Gil Yates’ life filled with helping people

Gilbert Yates wants to be remembered as a contributor to Coeur d’Alene and a servant to its people.

That will be easy: The founder of Yates Funeral Homes and Crematory is a 60-year member of the Lions Club, a Mason for nearly that long, a longtime member of the Eagles, Lions and Elks and a life member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

He recounts dozens of civic projects in which he’s been involved, including cutting, piling and burning brush with fellow Lions Club members in the 1950s, as they built the Coeur d’Alene Municipal Golf Course, a club which he later served as president.

That was a civic contribution that wasn’t necessary for his own pleasure: He was a member of the Hayden Lake Country Club for 30 years.

And that isn’t all. He was one of the pioneers in the formation and administration of the Kootenai County Rodeo; was a leader of the Quarterback Club which donated a field house to Coeur d’Alene High School; chairman and adviser to the Kootenai County Saddle Club’s Junior Posse; member of the First United Presbyterian Church where he’s served as elder, deacon and in several other leadership positions; and he’s held a number of offices including president of the Idaho Funeral Service Association.

Many of those contributions led to his being named “Boss of the Year” in 1966 by the Coeur d’Alene Junior Chamber of Commerce.

Furthermore, he learned to fly from famed local pioneer aviatrix Gladys Buroker.

Mel Schmidt of Hayden, a 35-year teacher and coach in Coeur d’Alene and Spokane, credits Gil with fostering his interest in athletics.

“Sixty years ago, when I was 14, Gil borrowed equipment from the high school and started a junior football program which he coached. He was awesome, a great mentor and role model, providing financial support, too.

“Before beginning my career in education and coaching, I played football for Coeur d’Alene High and the University of Idaho, and we’re life-long friends.”

Born May 13, 1919, in Potlatch, Idaho, Gil’s parents were Martha and Frank Yates. His mother was a housewife and his father a sawyer at the Weyerhaeuser mill, then the largest white pine producer in the nation.

At the age of 7 he moved with his parents and infant sister Aileen to a nearby farm and confesses that, as a youngster, he never wore a shirt while harvesting, baling hay and operating a threshing machine.

He’s now under hospice care, dying of melanoma.

During his sophomore year in Potlatch High – where he played football for four years as an end, center and in the backfield – he decided he wanted to be a mortician to help people during their hours of need.

Gil wanted to model his life after Howard Short, a Moscow mortician who served the end-of-life needs of the people in the small community in which he lived.

After his high school graduation in 1938 Gil worked as an apprentice for the Cassidy Funeral Home in Coeur d’Alene then moved to Yakima for work in a funeral home there.

With his savings, a bank loan and some financial help from his father, he enrolled in the Cincinnati (Ohio) College of Embalming for the then-one-year-course. After his 1941 graduation he returned to Coeur d’Alene and worked for the Cassidy Funeral Home.

Three months after Pearl Harbor Gil joined the Navy which, because of his education and experience, waived the requirement that he attend boot camp. Instead, that service enlisted him as a pharmacist mate third class and slated him for duty as an embalmer.

He was a “plankholder” – a member of the first crew – of the USS Pinkney, a troop carrier and hospital ship, which he boarded in Seattle in December 1942.

During the months he spent in that city prior to sailing, he met Eileen, a nursing student, whom he married in May 1942.

His journeys on the Pinkney, where he served principally as a corpsman, covered some 144,000 miles. Typically she would pick up combat troops, deliver them to Guadalcanal, then transport wounded soldiers and Marines to New Zealand.

With 49 other corpsmen, he tended to some 1,800 patients on each trip.

One soldier, he recalls, suffered from jungle rot to the extent that Gil had to change his dressings every hour for three nights and days. After the war, he recounts, the soldier, now a civilian truck driver passing through Coeur d’Alene, spotted Gil on Sherman Avenue.

“He stopped, leaped from his truck, ran over to me on the sidewalk and hugged me, saying ‘Corpsman Yates, you saved my life,’ ” Gil recounts.

And among his souvenirs is a petition, dated March 27, 1943, and signed by 47 wounded enlisted men and officers: “We the undersigned wish to show our appreciation to Gilbert D. Yates, PhM2c for the fine hospitality and service rendered to us on our trip aboard the USS Pinkney.”

After 18 months at sea, during which he embalmed only two servicemen, Gil was assigned to a Navy hospital in San Diego, where he served the remainder of the war as a first aid instructor.

Eileen, who had worked as a surgical nurse supervisor and instructor in Seattle’s Providence Hospital while Gil was overseas, joined him, and the young couple returned to Coeur d’Alene following his discharge in late 1945.

He and Donald English then formed a partnership which lasted until 1952 when Gil established his own mortuary at 744 N. Fourth St. in Coeur d’Alene. It was in a building, once the Farragut Naval Base’s officers’ club, that became the Yates family home and mortuary. After extensive additions and remodeling, it remains headquarters for the family business which now includes a second funeral home in Hayden.

The Yates’ first child, Dexter, was born in 1945; Patty and Pam followed in 1949 and 1951.

Patty, now Patty Rodriguez, is a registered nurse in Post Falls, and Pam Cromer-Market of Spokane is the health services coordinator for a pilot project funded by Washington State.

Like his father, Dexter was a sailor and, after Vietnam War service, he decided to enter the family business. He attended the four-year College of Mortuary Science at the University of Minnesota then took over Yates Funeral Home on his father’s retirement in 1980.

Dexter’s son, Eli, one of Eileen and Gil’s six grandchildren, has graduated from the same Cincinnati mortuary science school – now a four-year institution – as his granddad, and is now understudy to his father in the family business.

Since retirement, Gil and Eileen have visited all 50 states, traveled the Caribbean, played on their snowmobile on North Idaho mountains and, until his illness grounded him, he carried a golf handicap of 10.

Looking back on his years in the Lake City, Gil recalls a sawmill town of some 7,000 when he returned from his war and “being able to walk down the street and greet people by name. That’s gotten pretty rare these days.”

His proudest achievement is his own family, of course, but after that are the services he provided to some 5,000 local families going through what he calls “some of their toughest times.”

“I tried to serve each of them as though their funeral was the most important one I’d ever worked. I got great satisfaction through helping them.”

Gil claims one other bonus of his profession: “Hey, I’m going to get a free funeral.”