Jim Larkin

Visitation for Jim Larkin will be held on Tuesday, January 28 at the Warren-McElwain Mortuary Chapel from 5:00-8:00PM. Services will be held on Wednesday, January 29 at the Warren-McElwain Mortuary Chapel at 10:00AM. 

James Edwin Larkin, the ninth of eleven children of James Edwin and Catherine Eliza Semmens Larkin, was born on October 18, 1950 in Creston, Iowa and entered his rest on January 12, 2025 in Costa Rica.

The family moved to Brookfield, Missouri and St. Joseph, Missouri where he started school and in 1960, they moved back to Creston. In his junior year of high school, he visited with Dwight Wright at Coen’s Home for Funerals. Jim had watched Dwight the year before when his best friend’s father was killed in a car accident. He started helping Frank McKasson at the Keating-McKasson Funeral Home in 1968 while attending S.W.C.C. Frank McKasson taught him how to organize and conduct a seamless service and about cosmetics and embalming.

During the summer of 1969, Jim moved back to St. Joseph and lived with his sister Jenny while he worked for Meierhoffer-Fleeman Funeral Home. There he worked with a team of professionals led by Walter Meierhoffer Jr., one of the finest funeral directors and men Jim ever knew. The staff were all at the peak of their professional careers and the firm functioned flawlessly. Asked by Mr. Meierhoffer on his last day if he had learned anything, he replied “yes” and was asked what. “The right attitude. I know now that every funeral is the only funeral that family is having, and the last family deserves the same perfection as the first.”

Jim attended mortuary school in Chicago, Illinois and started his apprenticeship in September of 1971 at Dunn’s Funeral Home in Des Moines where he was proud to have been hired. He was given the “good to hire” recommendation by Ed Coen, owner of the funeral home in Creston he had not worked for. These were the early days of the corporate funeral firms and Paul Hamilton’s International Funeral Service, and their headquarters were just a block down Grand Avenue. When rumors circulated that Dunn’s was going to be sold, Jim approached Kenneth Roland in Corning, Iowa about the possibility of continuing his apprenticeship there. He was told it would be a 24/7 work week except for one weekend off per month and at something less than the $125 a week he was making at Dunn’s.

Mr. Roland called him back after he had investigated Jim’s reputation in Creston and offered to sell him the funeral home. On January 1, 1972, he purchased the firm after his father co-signed the down payment loan with him. This was when bankers could make “signature” loans, without collateral, based only on their trust and honesty of the customer. Jim bought the Bender Funeral Home in Lenox, Iowa in 1974 with a signature loan but without a co-signer, and that summer he built a funeral chapel in Massena when Donald Curry, the president of the Farmers State Bank, gave him 100% financing. As a young businessman in southwest Iowa, he benefited by learning from Clifford McGregor, Dow Keever, and George Reynolds.

On March 10, 1973 he was united in marriage with Jennifer Lynn Stargell at Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church in Corning. This marriage was blessed with the birth of Emily Lynn and Nathaniel Jay. Jim became an adoptive father in 1984 and a foster father in 1990 to Joe Herrera. In addition to the lessons he learned from his parents, Jim also learned lessons on parenting from his in-laws, Lindy and Jean Stargell.

In the first draft lottery Jim had “won” the #5 spot, which meant as soon as his student deferment expired, he would have won an all-expense paid trip to Vietnam. After the first lottery in 1969, the rules were changed so the draft board had 90 days to draft you or you then dropped to the bottom of the list. When the draft was suspended for an unspecified time to stop rioting across the country, Jim immediately took the biggest gamble of his life. He went to the draft board and told secretary Betty Mustang that he wanted to drop his deferment and go 1-A. She said, “Oh Jimmy, are you sure?” He told her no, he wasn’t sure, but it was only a bet he could make. Nixon was called “Tricky Dick” for good reasons, and he re-instated the draft after 93 days. Only a very few whose fathers were not Senators or wealthy real estate developers actually escaped Tricky Dick’s ruse. Jim considered this his biggest winning bet, since he never gambled except to bet on himself.

Jim was initiated into Crest City Lodge #522 on December 11, 1971 and raised a Master Mason on September 9, 1972 by his brother-in-law, Dick Bradley, who was a Worshipful Master. He was also a member of the Elks Lodge and Rotary clubs in Corning, Lenox, St. Joseph and Lawrence. He served the Corning community on the Senior Housing Board for several terms and was asked by Austin Turner to take his seat on the Board of Directors of S.W.C.C. in Creston where he was re-elected for two terms.

