Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (30 page)

Some of the funniest reactions to my hearse came from the girls handing me lunch at a drive-up window, but the most hilarious one came from a man running a recycling operation. When he saw me exit the hearse and open the back door, he didn’t even wait to see what I was getting out. I heard him say, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I wonder what he thought I had for him. He had probably seen the movie
Soylent Green
too many times.

On another occasion I was waiting for my hearse to complete its cycle at our local car wash, where the workers were used to my coming in.
While I sat and read a newspaper, two employees were drying the hearse. One of them whistled and waved a towel to let me know the car was ready, except he pointed at something in the open back door of the hearse that apparently needed my attention. I walked over, and for a fleeting moment, the unthinkable seemed to have happened. There was a fully clothed man on the floor with his arms crossed over his chest. It was just his buddy lying there, but for a split second my brain registered that someone at the mortuary had left a body in the car. This time, the laugh was on me.

In an environment where loss and grief walk hand in hand, a little lightheartedness is always helpful to keep your sanity. One family had an unusual epitaph placed on a family member’s headstone that read, “He was a waiter and the good Lord finally caught his eye.” One of my favorites simply says, “I told you I was sick.” However, the all-time classic epitaph comes from a graveyard in England: “Remember, as you walk by, as you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so shall you be. Remember this and follow me.” Sure enough, someone replied to the message, by scribbling on the tombstone, “To follow you, I’ll not consent, until I know which way you went.”

An infusion of gallows humor into my talks with the people whom we did business with always lightened up our conversations. My trips to Thomas Cadillac and auto supply shops always got everyone laughing when they would ask me, “How’s business?” My answer was always “Dead.” The other comment that garnered the greatest laughter was telling someone, “We’ll be the last ones to let you down.”

One day a man called and asked if we would be interested in purchasing two cases of embalming fluid. Naturally, I wanted to determine how he had come into possession of them. He said he had been the highest bidder at an auction. One of the largest companies producing embalming fluid was the Champion Company, and when he saw this name in bold red letters on the cases, he thought it said Champagne. When the auctioneer stated that these cartons contained bottles of embalming fluid, he thought that it was just a humorous way of describing the alcohol. This guy needed to consider going back to school.

Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary offered to provide professional pallbearers as an option to their clients, as opposed to having family members fill this role, so three or four times each month they requested pallbearer service from us. Once, after placing a casket on the lowering device, we lined up in our usual position in a straight line at the foot of the casket,
as we had hundreds of times on previous graveside services. As we stood there in total silence, Al Hartman observed an extremely large cockroach walking directly in front of him. As it walked by, he raised the front of his nearest shoe to let it pass under and then raised his other shoe so it could continue on its way. This did not go unnoticed by the other pallbearers and me. Sometimes, in the most serious of circumstances, the harder you try not to crack up, the worse it gets. One of our men tried very hard not to react but wasn’t able to stifle a quiet laugh, which caused the rest of us to start busting up as well.

Because we purchased three or four new hearses each year, we got to know all the salesmen who represented the four major hearse manufacturers: Superior, Miller-Meteor, Eureka, and S&S. These factories each had salesmen in every state, and we had gotten to know all of them quite well at the conventions. One of our favorites was a character named Ken Frink. Ken was not your ordinary salesman. He was slightly irreverent, joked all the time, and always had funny stories to tell. After we had known him for many years, he told us that he had been diagnosed with an inoperable cancer. He also mentioned that he had just made his own funeral arrangements with White’s Funeral Home.

Ken liked and respected the mortuary owner, an elderly gentleman everyone called “Shorty” White. On the day that we attended Ken’s funeral, Shorty told us that Ken had sold them the hearse that was to be used that day for his funeral. Ironically, when the service ended and they prepared to form a procession, the hearse wouldn’t start. A quick call was made to the funeral home’s friendly competitor, and within ten minutes a replacement hearse arrived, allowing us to leave for the cemetery. We found out later that when they called to have the hearse towed to the dealership, the tow truck driver got into the hearse to see if he could determine the problem. As soon as he turned the key, the engine fired up immediately and the problem never occurred again. Who knows? Maybe it was just the spirit of Ken, joking around as usual.

A funeral director we knew was making an arrangement for a woman who requested something that wasn’t all that unusual in and of itself, considering the number of people who have left their entire estate to their pet. In this case, she wanted to have her pet dog euthanized and placed in the casket with her. He then had to ask her what her instructions would be if the dog died first.

A studio brought some rental caskets back after filming a movie and no one thought to look inside them. Months later, we got another rental order for caskets, so it was necessary to check that they each had a pillow inside. When an employee opened one of the caskets, he jumped back at the sight of an authentic-looking mummified body. It had obviously been left in there from the previous rental.

The rubber dummy was badly in need of repair. Both hands were missing and it had other areas of damage. I spent three weeks working on it in the evenings. When it was finished, I took it to show everyone at work. Our employee Alfred Estrada suggested we pull a prank on our manager, Jerry. We put it in the walk-in refrigerator on a dressing table and then Alfred buzzed Jerry on the intercom, “You better come down right away and look at the deplorable condition of this public administrator’s case.” We actually had a PA case in-house at the time, or it wouldn’t have worked.

Usually on these cases no one attends the funeral, but we would go through the formalities anyway, which included a service in our chapel. Jerry came downstairs and entered the refrigerator. When he saw the dummy on the dressing table, thinking it was a real corpse, he yelled out loud, “Give me a f***ing break!” and ran over to the phone to complain to the coroner’s office. From behind the stairwell we couldn’t hold back any longer and busted out laughing, so Jerry realized what was afoot. With his years of experience, it was surprising that he had fallen for the prank.

