Bruno B. Bak, 84, the exacting mortician who brought the funeral business to life for two generations of graduates of the Worsham College of Mortuary Science in Wheeling, died in Condell Medical Center in Libertyville on Wednesday, Sept. 5. The cause was believed to be a heart aneurysm.
More than any man since Albert E. Worsham founded the college in 1911, Mr. Bak came to represent the institution’s reputation for producing students with a comprehensive knowledge of the funeral industry, coupled with a deep infusion of old fashioned Midwestern ethics.
It was the latter that the general public usually sees in funeral directors; it was the former that Mr. Bak, Worsham’s president and owner since 1979, and a teacher at the school since the late-1940s, drove into his more than 6,000 students.
The oral quizzes in his anatomy classes could draw beads of sweat from a forehead. Nervous thoughts of handling corpses were secondary to committing to memory his exhaustive lectures in embalming class. His funeral directing students learned legal issues, microbiology, psychology and ethics.
Mr. Bak moved with his family from Yonkers, N.Y., to Chicago in 1920, and helped out in his parents’ groceries until the Army drafted him in 1941. He fought in the South Pacific and returned to Chicago convinced that becoming a funeral director was a noble calling.
It was one he attacked with gusto. By the time he graduated from Worsham in 1947, he had the highest grade point average in his class, the school’s Albert E. Worsham Memorial Award in hand, and an invitation to stay at the school as an instructor. He did, and remained there the rest of his life.
A stern man with a powerful frame, Mr. Bak habitually stalked hallway and classroom in a shirt and tie, “and he always, always wore a white lab coat. One that was pressed and very, very crisp,” said his daughter, Stephanie Kann, the current director of programs at Worsham.
But if his demeanor was deliberately severe, students said Mr. Bak’s fatherly pride in their growing education and later careers betrayed a deeper sentimentality, and Worsham gained during his tenure a national reputation for its familial tone.
Mr. Bak taught at Worsham until 1988 and, with his wife, Joan Tomczak, the school’s registrar, moved the college to its current campus in Wheeling. During his career, services went from uniform to personalized. Women entered the profession and grew to 50 percent of Worsham’s student body. Funeral corporations emerged, advertising and marketing became common to the industry, and computers became de rigueur.
It was his ability to adapt to changes that kept him and Worsham significant in the funeral industry, said John Rice, a consultant for the three Pierce Mortuary Colleges in the United States.
“He was able not only to adapt to it, but to lead the funeral directors of the future to adapt to them,” Rice said. “There’s no doubt what he brought to Worsham College.”
Besides his wife and daughter, Mr. Bak is survived by two stepdaughters, Lynn Taylor and Jamee Burdick; a brother, Thaddeus; a sister, Virginia Javenkoski; and five grandchildren.
Visitation for Mr. Bak will be held from 2 to 9 p.m. Sunday in the Drake & Son Funeral Home, 625 Busse Highway, Park Ridge.
A mass will be said at 10 a.m. Monday in the St. Paul of the Cross Catholic Church, 320 S. Washington Ave., Park Ridge.
