But those families moved out of San Francisco, taking their business with them. Duggan’s daughter, Leticia Duggan Welch, was running the funeral home in those years. She had to lay off most of her employees, and sold her house on Dolores Street to buy paint for the funeral home, Welch says.
More recently, local Black communities have come to Duggan’s for funeral services, and in the 1990s, the business was running about 700 funerals a year, up from 100 or so a year in the 1980s.
“We’ve been the biggest provider for that community since the late 1990s,” Welch said, noting that San Francisco used to have a half-dozen Black-owned funeral homes, but none remain. And now, “that population is declining. No one can afford to live here.”
These days, business is quiet, more like it was in the 1970s, Welch says. He makes most of his money from a cluster of other death-centered businesses, including a crematorium in Benicia, the Chapel By the Sea funeral home in Pacifica, and College Chapel Mortuary, an online service that provides low-cost cremations.
Welch is holding out hope that he won’t be the last in his family to keep Duggan’s alive. His daughter, an engineer who’s worked on biotechnology labs and the Uber headquarters on Third Street, isn’t interested in switching careers. But his son James, a National Guardsman who maintains Chinook helicopters, “thinks about it. He says — maybe when he’s more mature,” Welch says. His niece, Megan Doyle, recently joined the business in an administrative role.
In the meantime, Welch says, “I’ll keep it going as long as I can.”
