Funeral director was civic leader
12/2/2000BLISSFIELD - Harvey Parker Tagsold, Sr., who owned and operated the Tagsold Funeral Home and the former Tagsold Furniture Store here for almost 50 years and was on the Blissfield school board for 16 years, died Thursday at his home in Chandler, Ariz.
He was 96 and had lived with his daughter, Janis Hoenig, near Phoenix since 1995. He never recovered from a stroke that he suffered in 1994, his grandson, Douglas Tagsold, said.
Mr. Tagsold's father, Otto, bought the furniture store, which also sold caskets, in 1913. Mr. Tagsold joined him in the business in 1928 after graduating from Worsham College of Mortuary Science in Illinois.
His father died a couple years later and Mr. Tagsold operated the businesses with the help of one or two employees at a time until his son H. Parker, Jr., joined the business in the late 1950s.
He opened the funeral home in its existing location in the late 1940s.
Mr. Tagsold retired in 1979 when he was 75, the year before his grandson Douglas Tagsold joined the business. The furniture store closed in 1981.
He was a member of the Blissfield board of education from 1940 to 1956 and was president from 1948 to 1954.
He graduated from Blissfield High School in 1923 and Adrian College in 1927. There, he was a member of Alpha Tau Omega fraternity and met the woman who would become his wife, the former Doris Hawkins. They married in 1928.
He was a director of the Jipson-Carter State Bank, which is now part of KeyBank, from 1938 to 1982 and was chairman from 1977 to 1980.
He joined the Blissfield Rotary in 1936 and served as president in 1956.
He was a member of the First Presbyterian Church in Blissfield all his life and was a scoutmaster of the local Boy Scouts in the early 1930s. He was a trustee of Adrian College in the late 1970s and on the advisory board to the local Salvation Army in the 1980s.
Surviving are his wife, Doris; daughters, Marilyn Hatfield and Janis Hoenig; son, H. Parker, Jr.; eight grandchildren, and 17 great-grandchildren.
Services will be at 11 a.m. Wednesday in the Tagsold Funeral Home, where the body will be after 2 p.m. Tuesday, with a Masonic service at 7 p.m.
The family requests tributes to the church or Adrian College's library building fund.