Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (19 page)

The three criteria that we had to deal with were protection, weight, and dimensions, the latter being the most critical because all major carriers depended on what were called “feeder airlines.” It wasn’t a problem to ship a casket to Chicago or New York on the large aircraft, but the small airlines did the puddle-jumping from major airports to small towns. American Airlines had to know these feeder airlines had large enough cargo doors to accept a casket in a container, or they couldn’t book it. Sometimes the caskets were almost as big as the loading door, so the protective container had to be as small as possible and still offer a certain level of protection. The weight was also an important factor, because the combined passenger and cargo weights were used to determine if it was safe to fly. A miscalculation could result in an aircraft being unable to lift off as it reached the end of the runway. We needed to think outside the box—or, was it inside the box?

After experimenting with a few prototypes, we finally came up with a workable design. It began with a plywood bottom and a solid wooden lower edge to protect the bottom of the casket from forklift blades. Next was the cardboard inner liner ring that protected the sides of the casket. The lid was also cardboard and resembled a large corsage box top, with hand holes in the wooden tray for easy carrying. Once a casket was placed in the tray, and the inner liner and top placed over it, the whole unit was made very compact by connecting the preinstalled straps and pulling them as tight as possible. The cardboard lid’s lower edge was slightly smaller than the tray, and tightening the straps pulled the lid down inside
the lower sides of the tray itself. This made the whole container only about one inch larger than the casket it contained. We called it the Casket Airtray and tried to patent it, but we were told this wasn’t possible since it was only a container. We were advised that the next best thing would be to trademark the name. We promptly did this, but it did not protect our invention. Within a short time it was being copied all across the country, and all they had to do was change the name.

We nearly hit the big time when the United States government started purchasing airtrays from us and shipping them to Vietnam. The opening order was for 200 and the government had its own specifications, including a plastic curtain coating to protect the casket from rainy weather there. However, it wasn’t long before a general came into Graves Registration, the branch of the military in charge of embalming and identification, and saw our units being used. He got very upset and said he didn’t want any of his soldiers being sent back to the states in a “cardboard box.” I assumed he was aware that as soon as the airtray arrived in Dover, Delaware, the remains would be transferred to a very nice metal casket, and this was just an inexpensive way to transport fallen soldiers back to the United States. In spite of this lucrative contract’s loss, I understood his motivation and respected his decision.

Allan and Ron invented the Casket Airtray in 1968.

During this same time period it was becoming obvious that the funeral industry was going through a major metamorphosis. Not only were new laws raising the overhead of the funeral business, but people’s perception of the value of traditional funerals was also transitioning downward. A new law was enacted mandating that all employees working for a mortuary must be paid for each hour that they were restricted to the premises. The reason that many mortuaries are called “funeral homes” is that for many generations, business owners or an employee would sleep there and answer phones throughout the night. It didn’t even matter if their sleep hadn’t been interrupted all night—the law required the firm to pay the employee overtime for every hour after their normal workday ended.

In a bold move, one mortuary broke with the tradition of twenty-four-hour availability and hired an answering service, which seemed almost scandalous to many in the industry. On its face it must have sounded very impersonal to a family not to be able to speak to someone who owned or worked for the mortuary, particularly if it led to the automated response systems with which we are now plagued.

Imagine this scenario. Your doctor tells you that you have an inoperable cancer. You don’t know how much time you have left, so you decide to make your own funeral arrangements to save your family the burden at a very emotional time. You get out the Yellow Pages and decide what firm you’d like to use. A cheerful recording announces that you have reached your friendly neighborhood funeral home. It informs you that you have some options. “Please press one if you want to arrange a funeral for a family member or a loved one. Press two if you are doing this for yourself. If you want to make a pre-need funeral arrangement, using the keypad on your telephone, enter the letters ‘FUN.’ Now press one for burial, two for cremation, or three if you desire entombment in a crypt. If you wish to charge this to your credit card, please enter the number. Now enter your expiration date.” By this time you are thinking, “Damn, the doctor didn’t tell me exactly when I was going to expire,” so you think the hell with it and hang up in sheer frustration.

The next momentous occurrence was the outbreak of the Hong Kong influenza epidemic of 1968. Since Southern California was densely populated, this pandemic spread quickly. In the late ’60s we were making more removals from homes than institutions. House calls required two men instead of the usual one, and when the outbreak hit, we became inundated with these calls. Under ordinary circumstances, we were expected to have our men on the road in seven to eight minutes after receiving such a call. However, at the height of the frenzy, our dispatchers were quoting as much as an hour to respond to house calls, which always took precedence over institutional calls.

At any given time for over two months, removal orders were stacked up on the dispatch counter eight pages deep, waiting for the next available crew. This was the only time we literally went to DEFCON 2. Many of our staff didn’t return to the office during their entire shift but were given instructions over their radios. It’s my sincere belief that the news media downplayed the severity of this outbreak because they didn’t want to incite panic. In truth, the Hong Kong flu epidemic was a worldwide pandemic, although not categorized as such at the time. Thankfully, the World Health Organization (WHO) and other agencies have since become aware of the necessity of warning the public to wear face masks and take other precautions, as in the case of the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic.

