Marie Vross of Niles pioneered career as funeral director

By ED RUNYAN

runyan@vindy.com

NILES

When Krysten Civitelli of Connecticut saw a 1947 graduation photo from the Cleveland College of Mortuary Science at an antique store near her home, her sense of curiosity had to be satisfied.

Civitelli was browsing with her mother, when she saw the large, framed item for sale. It contained about 40 individual photos of the graduates, but one stood out.

“I took a closer look and was surprised to see that there was one female student,” Civitelli said in a letter. “Her name said “M. Rossi.” I just kept coming back to the photo, wondering about who “M. Rossi” was. I decided to do a little investigating.” She also bought the photo.

On the Internet, she found an article about Marie Rossi Vross from Niles, the only woman in her mortuary-science class, and it contained a photo of her. Civitelli found a connection between Marie and the Joseph Rossi & Sons Funeral Home in Niles and wrote a letter.

It told of the graduation photo and said “‘Thank you’ for putting such a smile on my face and a little ‘curiosity and adventure’ in my life.”

It led to a conversation with Georgiana Naoum, who explained that her mother, Marie Vross, now 92, retired in 2001 after a 50-plus year career as a funeral director but still lived in the house at the funeral home where she and her husband, George, now deceased, raised Georgiana and her siblings.

Civitelli, who is an author, said learning about Marie Vross confirmed her theory that Vross had been a pioneer as a female funeral director.

“It was over the top of what I expected,” Civitelli said. “She is an amazing woman.”

The letter also made Vross wonder something: How did that graduation photo end up in an antique store in Connecticut?

Vross had a copy of the graduation photo at one time herself, but over the years it disappeared. Fortunately, Civitelli offered to send Vross hers.

Vross said her fellow mortuary students came from “all over,” including the northeast United States, so she suspects that’s the reason it showed up in Connecticut.

“I was the only woman in that class,” Vross said of her year-long training in Cleveland a few years after graduating from high school. “There were a few before me.”

For two years before her schooling she was an apprentice in the funeral home her father, Joseph Sr., started in the 1920s after arriving in Niles from the Scranton, Pa., area.

“The first couple of months, I was kind of bashful, shy, and they treated me like their sister,” she told The Vindicator of her Cleveland training. “We had fun and joked around.”

When she was 21, she was old enough to take the test and get her mortuary license. She passed the test and continued working with her parents at the family funeral home. A little while after she and George got married in 1951, George also joined the business.

Naoum says at the time her mother became a funeral director, it was rare for a woman. “Back in the day, most women didn’t work, but she had a successful career. She was a trail blazer. Now women can do anything.”

When Vross was asked whether she thought of herself as a pioneer, she just said, “Maybe it was because I was born into it,” referring to the family business. Vross said it seemed fairly natural to her to go into the funeral-home business.

Her main memory was of making a lot of friends. “They think of you as family when you do all those things for them,” she said of being a funeral director. “I got along with everybody.”

After her father died in 1953, “My mom and I did everything,” she said. Her younger brother, Joseph F. Rossi Jr., runs the business now.