As senior funeral director for the Cremation Society of Illinois, Robert E. Albright was a patient mentor to younger funeral directors, but a strict one.
“He always wanted things done the right way,” said Don Fritz said, operations manager of the company. “I have known him for 18 years, since I started working here at 16. He interviewed me, taught me the business. He started me out polishing cars and cleaning the bathroom and floors.
“He taught me how to be a good funeral director, how to run a funeral home and take care of people.”
Mr. Albright, 81, of Calumet City, a funeral director for 55 years, died of cancer, Sunday, Oct. 23, in the hospice of St. James Hospital and Health Center in Chicago Heights. He worked in the company’s Romeoville office but was available to all of its nine locations.
Mr. Albright first got an inkling of what he wanted to do in life as a boy in Marinette, Wis.
“He had been friends with an undertaker at home in Wisconsin and decided that’s what he wanted to do,” said his wife, Joyce.
The couple met in kindergarten and got reacquainted when she was in nursing school in Milwaukee and he was in the Navy during World War II. He was a midshipman after attending the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kingsport, N.Y.
Mr. Albright sent her a letter asking if she remembered him. She answered him “out of curiosity,” she said, and a friendship was born. They soon fell in love and got married in June 1948.
After he was discharged from the Navy, Mr. Albright attended the University of Wisconsin for a while, before graduating from the Worsham College of Mortuary Science, then in Chicago.
An apprenticeship followed at a funeral home on 79th Street; then he joined the Corcoran Funeral Home on Chicago’s South Side for several years before joining Lain-Sullivan Funeral Home in Park Forest. In 1965 he joined the Cremation Society.
He had grown fond of sailing while in high school in Whiting, Ind., where he would sail with friends, and through his Navy experience. He and his wife had a second home in northern Wisconsin for decades, where he would travel almost every weekend to sail on Green Bay. In later years, the couple plied those waters with a pontoon boat.
He also was a voracious reader, and he also liked to work on projects at their two homes.
Along with his wife, Mr. Albright is survived by a brother, Dale, and numerous nieces and nephews. Visitation will begin at 10 a.m. Saturday at First United Methodist Church, 18420 Burnham Ave., Lansing, to be followed by an 11 a.m. memorial service.
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bsherlock@tribune.com
