How a Funeral Home Became Warner Records

Corporate history is weird

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How a Funeral Home Became Warner Records

By Chris Dalla Riva

Nintendo has always been a gaming company but probably not in the way you think. The Japanese firm was originally founded in 1889 to produce handmade playing cards. Given that the Game Boy wouldn’t come out for another century, you might be wondering what they were doing for all those decades. Well, mostly making playing cards.

After the firm went public in the 1960s, they used an influx in cash to expand into other lines of business. That’s when they started to dabble into electronics. That dabbling turned into an obsession, the company soon dedicating more resources to the nascent video game business. When Donkey Kong was released in 1981, an empire was born.

Nintendo’s original Donkey Kong

In short, corporate history is strange. If you want to weather the highs and lows of the market, you’ve got to be nimble. That nimbleness is even necessary when you work in a line of business that is allegedly recession-proof, like funeral homes. How could you go out of business when people are always dying? Steve Ross wasn’t one to rest on his laurels, though. You’ve got to go back a bit to understand what I mean.

In 1897, Louis Meyers established a business in Manhattan focused on transportation for funeral services. As the business grew, Meyers began to open up his own funeral parlors. His grandson Edward Rosenthal would make it the largest funeral services group in the United States by the 1950s. Around that time, he brought his daughter’s husband Steve Ross into the business.

Credit: The New York Times

According to his obituary in The New York Times, Ross realized that the funeral limos were not being used during the evening, so he “arranged for a large limousine service to hire the cars in the evening.” That company, according to the Times, “became instantly profitable.”

With a good sense for business opportunities, Ross launched a rent-a-car company. This is when the web of companies began to spin in all directions. The funeral and rent-a-car businesses were soon merged with the Kinney Parking Company, a parking lot operator with ties to organized crime. A cleaning company joined the bunch before Ross took the company public in 1962 as the “Kinney Service Corporation.”

Ross was not to be satisfied with car and funeral services, though. In 1969, Kinney purchased Warner-Seven Arts, the conglomerate that controlled the assets of the Warner Bros. film studio and a handful of record labels, including Reprise and Atlantic. A few years later, the non-entertainment assets were sold off and Steve Ross was now the head of the newly named Warner Communications. A man who made his money in the drab corridors of funeral homes was now thrust into the posh world of music and movies.