Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (22 page)

A 1974 advertisement featuring Abbott & Hast’s numerous mortuary accommodation services.

The lifeblood of our company was a continuing supply of fuel. For months during the gas crisis, most of my time was spent on the phone trying to locate fuel. I managed to talk a few gas station owners into letting me purchase their entire inventory, enabling them to close for a few days and reduce their cost of operation.

I put the word out to everyone we knew to keep an eye out for fuel we could buy from unconventional sources. One of my contacts alerted me to a gas station that had unearthed three partly filled old metal tanks, intending to replace them with plastic tanks that would not rust. Vacuum truck companies in Los Angeles were moving gas twenty-four hours a day during the shortage, and the driver they sent on our behalf arrived at the location about three in the morning. He dumped a little over 1,000 gallons into our tank and, as he finished, informed our dispatcher that another truck had arrived to pump some gas. He told the just-arrived driver where he was taking it. The next day, two Los Angeles police detectives came to our office and questioned me about a report of grand theft.

Shortly thereafter, the owner of the station contacted me and demanded we return the gasoline, which I refused to do. I offered him more than the going rate, which he turned down. He finally called me, after all my efforts to settle this matter in an amicable way, and surprised me by saying it wasn’t necessary for us to pay him as his insurance company had already compensated him. It would have been very interesting to know how many gallons of stolen gas the station owner reported.

The closest we ever came to running out was when a customer from the Philippines purchased a hearse through the use of a financial instrument called a letter of credit. As soon as the hearse was loaded on the ship and it had set sail, they would give me signed copies of the bills of lading. I could then apply for funds from the bank listed on the letter of credit. On this occasion the ship was loaded and ready to go, but the Maritime Union called a strike that lasted for weeks. As long as the ship was sitting idle in the harbor, we couldn’t obtain the funds. To make matters worse, ARCO had put me on COD status because of a late payment caused by this strike. It was pretty frustrating having a $6,000 check sit on my desk that couldn’t be cashed and ARCO refusing to bring us any more gas. I was sweating bullets until the strike ended and the check was issued.

Gas was in such short supply that cemeteries couldn’t get enough to keep their lawn mowers running. And we thought that we had problems! People often complain about the high price of gas prices, but they have no idea how bad it is when you can’t get it at any price.

In the early ’70s there was a large earthquake in Los Angeles, the epicenter of which was in the San Fernando Valley, at Sylmar. The most severely damaged structure there was the large complex of buildings called the Olive View Sanitarium and Hospital. It was three stories tall and all the floors had pancaked. It was still dark, and everyone in Los Angeles awoke from the horrendous noise produced by the severe shaking that seemed to go on forever. It was obvious to me that we were going to get very busy.

Even before the sun came up, the coroner’s office was getting calls from all over Los Angeles County. They were dispatching deputies, who began picking up bodies as dawn broke. The calls they got were for people who had already died, but it was going to take a long time to get rescue crews to perform the body recoveries from this multistory building. They assigned us as their official representatives to report to Olive View with our men and cars. Because of the complexity of the job, I requested a signed document from them naming us as their official representative while we remained there. I called it our “Writ of Hideous Corpses.” Our vans and wagons were there around the clock for three days as the building’s layers were uncovered. As each body was recovered, we transported it to the downtown morgue.

One of the tragedies that resulted from this horrific event involved some friends who routinely carpooled to work each morning. The earthquake struck as they passed under a freeway bridge, which collapsed and crushed them in a pickup truck. When our men arrived at that scene they knew it was going to be difficult, because the whole truck was crushed to less than three feet of twisted metal. They told me that the only way they could tell body parts from truck parts was to squeeze whatever they saw—if it was hard, it was part of the truck, and if it was squishy, it was probably part of a body.

The startling part of the story came when we found out that these friends always traveled with a third worker, whose wife informed them that he wasn’t feeling well that morning and wouldn’t be going with them. His friends didn’t have the same luck. Had the victims left one minute sooner or later, they probably wouldn’t have died that day. It makes you wonder: If you were given the opportunity to know the date of your death, would you want to know? Pondering questions like these about mortality can be mind-numbing—a condition that for us was an occupational hazard.

