In times of need, the Medina County community has learned to depend on the services of Waite & Son Funeral Homes. A family owned and operated firm, they've served the local community for over one hundred years and have helped us deal with some of our most difficult moments. We recently spoke with Harold Waite who offered this description of their services:

Waite & Son Funeral Homes was started by my great-grandfather in 1902. His son Harold, my grandfather, followed in his footsteps as did my father, Ralph. My brother, Darrell, and I both came into the business with my dad in the mid 1970s. Darrell came in right out of high school and I worked for a couple other people for a few years before coming aboard in 1976. Waite & Son Funeral Homes has been in Medina since the early 1920s and we opened another funeral home in Brunswick in 1994. My son is in college and is interested in coming into the business when he graduates and Darrell's son, Andy, is going to be starting here as soon as he completes his apprecticeship and receives his license.

The Medina funeral home was built in 1962 and we completed an extensive remodeling in 2002. Our original chapel seats over two hundred people and our new chapel seats one hundred and can be divided into either two or four smaller rooms. We've added a new main entrance, a new main hallway, several new offices, and a new display room for caskets. We added a community room which will seat one hundred for lunch and the entire home is now handicapped accessible. We have one of the largest parking lots of any funeral home in the area and can park close to one hundred cars.

We have always tried to serve the families who choose Waite & Son Funeral Homes with a lot of compassion, caring, and fairness. We treat them the way we would want to be treated and we live by the Golden Rule. We have been very blessed over the past one hundred years with a lot of good friends. Our goal has always been to help people through a very difficult stage in life and to provide them with the information needed to make intelligent decisions at a difficult time. We want them to know what their options are and we'll gently walk them through every aspect of making their arrangements.

Our family has always believed in supporting the community and giving back to the community in any way we can. Darrell is involved in the Chamber of Commerce and my dad has been very involved with the Rotary. Our whole family has been very active in scouting and my grandfather and I have been involved in the Kiwanis. Most of our staff is involved in their churches' activities and we are all supporters of the sports teams and bands from the local schools. We believe that giving back to the community has always been an important part of our business operations.

Although we know a lot of people, have many friends, and we feel really blessed by those relationships, when a community is growing as fast as Medina is growing, we don't always get to meet a lot of the newer people coming into the community. We want the new members of the community to know that we take care of everyone in a very fair, honest, and straightforward manner. It's how we've always done business and how we always will.

There are times in life when we need to depend on those whose mission is to serve their fellow man with compassion and caring. As the Waite family prepares to begin their fifth generation of service to our families, they continue to be a source of guidance and strength in the Medina community's times of need.