Willard "Bud" Bailey was an old-fashioned funeral director, the kind who'd pick up a body himself so he could personally comfort the bereaved family.
"They had a pickup service," Rose Bailey, his wife, said Saturday. "But he was good at putting people at ease."
Mr. Bailey, who spent more than 50 years working in Sacramento funeral homes, died Tuesday of lung failure. He was 86.
Born in Marysville, Mr. Bailey moved to Sacramento when he was 17, just after graduating from high school. He immediately took work at Clark, Booth and Yardley Funeral Home in downtown Sacramento (where the Sacramento Hostel operates today).
Mr. Bailey was "the night boy. He was on call and slept there, taking all the calls for the deaths," Rose Bailey said.
Mr. Bailey did that for two years before joining the Army in 1943 during World War II. He manned a radio during the Battle of the Bulge in Europe.
When he came home, Mr. Bailey decided to stick with the funeral business. He spent nine months at a mortuary science school in San Francisco. Upon graduation, he came back to work at Clark, Booth and Yardley as an embalmer.
A few years later, he met Rose. "I lived next door to the funeral home," she explained Saturday. The two were married after a short courtship.
During the early 1960s, Mr. Bailey joined the A.J. Nicoletti Funeral Home in east Sacramento, again as an embalmer. During his decades there, he gained the trust of the Nicoletti family. "When Mr. Nicoletti passed on, they turned the business over to on to him," Rose Bailey said.
Mr. Bailey ran the funeral home as owner/manager after that; it remained a small shop, employing about four people.
"If we went anywhere, we had to be near a telephone," Rose Bailey said.
Mr. Bailey sold the funeral home in 1996 and retired, staying busy by occasionally bowling. He also remained active in the Masons.
By the time he died, Mr. Bailey had been married to Rose for 59 years. Their son Robert said his mother spent much of this weekend collecting her thoughts about her husband.
Rose Bailey said: "You could put him in a room for five minutes with someone and he'd know them – he never met a stranger. He lived a good life."
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