In 1974, I graduated from Lee County High School in Beattyville, KY, and needed a job for the Summer, before I started college at Morehead State. A good friend, Toni Wolfinbarger, told me her sister’s boyfriend was leaving Newnam’s Funeral Home and they needed someone to replace him. I talked to Cooge Newnam and he hired me.
That Summer I worked mowing Cooge’s steep backyard, sitting on the porch with Emmett Daugherty, Ronnie Paul Begley and Henry Sizemore; watching future customers go by, vacuuming the chapel, and even helping embalm people.
One day, Emmett’s aunt, I think it was, passed; so we took her up on the gurney in the old rickety elevator at Cooge’s and embalmed her. Emmett was the coroner and did most of the embalming work. I probably helped him with ten or twelve people, from children to the old. I watched him closely, especially the time it was his aunt. He was silent, his movement precise, efficient, and though I could usually never read emotion from him, I could tell that particular job affected him deeply.
Emmett taught me how to take flowers from the funeral home to the grave side and place them as they should be, how to set up the tent and take it down being sure to get it back in the truck exactly the way I found it; and much of the other work I did that Summer. I had never been around someone so precise and painstaking. I had always tended to be slapdash and disorganized.
On slow days as we sat on the porch talking, a question might come up, to which no one had an answer; a question such as: what type of tractor did Eddie Albert drive in Green Acres? Emmett talked less than the rest of us, but if we looked and he appeared to be seriously considering the question everything would stay quiet. Then, he would either tell us the answer or he would announce: “I don’t know.”
No one said: “I don’t know” the way he did. We knew he had carefully considered the question and since he knew a lot of things, we would all be patient until he was done reflecting on it. As a young man aspiring to know things and impress people with how much I knew, I learned from Emmett, it is more important to be honest with yourself and others, than to impress them with what you know.
Emmett lived so as to make the lives of others easier, more organized, less difficult. He thought more than he talked, and never seemed concerned with how other people viewed him. The question of who he was, was the one he never had to answer: “I don’t know”.
I loved Emmett Daugherty as a friend and mentor. I wish the family and friends comfort during this time.
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