Many of our drivers were up for thirty-six hours straight. They would drive until they couldn’t stay awake any longer, then switch with a second man, sleep in the passenger’s seat, and be awakened upon arrival at the next residence. Once the body was in the car, the passenger was out like a light again. All of our cars were equipped with two cots, and some of us actually crawled up on the empty cot next to a body for some much-needed sleep. One time our driver was pulled over for doing ninety while
I was asleep on a cot. The police officer told him that anyone traveling at that speed could be arrested on the spot, but after the driver explained the dire circumstances to the officer, he just issued a citation for going eighty.

Not only were we going crazy picking up bodies, but we were also trying to back up every mortuary in town with funeral cars, and this became a dispatcher’s nightmare. We would start laying out the schedules for the next day’s drives about 4
P.M
. and finish after midnight. It was a very difficult job, so only Ron, our manager, Pat Lind, and I could complete the task. We would schedule a single hearse driver to as many as four services per day as opposed to the usual two. We would go home, sleep for five or six hours, and start again the next morning.

We never routinely farmed out any first calls, but as the death toll grew, we realized that we were going to need the cooperation of every mortuary in a four-county area to help us with hearses and limos. Imagine us calling mortuaries at midnight asking if they could cover a service for us the next day and never having anyone ever getting upset for these middle-of-the-night calls. We asked for assistance from mortuaries in Ventura, Oxnard, San Diego, and Santa Barbara, some of which were 100 or more miles away.

During this six-week siege, things got so intense that we pressed every mortuary in Southern California into service. We sent competitors to help each other, colored cars, old cars, young drivers—and no one ever complained. They willingly ignored the usual rules, knowing the only way we were going to survive this pandemic was through cooperation. The death rate in densely populated areas like LA had gone up to at least six to eight times the normal rate.

An ordinary day’s work for us during the holiday season would be a combination of sixty drives. During the influenza outbreak, on the day before Christmas and the day after New Year’s, we covered over 220 services with the cooperation of each of our many friends in the business. Most people are unaware that the death rate increases every year around the holidays. There are several reasons for this phenomenon—illness increases because of inclement weather, the suicide rate rises, and fatal accidents occur more often during rain and snow conditions. It has even been confirmed statistically that ill family members are often able to hold out until reaching a significant holiday, and afterward quite literally give up the ghost.

On one extremely busy day, it was necessary for me to schedule myself to drive on four services. A delay on your first service could have consequences throughout the day. My first service was a High Mass and ran about one hour. At Resurrection Cemetery in South San Gabriel there was no take-man waiting at the gate—the first time that this had ever happened to me. About fifteen cars were in the procession behind me and, fortunately, the motorcycle escorts had stopped all the traffic. This gave me a chance to run into the cemetery office in a panic, where I insisted that the girl show me where the grave was on a large cemetery map.

We finally pulled up to the grave, but a glance at my watch told me that my next service was about to begin at a mortuary ten miles away. Tradition dictates that the coach driver leads the pallbearers to the grave and gives them more instructions after placing the casket on the lowering device. Opening the hearse doors up and hustling some of the pallbearers into position, I gave them the usual instructions, but the second they picked up the casket, the hearse doors were closed and I was gone with the wind.

Fortunately, this part of town was not densely populated, so the only real danger would have been someone pulling onto the highway as I drove eighty miles per hour most of the way, with one foot on the brake. When I arrived at Carter-Cram Mortuary in nearby Monterey Park, people were coming out the side door of the chapel, so that told me that the service was over. I ran in to locate the owner, Art Cram, to let him know I had arrived. Instead, his wife, Ruth, came running in from where the hearse was parked and yelled, “Your hearse is on fire!” I ran back outside with her and saw billows of white smoke coming from the rear wheels. I assured her that the car wasn’t on fire, but that I had merely fried the rear brakes.

After my fourth service it was back to the garage, where our mechanic was working. He immediately commented on the smell of overheated brakes. He pulled a rear wheel off and showed me the drum. He told me that in all his years working as a mechanic he had never seen the brake drum turn blue, as this one had from such high temperature. He then proceeded to give me a concerned look as if to say, “Are you out of your mind?” Well, I might have been out of my mind, but I wasn’t crazy. Besides, just like this hectic day, we somehow managed to just make it through this entire calamity.

As we continued to expand, we employed twenty-five people and had many new mortuaries seeking our assistance. Hardly a week went by that I didn’t get a call at home by a night dispatcher, informing me that a car had been involved in an accident or broken down, or that someone hadn’t reported for the night shift.

Late one night our dispatcher called, telling me that Bobby Kennedy had just been shot. The coroner’s office wanted to know if we were prepared to have two men ready to leave immediately in the event he died. We had been making calls for the coroner’s office for about eight years by then, and it seemed rather strange for them to be putting us on alert about a call that might not come. As it turned out, Bobby survived just long enough for someone on his staff to recommend the Armstrong Family Mortuary. They made the removal and between them and the coroner’s office, his body was prepared for shipment back east.

We had been assisting our friends at Armstrong Family through three generations of the family. After this momentous event, they had little signs made for the windows in their hearse that read, “On June 8, 1968, the body of Robert F. Kennedy was transported to the Los Angeles Airport in this vehicle.” This hearse was traded to me about ten years later, as part of a transaction with them for a newer model. I later rented it to a studio making a movie called
Wired
, about the life and death of John Belushi. Sadly, no one seemed to want it for its historical value. I eventually sold it to an Iranian man who couldn’t have cared less about its past.