How one Naperville business has survived 100 years of saying goodbye

In sixth grade at a Catholic school, Ray Jones wrote his term paper on what he wanted to be when he grew up, just as assigned.

His completed project surprised the nun who was his teacher.

"Ray, this is very unusual that you want to be a funeral director," he says she told him.

But Jones was sure. He didn't grew up in the business but knew from an early age he wanted to help families process and memorialize death.

"It was easy for me because I've been focused," he said. "I'm blessed."

Jones, 75, has worked for 53 years at one business in the industry he eyed from his grade-school days. His tenure at Naperville's Friedrich-Jones Funeral Home and Cremation Services has spanned more than half of its 100-year existence.

Friedrich-Jones is celebrating the century mark all year, so Jones can't resist the occasional morbid pun.

"Very few businesses are successful for that period of time," he said, pausing before the punchline: "with the mortality rate."

Jones joined the business in 1965 at age 24 and took over in 1977 after the death the previous year of his boss, second-generation owner Charles Ben Friedrich, who inherited the shop from his father, Charles Friedrich Sr.

Since 1937, the family-owned business has been preparing bodies for visitation, conducting wakes, writing obituaries and planning funerals from a house at 44 S. Mill St. that was built in 1856. Before then, its hub was on Jefferson Avenue.

Even as trends in the funeral business point away from tradition, Jones said families like the Mill Street setting. The neighborhood is leafy and historic. The house is a stately, white three-story with a large front porch and three visitation parlors of various sizes.

The business is renovating the space this year, led by one of Jones' three children, daughter Stephanie Jones Kastelic.

The funeral home renovated its largest parlor, the east room, to have what Jones Kastelic called a "cleaner, simpler look," rather than the previous "super-traditional" style, with heavy drapery, dark lighting and a room set up to be laid out only one way. Families now want to avoid the dull or stilted funerals of the past.

"People want it to be more personal," Jones said. "They want it to be more of a celebration."

That means video tributes are "almost standard," Jones Kastelic said, and so are personalized playlists. That means people bring in their pets to say goodbye to lost relatives, and when customers visit the casket showroom on the second floor, they often invest in carvings for the corners or military or religious insignia.

"There's nothing just so-called 'traditional' anymore," Jones said. "That answer, 'This is the way we've always done it,' isn't good enough anymore."

The trend away from tradition also leads to more questions.

"Nothing is assumed," said new employee John Tautkus, whose tenure with Friedrich-Jones so far has spanned one of the business' 100 years. "Everything is done at the request of the family."

In the dressing room next to the casket showroom, Tautkus and other employees use their mortician-school skills of embalming, dressing and washing to prepare bodies for visitation.

Tautkus said many families lack religion, but among those who practice, different customs remain.

Jews and Muslims, he said, do not allow embalming, while Catholics do. Deceased Muslim men and women must be dressed and washed by someone of the same sex. Mormons are buried in different colors symbolizing the rank or status they've achieved within their faith.

The personalization trend works because funeral directors like David Jones, Jones Kastelic's twin, see themselves as listeners and facilitators, ready to find out and provide what families need at "the toughest time of their lives."

As the business celebrates 100 years, the first- and second-generation Joneses hope the third generation will get involved, too. But the children of David, Stephanie and their brother, Daniel, are 17 at the oldest and infant at the youngest.

Death, as it were, won't be on their agenda for some time. And when it is, cultural trends likely will have shifted again.

"I think there's still a fundamental need," David Jones said, "for people to view and say goodbye."