Local embalmer Doris Baker a true trailblazer
ZANESVILLE - Doris Baker didn't care that she was one of only two women in her class at embalming school in the late 1930s. Honestly, she said she never really thought about it.
Now 97 (and 3/4) years old, Baker lives in the same neighborhood in Zanesville that she moved to in 1960. She still doesn't think of herself as a trailblazer, but she was one of the first female embalmers in the state. Additionally, she has been a member of Soroptimist for more than 70 years and has worked for much of her life to bring awareness and support to domestic violence victims.
Baker grew up in Clover Hill in Perry County before moving to Zanesville with her family when she was 10. Her grandparents had a farm, and she visited there often, doing chores such as gathering eggs and carrying water.
When she was a teenager, she started working for her father at the funeral home.
"I adored my father," Baker said.
Her father, William DeLong, owned a funeral home on Market Street, and Baker wanted to follow in his footsteps. He taught her the importance of honesty, respect and concern for other people's heartbreak.
"Mother used to say he'd go shopping and come home with nothing in his pockets," Baker said, because he would give it all away.
Baker graduated from Zanesville High School in 1936 and enrolled in embalming school in Cleveland. She was one of two women in her class; the other woman was from Pennsylvania and was there for nine months.
"I was the only girl for the whole year," Baker said.
She returned to work for her father, then married a funeral director and moved to Columbus. Later, she and her husband bought a funeral home in Zanesville that would eventually become the present-day DeLong-Baker & Lanning Funeral Home.
For the next several decades, she balanced home and work life in a time when many women stayed at home, said Julie Baker, Doris Baker's daughter-in-law.
"She did what young women today try to do," Julie Baker said. "She did it all back then."
Doris Baker didn't have to work all day everyday, and the balance wasn't difficult because of what she'd learned from her father and the aid of her husband.
As she was working for decades with people and families in grief, she could be asked how was she able to handle such a profession. But for her, the good outweighed the negative, and her priority was on helping others.
Once, she had to help prepare a woman who had been beaten for her funeral. The woman's face, Doris Baker remembered, was a horrible mess, and she worked for hours to make the woman presentable. When the family finally got to see her, they were confused about the lack of scarring.
"When the family walked in, they said: 'We thought he battered her face,' " she said. "That was worth all of the hours (spent) working."
Many years before, Doris Baker became one of the first members of Zanesville's local chapter of Soroptimist, an international organization dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls. She helped make caring for and supporting victims of domestic violence one of the priorities of the local organization, which helped lead to the organization supporting Transitions, the local domestic violence shelter.
In the mid-1980s, she retired and sold the funeral home.
Outside of working and raising her children, she loved to cook, read and travel. Her son, Bruce Baker, recalled going home for lunch when he was in middle school to find his mother cooking German food. Then it was Hungarian. Then Lebanese.
"She'd make her own baklava," he said.
She was always reading and took many trips around the world, including one journey down the Amazon River. Her favorite places were Scotland, Germany and Yugoslavia.
But despite all the countries she's been to, and all the cities she's seen, when she had a choice of whether to live in Zanesville, it was an easy decision to make. She lived here for nearly her entire life and did her best to help her community grow.
"Zanesville was my home," she said.
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