Reid founded Reid’s New Golden Gate Funeral Home
Arthur Reid Jr. was 13 when his family relocated to Milwaukee in the 1950s and the future business leader in the city’s African American community soon discovered where he wanted to make his mark.
Reid, who would go on to found Reid’s New Golden Gate Funeral Home, took an interest in the funeral business when Lamar Williamson, the father of a friend and a long-time African American funeral director in the city, invited him to try it out.
“One day in 1956, Mr. Williamson came to me and asked if I wanted to learn the funeral business or if I wanted to keep fooling around like the other kids outside,” Reid told the Milwaukee Times in 2015. “I never looked back.”
Last Friday, Reid’s family gathered at Reid’s New Golden Gate Funeral Home on Teutonia Avenue in Milwaukee to celebrate his life. Reid died May 27. He had just turned 82.
Reid, born in Jackson, Tennessee, began working in the business to learn the trade before he helped found Reid and Yandell Funeral Home, which would eventually become the first Golden Gate Funeral Home in 1986. In 2012, Reid opened a second funeral home in Racine before opening the third location on Teutonia Avenue.
George Williams remembered Reid as an expert at his craft.
“People trusted him. And they trusted him to do the very, very best for their loved ones who were deceased,” Williams said. The two met in the 1980s at the St. Matthew CME Church in Milwaukee. “Craft at his art. The very best.”
Reid cared for the living just as he did the dead. Along with his wife, Mary, Reid partnered with Channel 12 and the Milwaukee Times to donate laptops to high schoolers recognized as scholarship recipients during the Black Excellence Awards.
Williams remembered Reid as fashionable — when he wasn’t in uniform — and as the consummate family man. “Just a wonderful daddy,” he said.
Reid’s daughter, Sheila, is now in charge of day-to-day operations at New Golden Gate and owns her own funeral home in the Chicago area. “She was second in command; now she’s first in command,” Williams said.
Former neighbor Myra Holland, who lived in the same duplex as Reid when her family moved to the city, remembered him as focused and ambitious in a news release issued by the family.
“He was very ambitious and well organized,” she said. “Even when he was a young man, he had a plan to own his own funeral home. He accomplished his goal.”
Reid his survived by his wife, Mary Smith-Reid, his daughters Phyllis Reid and Sheila Reid-Johnson, and by his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Services were held Saturday at Greater Mt. Sinai Church of God in Christ in Milwaukee.