Business
‘How Honored and Privileged I Was’: After 47 Years, Tom Cicalese Retires from Hoyt Funeral Home
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Tom Cicalese was 18 years old when he moved to New Canaan to work at Hoyt Funeral Home. A Hartford native, Cicalese had an uncle and cousins who owned funeral homes upstate. Since age 13, he’d done odd jobs during the summer in the nursing home where his mother worked as an administrator. “It allowed me to see life through a different lens,” Cicalese recalled one afternoon this week from the sitting room of Hoyt Funeral Home on Main Street. He graduated from high school at age 16 and went on to “embalming school” in Boston for two years before sending out applications around Connecticut for a job in a funeral home.