A calling that runs in the family

Two of Louie’s great uncles each owned a funeral home here — W.A. Jones, who ran Jones Funeral Home, and Decatur Longmire, who ran Longmire Funeral Home. When Louie came to visit as a child, he would help out around the family’s business: carrying, watching, listening. The work made an impression that never left him.

He was born in 1967 at Fort Polk, Louisiana, the first child of a military family, and raised in Atmore. As a young teenager he met the man who would shape his life: Eugene Ervin, who let him help around Ervin Funeral Home in Atmore. Mr. Ervin handed him work to do, and Louie was hooked. From then on he worked in a funeral home through college, and every year after, no matter where life took him.

He graduated from Atmore High School in 1985 and went on to Alabama A&M University in Huntsville, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Marketing and Management. His father had encouraged him to explore other avenues in college so that he would have versatility to go with his calling. Louie took that advice, and he was always grateful for it.

The years that followed took him far from Atmore — business and retail management with the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, with Southwest Airlines, and with Sears, in positions that carried him across the country and taught him how people are truly served. He worked at a funeral home during college and every year after that, no matter where he went. And he came home to Atmore whenever he could. When his father fell ill, Louie moved closer to be near him. His father died a month and a day after he arrived.

He had talked with his mentor about opening a funeral home in Atmore. Mr. Ervin — Chief, as Louie called him — told him his future was in Anniston and did not want him to leave. But Louie had a desire to come back to Atmore, and that desire won out.

He came home in 1997, and in January of 1998 he opened Turner Funeral Chapel — in the very building where his great uncle’s funeral home had once operated. His office was the room that had been his mother’s bedroom when he was a boy.

Louie has described this work the same way from the beginning. “The funeral business is more than just a business,” he says. “It is a ministry, and you have to have compassion for people.”

That conviction is why families come back to him years after a service, asking about life insurance, veterans’ benefits, and Social Security — and why they find someone ready to help rather than someone waiting to be finished. It is why he tells the truth about cost, even when it would be easier to say nothing. “It is our job to build a trust with the family and not take advantage of them in their emotional state,” he says.

Louie has never believed a funeral director should be a stranger in his own town. In 2000 he was elected to the Atmore City Council, where he has worked for new ideas and for the things a community needs in order to thrive — a better education for its children, good jobs to bring them home, and a reason to stay. He keeps a special heart for young people, and he has said plainly that the future of a place is bound up in how it encourages them.

And he has never lost sight of the work itself. Asked what gives him the strength to be a funeral director, he answers without hesitation: “I love people, helping people. I can’t take away the loss, but I can make it better by being compassionate.”

Nearly three decades on, Turner Funeral Chapel serves families of every faith — in our own chapel, in the church of your choosing, or at the graveside. We offer pre-arranged funerals, so your wishes can be recorded in writing and your family spared those decisions on the hardest day of their lives. And we keep the same promise Louie made when he opened the doors in January of 1998: to serve with dignity, compassion, and excellence.