Burying the dead, he keeps a legacy alive
In his Eastchester office, C. Alan Benedict recalls his first hands-on experience in his family”™s business more than half a century ago. It was his summer break from college and Benedict had not yet decided to take up the work, necessary and respected and ancient, of his father and grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather.
The Colgate student answered his father”™s call for help from the Westchester Funeral Home, the Benedicts”™ business that had moved to 190 Main St. in Eastchester in 1939. His father was on his way to a local golf course, but called on his son as neither playing partner nor caddy.
“It was then Vernon Hills Country Club. There”™s a guy lying absolutely dead as a doornail on the eighteenth green. His ball is this far from the cup,” says Benedict, spreading his hands. It looked like a fairly easy putt for one not handicapped by untimely death. “The poor guy didn”™t finish the round!”
“That was the first removal I ever made,” says Benedict, who has made countless more in his 51 years as a funeral director.
Already there were signs that he would follow in the profession of the Benedict men. Giving a demonstration speech in a college class, he recalls, “I had this tall guy lie on a table and I embalmed him.” His mortuary model lived to take another class.
Alan Benedict wears a green tie on this day, a thoughtful tribute to the Irish ancestry of the surviving family and the woman in her 90s whose burial he directed this morning. It”™s the kind of knowing personal touch that comforts the grieving and has sustained the family business into what is now the sixth generation. Like her father, Carrie Benedict Foley joined the business soon after her college graduation.
“Mom-and-pop businesses have had trouble with the conglomerates,” Alan says. “Little small funeral businesses have been able to compete because we do it on a personal basis. This is one business where the really small family business can compete with the conglomerates because we really do take it personally.”
Alan and his wife, Maria, lead us on a tour of the funeral home. A former nurse, Maria took over administrative duties in the family business in 1980 after her father-in-law”™s death. She started the funeral home”™s lending library, which includes a children”™s section on death and dying. The Benedicts were encouraging kids and families to talk about grief and death and dying when those subjects still were largely taboo in American society.
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“We ran support groups when no one was doing it,” she says.
On a hallway wall, a vivid mural tells the family”™s migratory business story. It begins with Samuel T. Benedict, Alan”™s great-great-grandfather, a church sexton in Greenwich Village who in 1832 became an undertaker ”“ an undertaking that presumably augmented a sexton”™s modest income. “He worked out of a church when they first started,” says the founder”™s descendant.
Alan”™s great-grandfather moved the Village business he inherited from Carmine Street to a building on West 13th Street. “My great-grandfather and the family lived on the upper floor and the funeral home was on the lower two floors.” Charles A. Benedict also drew on another reliable source of household income as a tax collector. Yes, death and taxes.
“He was the most famous of us, that”™s for sure,” Alan says of his great-grandfather.
In 1881, the New York City undertaker was summoned to New Jersey to prepare the body of President James A. Garfield for burial and funeral transport to his lakeside resting place in Cleveland. Garfield was at his summer home on the Jersey Shore when he died of wounds from bullets fired by an assassin two months earlier in the nation”™s capital.
Alan hands us a funeral trade journal article from 1932, when the family”™s most celebrated embalmer at 94 recalled the night he got the call: “I was so excited that I rushed right out to harness up my horses, and it was not till I had almost finished hitching up that I realized Elberon, N.J., wasn”™t in driving distance, and that I”™d have to wait for the next train.” (Unlike Charles, we were able to Google it: he had about a 55-mile haul.)
Four years later, the funeral director doubly secured his place in American presidential history when he served as chief pallbearer and handled arrangements in New York City for the funeral of Ulysses S. Grant.
Early in the 20th century, Alan”™s grandfather moved to the Crestwood section of Yonkers, bringing the family business with him to suburban Westchester. The Benedicts operated at four other locations in the county before settling on Eastchester”™s Main Street. There Alan”™s father salvaged the business from financial ruin while working a second job at the Anaconda wire and cable plant in Hastings-on-Hudson. Alan joined his father in the resurrected business in 1961.
“In the older days, whenever we looked for a place to live, we had to be within walking distance of here,” Maria says.
“We never lived more than a mile from here,” says Alan.
Overworked and understaffed after his father”™s death, “It was really difficult for me,” he says. “I don”™t think I would have still been here if Carrie hadn”™t come here 16 years ago,” becoming the first woman to carry on the Benedict tradition as a licensed funeral director. “That revitalized me.”
With a larger staff and his daughter running the funeral home”™s day-to-day operations, “I”™m working less,” says Alan. But with their daughter pregnant, Alan and Maria soon will be working more again.
Newly bereaved families still call their home in the middle of the night, and the Benedicts answer.
“They”™ll say, ”˜Alan? You”™re there?”™ They”™re so grateful to have someone they know,” he says.
“My whole philosophy is that when someone calls on us, it”™s a privilege to work with a family. I”™ve been with families for generations. It”™s an exceptional emotional feeling.”