Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (2 page)

Allan (left) with his father and brother in a 1942 contest-winning photo that commemorated the end of World War I.

Allan (left) and his brother John in a backyard foxhole, with machine guns handmade by their father.

Every Saturday we would walk to one of the movie theaters in our neighborhood. There were two films, a cartoon, and the Movietone News, which kept you up on the progress of the war effort. All this excitement cost us ten cents each. There were constant reminders of the war through newspaper cartoons and numerous patriotic songs. My recollections were mostly of songs like “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary [Ireland]” and “Over There.” Those patriotic and occasionally sentimental songs still take me back to that time, especially songs by French singer Edith Piaf, who engendered a real sense of that tragic, heroic era with her lilting voice.

My only negative recollection of the time was the indignity of having to eat Spam. It was supposed to be similar to ham, but in my opinion it tasted terrible. It attained a sort of mythical status because of the manufacturer’s secrecy in divulging precisely what meat was used in it. Some critics even went so far as to imply that Spam was an acronym for “something posing as meat.”

At age 11 I became the youngest boy ever to work for the
Los Angeles Examiner
, delivering newspapers at 5:30 each morning. Their policy was to never hire a paperboy under the age of 13, but my brother John had been working there for a number of months and he went to bat for me, explaining that anything he could do, I could do as well.

Our best friend, Jerry McMillan, lived across the street from us. He told us about a fellow student at Audubon Junior High named Hampton
Fancher, who had built an elaborate house of horrors in his backyard. We went to see it and it was even better than Jerry had described. There was a small cemetery with headstones behind the structure. When one of the headstones was tilted forward, it revealed a small tunnel that came up to a room in the haunted house. Hamp was a remarkable artist. In later years I always wondered what he was doing, so I was not surprised when the credits for the movie
Blade Runner
revealed that he had written the screenplay and been an executive producer of the film.

When I was 16, my dad took me to buy my first car, which was a metallic purple 1941 Ford Coupe with a hopped-up engine. It cost me $320, which was most of my paper route savings. With my new mobility came the freedom and desire to explore. After trips to San Diego and then Santa Barbara, I continued north, up coastal Highway 1. I saw a California Highway Patrol car parked on the roadside so I asked him about a place to stay. He directed me to turn left just ahead, to a town called Carmel, which was unfamiliar to me. The area made a significant impression on me. Instead of leaving the next morning, I spent two more days to see much of the Monterey Peninsula. When I returned home I told my mom that someday I was going to live there. She brushed it off with wave of her hand, saying, “Yeah, sure.”

In my second year at Dorsey High School I met a fellow student, Ron Hast, and we became good friends. We both had the same teacher, Geraldine Howard, but we didn’t attend her class together, so our meetings were chance at best. Her classes were in a bungalow, where she would let students come in and eat their lunch. Some of us would play chess, but Ron didn’t play, so he would just sit and have conversations with Mrs. Howard. If the chessboard was already in use, I would sit and chat with them. Neither of us could have ever predicted that we would soon start a business together that would last over forty-five years, and that Mrs. Howard would be our bookkeeper for the first four of those years.

The following year Ron and I took as many classes as we could together and did our homework after school at his house. His parents were pleased that he raised his grade point average that year, but on almost every other level they didn’t approve of me. My hair was too long, touching my collar, and my jacket was black leather. By their reactions, you would have thought it said “Hells Angels” on the back.

We would often talk about starting some kind of business together. After discussing some possible ventures, we finally decided on one. Some
of the stores in Hollywood were selling property deeds to one square inch on the moon. This seemed ridiculous, since there was no basis for such ownership, but it did give us an idea.

We enjoyed spending time in Hollywood and discussed the possibility of creating a deed for one square inch of the Hollywood Hills. We felt that this deed should represent part of an actual piece of real estate, so we made a trip downtown to the Hall of Records. After sifting through many tax records, we found a vacant lot just off of famous Laurel Canyon where the street hadn’t been paved yet. The owner of the lot was willing to sell us his property because he had purchased a number of lots in a row hoping the city would eventually pave the street, making them much more valuable. The man found out that the city was not going to pave the street, so we were able to purchase the small lot for $200.

The next order of business was to take out a DBA (doing business as) for a venture we called Hollywood Investment Company. We found an attorney named Louis Sackin, who had an office in Hollywood. He didn’t quite know what to make of us on our first visit, but after we explained the purchase of the property and showed him our concept for the deed I had designed, he agreed to represent us and formalize the necessary paperwork. When we inquired about his fee, he told us that it would be pro bono because he felt that we had shown a modicum of ingenuity to start this venture on our own, while still in school.

After that, we needed to get the deed printed and do our marketing. We paid a fellow student to take pictures of points of interest in Hollywood, which included the Brown Derby restaurant, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where a Marilyn Monroe movie happened to be showing, and the newly constructed Capitol Records Building. The faux deed included the photos, along with a map of the property’s location and other information. The next task was to market the deeds, which we were totally unqualified for. We went from store to store down Hollywood Boulevard without making a single sale, so the deeds ended up in a closet as our focus returned to school.

