CANFIELD — An AI overview of employment longevity trends shows that the average time a person 25 and older spends at a job is five years. For those aged 55-64, it’s just under 10.

Wally Sinn, then, is a wonder by any standard.

On Wednesday, Lane Funeral Homes honored Sinn for his 60-year career, all spent with one business. The luncheon in his honor took place at the facility next to the funeral home where so many families have gathered after funeral services. On Wednesday, it was filled with laughter and gratitude as colleagues, friends and family all gathered to celebrate Sinn’s career.

He started out washing ambulances when the two businesses were one, parking cars at funerals and moving up to captain the ambulance service, before becoming a funeral director.

It all started when Sinn was a teenager working at a gas station in Ellsworth.

“He saw a big crash right there while he was pumping gas, and Lane Ambulance responded,” said his son, Steve Sinn, supervisor of Austintown’s 911 dispatch center.

Steve Sinn said his dad went to Joe Lane Sr. to ask for a job but was told he had to be 16 to work for the company. So, two years later, on June 1, 1965, Wally Sinn went back and asked for a job, and Lane made good on his word.

Sinn began by washing trucks and parking cars, mostly, but his first day on the job, he rode with another paramedic to a home where a boy had dislocated his leg.

“The guy I was with that day, Jerry, told me just to follow his lead, so I helped him get him on the cot and get him in the back of the ambulance, then Jerry got in the front seat, and I got in the front seat and left the patient in the back with his mother. That’s how little I knew,” he said.

In 1970, he went to mortuary school and graduated in 1971, and has been a funeral director ever since.

“I never dreamed that 60 years later I’d still be doing it,” Sinn said. “I had planned to retire at 50 years, but Joe Jr., my boss, asked me to stay — he said ‘Wally, you can’t retire.’ So, I said OK, I’ll wait until 55, and here I am at 60. I can tell you there won’t be a 70.”

Sinn said the job is a calling, much like being a priest without doing the Sunday service.

“You’re helping people at their hardest time,” he said. “When I started I was burying my friends’ grandparents, then I was burying my friends’ parents, and now here I am burying my friends, but there’s still a lot of people yet I have to take care of.”

Steve Sinn said his father feels a sense of duty to many people he’s met over the years.

“He’s promised so many families that he’ll be here for them if something happens, so he feels like if he retires and then he’s not available when they need him that he’s letting them down,” Steve said.

Location Manager Candace Rivera has worked with Sinn for eight years, and said the staff all turn to him for leadership and guidance.

“He’s the most wonderful human being I’ve ever met,” she said. “He’s adapted to all the changes over the years and he’s a wonderful resource to all the staff we hire.”

She too said Sinn’s standard of care with grieving families is what helps set him and Lane Funeral Homes apart.

“His personality, when he meets with a family, he automatically provides comfort,” she said. “He’s just very easygoing, very easy to work with and very empathetic.”

Sinn has slowed down a bit in recent years, working only two days a week for the most part. He and his family go to Florida for four months each winter as well, and he had open-heart surgery last year, and has been healing from it. But Rivera said he is no less accessible for staff or families who need him.

“He’s still always available to us or to families. If somebody wants to talk to him, he’ll call them from wherever he is,” she said.

Funeral director John Vigliotti said he learned the job from Sinn.

“He gave me my start in this business, 22 years ago,” he said. “He was my mentor and he gave me the example. I wanted to do this job the right way and he was the model for that, and he still is.”

Vigiliotti said he sees the way Sinn loves the vocation and so he too has come to see his job as a calling.

“These guys, they learned it the old way — it’s a ministry first and a business second,” Vigliotti said.

He said when Sinn began his career as a funeral director, the priority was always to make sure the family’s needs were met, even if the business didn’t make money off it. While some of those standards and practices in the industry have changed, to ensure the business’s sustainability, he said people like Sinn are still there to make sure the job is done first and that it is done right, and families are cared for properly

‘He’s never changed the way he carries himself,” he said. “That’s why now, it’s always the first thing you hear when people walk in the door, is ‘where’s Wally?'”

Sinn said the job has been its own reward, and in a job that weighs on the heart, one thought about his career drew a tear or two from Sinn’s eyes.

“Just the great people I work with, and the friendships I’ve made throughout the years,” he said.

Lane Funeral Homes has locations in Austintown, Canfield, Mineral Ridge, Brookfield, Cortland and Warren. It also has event centers in Canfield and Warren.