Helen Davis, 96; brought elegance to Roxbury funeral home

Helen Davis and Jackie Kennedy looked over a book.

Unfailingly comforting to the bereaved who passed through her Roxbury funeral home, Helen Young Davis was a regal presence, elegant and mannered.

Beneath her graciousness lay a steely will, however. A widow who made her husband's prosperous business even more successful, she set high standards and insisted that tasks be performed with a measure of decorum.

"She didn't allow men to be in her company with their hats on indoors - she was a real lady of her times," said Rebecca Ridley, who learned the funeral business under the tutelage of Mrs. Davis and purchased Davis Funeral Home on Walnut Avenue six years ago. "She had to be tough because she was a businessperson at a time when women weren't businesspeople. And she insisted on being called Mrs. Davis. She did not let people who were not friends call her by her first name."

Mrs. Davis, who retired just shy of her 90th birthday in 2001, died of heart failure on Dec. 23 at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She was 96 and had lived in Chestnut Hill after residing on the floors above her funeral home for more than 50 years.

"The business became synonymous with her style," said Hassell McClellan, a Boston College professor who became an adopted son of sorts to Mrs. Davis after her own son died in the early 1970s. "She was an extremely prominent businesswoman and one of the leaders in the community."

And though Mrs. Davis spent her days consoling those who had just experienced the death of someone close, with business colleagues "she could be very sharp-tongued," McClellan said with a laugh. "She tolerated nothing less than excellence."

Short in stature, Mrs. Davis "would tell people, 'I'm a little piece of leather, but well put-together,' " McClellan said. "In fact, we were saying that now she's in heaven, telling God how things should be run, checking everybody, making sure there aren't any spots on their robes, and having a vodka gimlet."

Born in Little Rock, Ark., Helen Camile Young was the eldest of seven children. She went to Talladega College in Alabama, then graduated from Fisk University in Nashville.

Working with the national YWCA and as a fund-raiser for the United Negro College Fund, she lived in Chicago and Indianapolis. She also married her college sweetheart, McClellan said, a relationship that ended in divorce after the couple had a son, John Howard.

Invited back to Fisk, she became the first woman to serve as the university's alumni secretary. In 1950, her work at Fisk took her to an event at Harvard University. While in Boston, she met Norris G. Davis, who had founded Davis Funeral Home in 1935.

"Everyone remembers Norris G. Davis because he was such a dashing bachelor," Ridley said. "He was a handsome, smart, kind gentleman. She was quite a catch, too. She was quite beautiful, and she was really, I think, a socialite."

Years earlier in Little Rock, Mrs. Davis had placed second in a beauty contest and was photographed for a newspaper wearing high heels and a bathing suit. A sash identified her as "Miss Melrose Tea Room," her sponsor from the black community's business district along 9th Street in the city.

After a short courtship in Boston, she married Davis.

"She always said - and she said this to a thousand people - that she met him in June and married him in August," Ridley said.

"She was the talk of Boston because all of the women were chasing Norris Davis," McClellan said.

At her husband's suggestion, Mrs. Davis went back to school and in 1955 became a licensed funeral director. For the 17 years of their marriage, the couple used the success of their business to help others by making charitable donations and privately helping people through rough spells.

Mrs. Davis also was a trustee of Fisk University and served on the boards of a host of organizations, from the Boston YWCA, to the Boston and Vicinity Club of the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs. And for years, she opened her home to young black women from around the country who had come to the Boston area to attend college and ended up calling her "Aunt Helen."

She also helped bring the Ebony Fashion Fair to Boston and coordinated the benefit event for more than a quarter century. In 1986, when the Fashion Fair raised money for Fisk, Mrs. Davis was awarded a Norwegian blue fox boa for her work as an outstanding alumna of the university.

"Although she had achieved great things and accolades and was an important person in the community, for me, the most important things about her were the small ways she related to people," Ridley said. "She always had time for her friends, always had time to ask about how their parents were doing, always asked about their children. She rarely missed birthdays, never forgot a face, rarely forgot a name. It was millions of moments I witnessed that showed she was just genuinely concerned with people's welfare."

The day before Christmas, a private service was held in Oak Grove Cemetery in Medford, where Mrs. Davis was buried next to her husband, who died in 1967. Separately and together, the two had run Davis Funeral Home for 66 years.

"She is a person who will be missed in the community," McClellan said. "For many years, if you lived in some parts of Boston, you probably had someone in your family who was buried by Mrs. Davis."

Discreet to the end, Mrs. Davis kept secret a half-century of private conversations with her many customers.

"I tried to get her to write a book, and she said, 'I could not write a book because there are too many stories that I could not tell. I know too much,' " McClellan said, laughing.

Mrs. Davis leaves a brother, Theo K. Young Sr. of Washington, D.C

A memorial service will be held at noon on Jan. 19 in St. Mark's Congregational Church in Roxbury.