Castro Institution Sullivan’s Funeral Home Maintains Tradition

By Kat Murti

People do not often consider funeral homes a pillar of society, but it is hard to describe Sullivan’s Funeral Home on Market Street any other way. Much of the Castro literally around Sullivan’s, which was founded in 1924 when the area was sparsely populated.

In the eighty years since, the Sullivan family has formed close ties in the community and watched San Francisco mature, while Sullivan’s status as a family-owned business has helped it prosper.
Jim Sullivan, who co-owned the home until two years ago, has spent most of his life working for the family business. His grandfather, an Irish immigrant, decided to open the home to fill a niche in the community before a state licensing board even existed to oversee funeral homes and mortuaries. He died in 1942, less than twenty years after the home’s opening leaving the business to Sullivan’s father to run with his widowed grandmother. When Sullivan and his brother came of age, they took over.

Though the next generation chose to enter different career fields, Sullivan’s is still family-owned. Two years ago, Jim Sullivan was facing health problems that required him to be hospitalized and his brother was considering retiring. Sullivan asked the Duggan-Serra family, which operated two funeral homes at the time, to watch over Sullivan’s while he was in the hospital. After he was released, the Sullivan brothers sold Sullivan’s to the Duggan-Serra family. Despite the sale, Jim Sullivan still works at the home, doing the activities he particularly enjoys, including meeting families, making arrangements and directing services.

“We sold they business and they, in turn, offered to keep the business here,” said Sullivan. “They continue to run it the same way my brother and I ran it – try to get good service, be helpful to people. The benefit I get is I don’t have to worry about payroll and overhead anymore. It makes life easier.”

Although a few minor changes have been made, including converting two rooms formerly used as a lounge into a reception room where mourners can congregate for coffee, tea, or catered refreshments, Sullivan’s is still operated in much the same way and according to the same standards as it always has been, perhaps because the Duggan-Serras share a similar family history and understanding of the funeral business.

In 1903, William Duggan, an Irish immigrant with a background in raising horses, moved to San Francisco, where he found a job caring for the horses at a funeral home. By 1916, he had married his former employer’s youngest daughter and started his own funeral home on Valencia Street — Duggan & O’Reilly Co., now called Driscoll’s Valencia Street Serra Mortuary. Duggan’s son, Bud, started working part-time at the family business at the age of 13, and after graduating from San Francisco College of Embalming with a Doctor of Mortuary Science degree, returned to work full-time. Then, in 1963, he and his wife, assisted by their three children, opened a second larger home in Daly City. The two Duggan homes and Sullivan’s are still operated by the Duggan children and other family, although the business has grown considerably from its humble origins and now employs a large staff.

“In this day and age, more and more funeral homes are being bought out by large conglomerate corporations, and obviously their basis is to serve families, but there’s a very high emphasis on profitability with corporations, whereas our success over the years has been based on a being a family business,” said Dan Duggan, President of Duggans-Serra Mortuary in Daly City.

“Service and customer satisfaction is the bottom line,” he said. “And I like to think we have a very good reputation in the San Francisco area. If you have families and they like what you do, we like to think they’ll come back in the future.”

Sullivan’s Funeral Home is located at 2254 Market St. For more information call 621-4567.

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