up in the business, welcoming people and handing out cards. They do landscaping, remove bodies from homes, help with pre-arrangements, viewings and funerals. They both are working toward becoming licensed funeral directors and will probably take over the business one day.
Paula Matinchek is glad she took up the family business.
“It gives you immediate satisfaction because you’re helping people,” she said.