A Little Less Conversation

Sid Oman passed away this past Monday. Mayor emeritus of my hometown of Chesapeake, VA through three terms in the 1980's (as well as one year as the mayor of Elizabeth City, NC) and co-owner of Oman Funeral Home & Crematory, Sid was an old friend of my family, even delivering the eulogies at both my grandmother's and Uncle Biscoe's funerals. When he and his wife moved to the small town of Great Bridge in 1964, the town where I grew up, he often regales that neighbors immediately informed him that he should only buy his meat at my grandfather John Pittman's butcher shop, which resided in the tiny Great Bridge grocery shop next to the river and bridge itself. My dad lived as a boy in the apartments upstairs and worked as a shoeshine boy at the barber shop next door, and Sid befriended my family, watching my father grow up over the years. A few days after my mom and dad were married, my mother remembers sitting in the car at the Great Bridge Exxon station on the corner of Battlefield and Cedar while my father chatted briefly with Ray (then the long-time manager of the only gas station in town) and Sid sneaking up behind him with a measuring tape and jokingly "measuring my dad for a coffin" like one of those scenes in the old westerns where the undertaker measures the unsuspecting new hired gun behind his back.

So what other significance is there to post about the passing of a former politician and funeral home director? Well, Sid Oman was also once the drummer for The Nairobi Trio on The Ernie Kovac's Show from the 1950's, one of my favorite television programs of all time (Trenton, NJ-born Oman was at the time a mortuary student at Temple University in Philadelphia, where The Ernie Kovacs Show was filmed).



R.I.P. Mr. Oman. I'll be humming that tune in my head all week.