A life-long Democrat, he started putting up campaign signs for LBJ in 1964. As a young funeral director in the early 1970’s, he would listen as obituaries recounted the lives that had gone from horses and outdoor toilets to TV, electricity and a man on the moon! Jim’s recounting of the changes in his own lifetime was from the integrity of “the buck stops here” with Harry Truman, to having witnessed a President assassinated, commit felonies and resign, and be impeached for lying under oath. He also saw a President selected by the Supreme Court with less popular vote in a power grab by the Supreme Court, the joyous elections of Barack Obama, and the shame of desecrating the White House and our national honor by the “Pussy Grabber,” a man so base that he would mock a handicapped person with cerebral palsy, a man unworthy of the human race.

Jim was a founding and continuous member of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.; founding member of the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History, and since 2011, the N.A.A.C.P. Through the years, Jim enjoyed different hobbies: photography including doing his own darkroom work, down hill skiing, collecting antiques and classic cars, and riding four motorcycles. He was most proud of his pilot’s license and having flown his own plane from the Rockies to Detroit and from Canada to Dallas.

While most people unfamiliar with the family in Creston would assume Jim was spoiled as the only boy, the truth was that he was expected to do all the work his father required of his only son. Jim always said his father was the hardest-working man in town, and he made darn sure Jim was number two. In many ways though, that schedule of starting to work at age 10 created a pattern of work for most of his life that allowed him to pay for all his own schooling, buy his first car for cash, and finish school debt free.

As a funeral director, Jim owned and operated 36 different funeral homes in five states - ten of which he started. He was once the seventh largest privately-owned provider of funeral care west of the Mississippi River. He also built and operated 13 Casey’s General Stores as their largest franchisee. It was in Corning in 1984 that he secured permission from Casey’s to experiment with selling made-from-scratch pizza. He was told if he bought used equipment, he wouldn’t lose too much money. High school friend Arlin Beemer talked Jim into the newest state of the art small conveyor oven, and they fundamentally changed not only Casey’s but also the convenience store industry. Through the years, he owned and operated (with various degrees of success and failure) a car wash, a clothing store, a monument company, DEJAVU - an internationally famous nightclub in Costa Rica, and several hotels. In 1985 he co-founded Breadeaux Pizza and grew it to the tenth largest pizza chain in the country before he was forced out in 1992 for being gay.

Following his divorce, Jim became the custodial parent for three of four children. In 1997 he sold his beautiful home in St. Joseph and moved his daughter Emily Lynn to Costa Rica to secure better care and climate for her. It was during this time he met Victor, and after 18 years together, they were married on January 9, 2015 in Riverside, CA.

After Emily’s death on September 25, 2000, Jim survived this loss with the love and support of Victor, his sisters, and some of the best friends to ever bless anyone’s life. Jim also mourned the loss of his parents; an infant son, Nathaniel Jay; five sisters: Janet Larkin, Joyce Hutchinson, June Nelson, Jenny Hutchinson and Joy Pantelis; and eight brothers-in-law: Dick Bradley, Bob Kenney, Roger Claycomb, Bill Hutchinson, George Pantelis, James Morgan, John Lukehart and Everett Nelson.

Since 1990, Jim’s hobby had been to travel, with flying on the Concorde SST as the most extraordinary. He arranged and treated siblings with vacations including a Caribbean cruise; a trip through Wales to Ireland; Bal; 4th of July in Washington, DC; Buenos Aires, Uruguay & the Panama Canal, and Costa Rica. One evening in 1972, Jim made funeral arrangements with Merrit Dillon for his wife. Merritt reminisced at length of the many trips they had taken all over the world. Jim always remembered Merritt’s words to him when he’d expressed surprise: “Jim, all my neighbors planted more beans and picked more corn than me. They all fed more cattle and butchered more hogs than I did, but most of them have never been beyond Omaha. I always figured that once I spent the money and took a trip, the bank could never repossess it.”

Jim became a believer in these words and through the years rewarded staff with trips, figuring the memories of the trip would last far longer than memories of a bonus.

Jim’s long-time attorney David Updegraff once told him: “You may die rich, or you may die poor, but you will never die bored.” 

It is Jim’s hope you will remember him as someone who tried to be a good son, brother, father, partner-in-life with those he shared love, a good business partner and always, a good friend. He asks you to remember the times he succeeded and please forgive the times he failed.

Jim is survived by his spouse, Vika Perez Larkin; his foster son, Joe Herrera of North Kansas City; his grandchildren: Allyssa, Kianna and Grayson. Also surviving are his sisters: JoAnn Bradley of Creston; Jean Morgan of Snellville, GA; Judy Kenny of Gilbert, AZ; Catherine Jane Larkin of Madison, WI; and Janette Larkin of Liberty, MO; and by many nieces and nephews. Also surviving are his ex-wife and friend Jennifer Larkin of St. Joseph and friends Bob Walton and Brad Van Brimmer, both of Kansas City and Brian Gach of California.

Charities Jim supported that are appropriate for memorial donations include United Cerebral Palsy in St. Joseph and any charity of your choice benefiting children. 

 Jim lived by the words of Emily Dickinson: “Because I could not stop for death, She kindly stopped for me.”