George William Booker III

As head of the largest chain of funeral homes in Arkansas, you might expect Bill Booker to be a model of decorum, compassion and caring.

You’d be half right.

That half is Booker’s demeanor on the job at Roller Funeral Homes. It’s no act. He believes offering comfort to the bereaved is a high calling.

“We’re dealing with people at a really tender time in their life,” he said. “We see some heart-rending matters.”

See him in another context, though, and another side emerges.

The man’s just gotta sing!

As president of Little Rock’s downtown Rotary club, Booker has started nearly every meeting since last summer with a Broadway number. Standing in front of hundreds of the city’s most successful business leaders, he has serenaded them with everything from “Memory” (Cats) to “Music of the Night” (Phantom of the Opera), for which he donned a tuxedo and white mask. In a December meeting at the Clinton Presidential Center, he varied the routine a little with a movie hit — “White Christmas” — asking members to forgive “my attempt to be Bing Crosby for a few seconds.” By the time Booker reached for that last high note — “w-h-h-h-ite” — many members were quietly singing along.

“I just love music and I love Broadway,” says Booker, who has never had any formal musical training. “When you think about it, music plays a big role in our lives.”

Friends call Booker an astute businessman who has helped expand Roller while finding time to represent his industry as a whole and serve the community.

“Bill has worked both up front and behind the scenes on just about every progressive issue that has occurred in Arkansas since he entered the funeral business,” said Adam Robinson, president of Ralph Robinson & Son Funeral Home in Pine Bluff. “He has made major positive contributions.”

“Bill Booker personifies the word trust,” says Little Rock lawyer Graham Catlett. “Whenever he assumes a responsibility to do something, it will be done exactly right. He couples that with self-deprecating humor, which makes it very easy to be his friend. He has many friends.”

According to Catlett, Booker has just one weakness — Girl Scout cookies.

“He will buy them by the case, and preserve them so that he maintains an inventory all year long.”

Booker grew up in a funeral home, although it wasn’t the family business. He lived across the street from one in El Dorado, his mother’s hometown. He became close to the Young family, who owned it, using its parking lot as a playground and even helping unload caskets as they came in.

“They were there, just on duty, all the time,” Booker said of the Youngs. “As a child, your perspective of the seriousness of what they do didn’t register.”

Booker says he “wouldn’t be here today” if not for that positive experience, although he didn’t go directly into the business.

Instead, he enrolled at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, majoring in aviation and getting a pilot’s license before transferring to Arkansas State University at Jonesboro and earning a degree in accounting.

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During summers, he followed work as a late-night disc jockey for radio station KELD in El Dorado. He started each night with Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” a signal to his parents that he’d made it the station, then followed with tunes by Andy Williams, Dean Martin and other “adult contemporary” artists of the period. Although Booker loves Miller, listing him as his favorite composer, he considers the early rock ’n’ roll of the ’50s and 60s “when music was the best.” One night, he sneaked in “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” by rock ’n’ roll singer Joe South. “I didn’t think anybody would hear it at 3 in the morning. I got in trouble.”

After college, Booker passed the exam to become a certified public accountant and went to work in the Little Rock office of Ernst & Ernst, now Ernst & Young. Denver Roller, who’d opened his first funeral home in 1941, was a tax client.

“We just struck up a friendship, a mutual friendship and admiration,” Booker said.

Roller was looking for a full-time financial expert to join his business, and Booker signed on in 1980. He started as controller, becoming vice president for finance and then president in 1999. Booker’s main work is on the financial and administrative side of the company, although he is a licensed funeral operator and assists in the services of people with whom he has a connection.

Roller owns 27 funeral homes, nine cemeteries and two crematoriums in Arkansas, plus one home in Memphis. Altogether, that’s about double its size in the mid-1980s. Booker said consolidation is a trend in the funeral home industry and Denver Roller, who died in 1985, was at the forefront of it.

“He just had a tremendous amount of common sense. He was a visionary. He could see trends for our industry and others.”

As Roller has expanded, it has kept the names of the homes’ original owners as part of their titles. Booker notes that the firm’s oldest homes, Roller-Drummond in Little Rock and Roller-Crouch in Batesville, date to 1881 and 1859, respectively.

“There’s so much heritage and value and good will in that family home, we don’t want to lose that connection.”

Booker is also president of the Roller funeral-affiliated insurance business Citizens Fidelity Insurance Co., through which 60,000 Arkansans have pre-arranged their funerals with Roller.

Booker has represented his industry in the public policy arena for years. He’s a past president of the Arkansas Funeral Directors Association, current chairman of the Arkansas Cemetery Board, a former member of the National Funeral Directors Association, and chairman of the Arkansas Society of CPAs political action committee. He frequently appears before state legislative committees and regulatory bodies. He has worked on legislation that clarified which next of kin is in charge of the deceased, as well as a bill that shifted regulation of prepaid funerals from the Arkansas Securities Department to the Arkansas Insurance Department.

“It’s an opportunity to help educate the Legislature about what we do,” he said of his work at the state Capitol. “They really don’t know a lot about the details of that world. I guess every industry feels that way.”

Booker also became a volunteer for the American Diabetes Association, and then a member and treasurer of its national board. The disease claimed his father and grandfather.

He said he has been able to do much in his profession and beyond “only because of the Rollers,” who still own the firm. Denver Roller’s daughter, Sue Roller Jenkins, chairs its board, while her daughter, Renata Jenkins Byler, is the member of its executive team who Booker calls the “face, heart and soul of the company.”

Catlett, who represents Roller, said Booker has been “integral” to its growth. Robinson attributes his friend’s success partly to the fact that he is “a good listener. He’s not waiting to speak. He’s listening. That is a real attribute.”

FROM DAIS TO DELTA

Booker’s one-year term as president of the Rotary club lasts through June 30. He’s excited about one of the service organization’s newest projects. In December, the club was notified that it will receive a grant from Rotary International to help farmers in the Arkansas Delta find and develop markets for their products. The local club put up $60,000 in seed money for the effort, which is headed by Little Rock-based Heifer USA.

“This is the first time Rotary International money has come back to the state of Arkansas,” Booker said. “The point is, we have poor areas right here in Arkansas.”

He will preside over at least two more important ceremonial events for the club: a centennial gala in May; and the dedication in June of a plaza in the River Market District commemorating Rotary’s century in the community. One of the largest Rotary groups in the world, the Little Rock club was chartered Jan. 1, 1914.

“Bill has been a great leader for us,” said Karen Fetzer, the club’s executive director. “I think it’s been unusual to have someone who has Bill’s professional background and to have this other side, which is completely different, very fun, very engaging, very compassionate.”

Booker has a couple of regrets in life, which he appears to be doing everything in his power to make up for.

The first is that he wishes he’d gotten married the year he met his wife, Carolyn, which was 1973, on a plane to Atlanta. They didn’t see each other for almost three years, when they were both working in the same downtown office building. They married in 1978. “Fate put us back together,” Booker said.

He also wishes she hadn’t been forced to fight through breast cancer — twice. For Carolyn’s birthday in October, Booker’s fellow Rotarians joined him in singing Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” to her. The couple enjoy traveling and spending time on a family farm outside Pine Bluff.

Booker’s other big regret is that he didn’t see his first Broadway play until the age of 40. He has now seen Phantom of the Opera nine times, The Lion King, Mamma Mia! and a few others nearly as often.

Booker said he plans to stay as involved in his profession, community work and other interests as long as possible.

“I can see from my own vocation that sometimes people’s plans haven’t included their own demise,” he said. “Every day’s a blessing.”