Allnutt biz awaits sixth generation

Secrets of success are sometimes so simple.

For Allnutt Funeral Service Inc., the oldest continuously operated family-owned business in the state, the path to becoming Northern Colorado's preeminent funeral business was as natural as the cycle of life and death.

Rick Allnutt's two sons

- Spencer, 10, and Walker, 7 - would become the sixth generation of Allnutts to continue forging the business, should they choose to follow their predecessors. Rick Allnutt is optimistic the lineage will continue.

"Spencer definitely shows interest," he said. "Even when he was younger, one of his teachers asked her students to draw a picture of what they wanted to be when they grew up. Spencer drew a picture of a bunch of people in a chapel, with a casket in the front."

Seated at a rough-hewn pine conference table in his Fort Collins office, Rick Allnutt, 41, spilled out a large manila envelope fall of photos as he traced the business back to its start under his great-greatgrandfather, Greeley undertaker T.G. Macy. His 70-year-old father, William Allnutt, sat nearby, filling in details that described the late 19th- and early 20th-century photos, some of them modem prints of fragile tintypes.