Later that same day, a friend of ours arrived to officiate at the service for the real PA case. Bob Richards was a Lutheran minister whom everyone called Zeke. He always performed these ceremonies for us with only Ron, an employee, or me sitting in the chapel. After the service I asked him for a special favor. He followed me into the prep room where I had placed a crucifix on top of another casket. He was then asked to bless it and place it inside the casket. He dutifully said a prayer and made the sign of the cross over it while holding it in his other hand. When I opened the lid and he saw the dummy, he just stood there for a few moments with a shocked look until I told him it was a prank. Thankfully, forgiveness is his stock-in-trade.

In the late ’50s, the LA rock station KRLA had a contest where listeners would get a chance to guess how many times their call letters were stenciled on an old hearse, and whoever got closest to the correct number won the hearse. The contest begged the question of who would want an old hearse anyway, aside from the people who used them to smuggle illegal booze during Prohibition.

Actually, very few people seem to appreciate the tremendous versatility of a hearse. Not only are they extremely spacious for hauling large items, but they can sometimes be a person’s home. After country singer David Allan Coe was released from a state penitentiary, he moved to Nashville and lived in a hearse until he began his recording career. And after all, we began our careers after purchasing a hearse for reasons that had nothing to do with its intended purpose.

Our mechanic for twenty-six years was Mike Lampros, who was so well trained that we never had to farm work out for our fleet. Mike could completely rebuild any engine or transmission in-house, and I even purchased an alignment rack so he could also do front-end alignments. His work on hearses must have rubbed off because he eventually bought one as his personal vehicle. He had me order him a set of hearse nameplates for the windows that simply read, “THE END.”

A man who found out I sold hearses came into the garage one day to see what was available in my inventory. When I asked him why he wanted a hearse, he said that a station wagon wasn’t large enough to hold a flag he had commissioned that measured 47' x 82' and weighed about 800 pounds. After he agreed to purchase a twenty-year-old hearse, he asked if my paint shop could paint it red, white, and blue, and install a stainless-steel roof rack.

His name was Thomas Demski, but everyone just called him “Ski.” When the hearse was ready, I personally delivered it to his home near Long Beach and was surprised to see a 132-foot-tall flagpole with the gigantic American flag proudly flying, which his friends had dubbed the “Ski Pole.” One of his neighbors took him to court because he said that on windy days the flag would make flapping noises, but the judge ruled in Demski’s favor.

Ski told me that the flag he bought the hearse to transport was a miniature compared to a new one that was in the process of being produced. Called “Super Flag,” this one would be 225' by 505' and weigh 6,000 pounds. Super Flag has since been unfurled in front of the Washington Monument, Hoover Dam, and a Super Bowl game.

As unconventional as Ski was, when he died at age 72, a viewing took place in the garage of his home inside a glass casket. His shirt was removed to display flags tattooed on his chest and on his back, visible from a rectangular mirror below the casket. At his request, his body was cremated and his ashes placed in the eagle atop his giant flagpole.

The first U.S. citizen intentionally cremated was Colonel Henry Laurens, who presided over the Continental Congress of 1777–1778 and was also a member of George Washington’s military staff. He was cremated at his own request upon his death in 1792 and his ashes were placed in the family plot. It was not until 1873 that the United States first held meetings to formally discuss cremation. It didn’t take long until Americans were requesting how their bodies would be disposed of in their wills. Interestingly, fourteen former American presidents have been cremated, putting them well ahead of the curve compared to the national average.

In England and early America, cremation was not a popular option and carried a fairly negative connotation. The impetus against cremation in many cases was based on the belief that it was a barbaric act practiced in many third-world countries. But by the ’80s, it had become apparent that cremation was taking hold and that future profitability in the funeral business was not looking very bright. Societies had popped up everywhere offering low-cost cremations. The first one in California was Telophase in San Diego. Once they had gotten their foot firmly in the door, it wasn’t long before the Neptune Society began opening branches in almost every part of California. Their name was derived from the fact that they also offered ocean scattering where their namesake, the mythical god of the sea, resides.

These businesses were exclusively cremation service providers, but they were not crematories. Any funeral home can offer cremation, but almost all of them have to outsource the work to a crematory. Originally, cremation societies were cheaper than full-service mortuaries because they were nonprofit organizations formed to negotiate for the lowest prices. Some cremation businesses took to calling themselves “societies” so that potential customers would think they were one of the nonprofit services,
but the state Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers banned all new businesses from using the word.

Mortuaries did their best to resist the type of service known as “direct cremation,” with no casket, no visitations, and no burial. Many of the firms we served referred to these potential customers as “shoppers,” who would call on the phone inquiring about the price of different services. The reluctance of the mortuaries to offer low-cost direct cremation only encouraged the expansion of the cremation societies. By the mid-’80s, the cremation rate exploded in most large cities, while rural areas and religious communities maintained traditional funeral practices.

In the early ’80s, a young man named Tim Waters contacted me because he wanted to buy a conversion. He had recently graduated from high school and told me that during his senior year he had been driving a hearse to high school. Just before purchasing the conversion, he had acquired a cremation service in Burbank called the Alpha Society. By purchasing an existing company, Tim was able to keep the “society” designation. Alpha had been doing only about thirty cremations per year and the owners had full-time jobs, so they used an answering service for their calls.

Tim started calling me at home, and we would sometimes talk for several hours. He said that he had been hearing about us for more than a year, and he had many questions about the funeral industry. Ron and I started off in this business ourselves in our late teens, and it would have been very helpful if we had been able to get answers from someone with experience in this field, instead of learning everything by trial and error as we did. Tim was very aggressive when it came to business, and within a few years he was doing about 300 cremations per year. Soon, he opened a second location in Ventura County, which was doing another 100 cases by 1984.