Since I had graduated half a year ahead of Ron, I decided to work for six months so we could both start college at the same time. After Ron graduated we decided to take advantage of the break and go on a long trip before starting college. We headed north up the coast of California by Greyhound Bus until we reached Seattle, Washington. Since we could get off the bus anytime, even if it was not a designated stop, we took full
advantage of this option and often found ourselves standing on Highway 1 flagging down another Greyhound the following morning.

From Seattle, we boarded a ferry to Victoria, British Columbia, then on to Vancouver. The Canadians operated a train that went from Vancouver to the Great Lakes, and we got on and off the train at different towns. On the way back we left the train and decided to hitchhike into Yellowstone National Park. Our last stop was Las Vegas, and in those days the casinos on the strip were about a half a mile apart with nothing in between.

The real significance of the trip was that for over a month we were together twenty-four hours a day. Many times we didn’t agree about where to stop or what to see, which demonstrated that even when we had different interests, we could compromise and still get along well. At summer’s end I started my first semester at El Camino College majoring in geology. Science was my favorite subject, with some of the influence coming from my uncle Lyle, who had been the science editor for the
Los Angeles Examiner
for almost twenty years. Lyle was my father’s older brother, and he had interviewed some of the world’s top scientists, including Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Lyle had one of the largest privately owned telescopes in the country at his Silver Lake home, and I loved to go to his house and look into the heavens. When the decision was made to construct the world’s largest telescope on Mount Palomar near San Diego, Lyle was chosen to be on the panel of scientists who coordinated the effort. He told me that when they poured the first casting for the telescope’s lens, the molten glass was so hot it melted the iron bolts that were to be used to mount it, so they tried again with carbon steel bolts. The 200-inch lens made Palomar the largest telescope in the world for decades. Someone standing in front of the lens would only come up to a little over a third of its height. Today, the lens is hooked up to the largest digital camera ever built, which is capable of tracking a star more than 10 billion light-years away.

I didn’t know a great deal about my uncle until he died and the
Examiner
printed a half-page memorial about him. Along with being noted for his work at Palomar, he was credited for coining the word “motorcade,” a term he used while writing an article about a visit to California by the president.

My first semester studying geology proved to be extremely interesting, and all my spare time was consumed with prospecting for rocks and fossils. Ron would always accompany me, and the first few times we ended up in remote areas, which made it necessary for us to sleep in the car. One weekend, we were driving through Culver City and spotted something interesting. It was an old hearse with a For Sale sign. We reasoned that we could stretch out in comfort with a car like that, so we stopped to check it out.

It was a big, black, morbid-looking 1941 Packard hearse, consigned to a hearse salesman named Bob Blake by Gutierrez and Weber Mortuary in downtown Los Angeles. Bob told us that the owner was asking $200 for it, which was well beyond our means, so he offered to call Mrs. Gutierrez and see if she would consider reducing the price.

We sat there as he made the call, and he explained to her that in the six months he had stored and tried to sell the hearse, we two young college kids were the only ones to show any interest. Mrs. Gutierrez argued that she had recently spent $40 just for the license fee. Irritated that she was being stubborn, he finally told her that she should send someone over and get the car out of his lot. She finally gave in, and we purchased it for just the $40 that the license had cost her. Had we not spotted it, we would have never purchased such a unique and seemingly single-purpose vehicle. Without knowing it, Mrs. Gutierrez had done us all an enormous favor, because that move would launch our careers and allow us to be of service to her and her son Rick for many years.

Ron, John, and Allan in 1957, in front of their first hearse used for funerals, a 1948 Packard.

We weren’t sure what our parents would think about our “black elephant.” Not only did my parents think it was quite novel, they said we could park it in front of our house. We learned that this was called a three-way-side-loader hearse, as opposed to the end-loaders being used in most of the other states.

Unlike my parents, Ron’s parents had a big problem with the hearse. They made him park it a block away from their house and the tension between them grew each day. When I stopped at Ron’s house one afternoon, he came running out and said that he and his parents were involved in their worst argument ever. As we sat in the car he told me that they had given him an ultimatum, which was to disassociate from me and get rid of the hearse or else move out of their house. My parents were aware of his family situation, so I suggested the latter option, knowing full well that they would agree to let him come live with us. He went back into the house to get some clothing and then left with me, never to reside there again.

We began using our camping car on a regular basis and it worked perfectly, with a mattress fitting right between the wheel wells. We also put a chest in it for food storage and cooking gear. So does that mean, since Al Gore claimed to have created the Internet, that we had just created the first motor home? I guess not, since most people wouldn’t want to be caught dead in a car like that. Even for us, it took awhile to get used to seeing people make the sign of the cross or remove their hats as we drove by.