You're listening to a throwback edition of What's Ray Saying, recorded during the early development of the show.

If it sounds different, well, I used to do this whole damn thing on my own.

I've got a bigger team now, but these early episodes were made with love and are absolutely worth listening to.

Enjoy the show.

You're listening to. Enjoy the show.

You're listening to What's Race Saying, the podcast?

You know, people are still highly segregated by race in the funeral businesses.

Not many funeral homes are experienced in providing traditional funerals, excluding cremations for all races. Now for a good deal of my early life, before I left home and joined the Army, we live behind a funeral home, where at nights I could find myself compelled to look out the back window to see if the light was on, meaning at night they were working.

On most occasions the window was shut and covered with a type of frosty glass that made it impossible to see in.

But on occasion, very rare occasions, maybe once or twice a year,

the window would be open.

I would be home.

I would be looking. I would be looking.

And a body was being prepared.

I could see the process.

I saw the very same people I knew in life from around the way.

Right there inside the funeral home.ainted, decorated in that odd way, filled with things that have the unmistakable

aroma of preservation from Eldahide.

I recall the times my sister Janice and I went inside to test our nerve, look at a body and run out.

How my sister Carolyn attended services for people she barely knew or just heard of.

The number of times I saw people who had died within a block of

the funeral home right there inside and I remember how there was always a sad

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