John R. Bush earned the respect of grieving families, Part 3

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Jdhn (L. funerals himself. He thought it important to be with the grieving family in person. That was his thing," recalled his nephew. Summing up the changes in funeral service traditions from the 1950s to the present, he said: "I don't think things have changed much since I worked for my uncle. Time of a funeral following death is still the same as it was back then except visitations were a lot longer. It used to take all day or all evening. Now, they have limited hours for that." Bush used to take in apprentices at the funeral home and the training they received with him guaranteed them a job in the business wherever they applied, noted Robert Dolan One of his first jobs at the funeral home was to drive one of the two ambulances -- a supplementary business that Bush ran alongside the funeral home business. Other funeral homes in the city also operated ambulance services at the same time. The ambulance services were mostly used within the city only, he recalled. On his very first ambulance response to a call from a home in Belleville, Robert Dolan recalled his traumatic experience of having to deal with the death of a little girl who was accidentally shot and killed while playing with a gun at home. "I think I was 17 at the time and I had my eyes opened up, the very first day at work," he said. Another time, while responding to a call to Canadian National Railway station, the ambulance driver told him to expect a bad one. "Things like that are very vivid in my mind because you start to expect to find someone with their arms or legs cut off. A lot goes through your mind at a time like that." Fortunately, he said, the incident turned out to be a relatively minor one where a man was wedged between two cars. His uncle, he said, was strict about his staff maintaining the privacy of such details getting out to the public. "He used to say to us. 'You are like the three monkeys -- you hear nothing, you see nothing, you say nothing.' I think people like that about him -- that they could trust him with their privacy." Bush sold his funeral home business several years before his death in September, 1989. The .current owner of the John R, Bush Funeral Home, Douglas Rushnell, bought the business in 1974. You can reach Benzie Sangma at bsangma@cogeco.ca < I take the body to the graveyard and begin the burial. Friends and relatives, who accompanied the family to the grave site, went back to the deceased person's home for a familial time of eating and remembering. Dolan's son, Robert, worked for his uncle for two years while still a high school student between 1958 to 1960. Two years earlier in 1956, Bush had moved the funeral home to its current location on 80 Highland Ave., the former Belleville Tourist Home and originally, the home of J.W. Dunnett, mayor of Belleville from 1884 -1885. "My uncle was very professional in the way he conducted his business. People respected him for that. One thing about him was that he liked to be at all the

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