Page 28 - INSIGHT MAGAZINE_July2024

MEMBER PROFILE

While still in elementary
school, a teacher once
asked Bob MacKay and his
classmates to draw pictures
of what they wanted to
be when they grew up. His
effort would prove to be very
telling.
“I drew a big house with my name on
it, and a black coach out front,” laughs
the long-time funeral director, who
has been a familiar face at Coutts
Funeral Home & Cremation Centre in
Cambridge since 1968.
Although he had no family members
involved in the funeral business,
looking back, the 81-year-old says
it was an industry he was more than
familiar with.
“I went to a lot of funerals growing
up,” says Bob, reminiscing about
visiting his grandparents in Elmira,
where they lived across the street
from two houses that belonged to a
local funeral home. “They had a big
barn behind these houses filled with Funeral home offers
equipment from their funeral home,
and we used to play in there. I don’t
know why, but it kind of stuck with director a lifetime of
me.”
Upon graduating from the Canadian service
School of Embalming, the Woodstock
native first found work in 1965 at the
former Schreiter-Sandrock Funeral
Home & Chapel in Kitchener before
being hired three years later by Wilfred
R. Coutts Sr. to work at his Cambridge
funeral home. BOB MACKAY HAS BEEN A FUNERAL DIRECTOR SINCE 1965

28 Summer 2024 www.cambridgechamber.com