Fortunately, a positive result of the Sylmar quake was the wakeup call that Los Angeles got about all of its unreinforced masonry buildings. The most common ones were large warehouse and factory buildings. This marked the beginning of reinforcement and removal of parapets, a short section of wall that extends higher than the roof of a building. These modifications probably prevented a great deal of death from the Northridge earthquake decades later.

Another disaster we worked on was a plane crash in Pago Pago, American Samoa, which is part of the island archipelago of Polynesia. As commercial aircraft grew larger and transported greater numbers of passengers, the death tolls from crashes were beginning to increase as well. Even if the airline wasn’t at fault, it was customary for them to purchase a casket and transport the remains, or what was left of the deceased, back to their families wherever they lived.

When the decision of which mortuary to use for this air disaster came up, one of the executives chose the Douglass Mortuary in El Segundo, across the street from the south runway at LAX. Owner Sam Douglass’s wife, Jackie, had worked for the airline and knew many of their executives. Sam and Jackie were asked if they would be willing to fly to Dover, Delaware, and oversee all of the identification, embalming, casketing, and funerals for the victims. With our ongoing assistance, it was handled very efficiently and the airline was quite satisfied. From that time on Douglass Mortuary became the official airplane disaster mortuary in the nation, while we served as their support team.

The deadliest airline disaster in history occurred in 1977 on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, probably best known for the French sailors who sighted a giant squid there in the seventeenth century. Many aircraft were being diverted from the island of Gran Canaria because of a bomb threat. Tenerife had a smaller airport called Los Rodeos. These two islands were in proximity to each other, so Los Rodeos received
most of the diverted planes. It had no working ground radar and only one short runway and a taxiway. Planes were stacking up, and only incoming aircraft were allowed to use this runway. By the time everything got sorted out it had become foggy, but they decided to let some of the diverted planes take off.

A KLM Royal Dutch Airlines senior pilot had landed in Tenerife and was approaching his limit of flight time, so he was eager to get airborne after the long delay. The pilot was “pushing up”—the airline jargon for advancing the aircraft into a position for takeoff. The KLM aircraft was a Boeing 747, which was the largest aircraft built at that time. At the other end of the runway was a Pan Am 747 that had just landed. The Pan Am pilot had been instructed to turn off the runway at the third exit, which he missed because of fog. The pilot transmitted to the tower that they were still on the runway, but the message was interrupted.

In the meantime, the tower had instructed the KLM pilot to remain holding, but the pilot believed they had given him permission to take off. The copilot disagreed and told him that they had not received such instructions, but the pilot overruled him and commenced with his takeoff. When the KLM jet started to become airborne, they saw the Pan Am airplane still taxiing on the runway, so the pilot pulled up as steep as he could with full throttle. He nearly cleared the other aircraft, but the landing gear struck the top of the other aircraft, causing them both to crash and burn up. Some passengers were killed instantly by the collision, while many others died in the conflagration that ensued. All told, 583 people perished.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigated the disaster for months and concluded it was caused by pilot error and a communications problem. When two people key their microphones simultaneously it causes a heterodyne, or combination of two frequencies. The NTSB found this had happened when they recovered the black box, which is actually a fluorescent orange color.

This transmission phenomenon was something with which we were very familiar. All our first-call cars were equipped with two-way radios, so the dispatchers at our office were in constant contact with our drivers. Because there were not enough frequencies available for commercial use, we shared ours with a firm called Western Trucking Company. Many times when our drivers were trying to communicate, they would get “stepped on” by a heterodyne.

Just like the Pago Pago disaster, the remains from both aircraft on Tenerife were once again sent to the Dover Air Force Base, where the Douglasses had to report and begin their labor-intensive process. Sam and Jackie were working sixteen-hour days, and they asked us to help with the arrangements on our end in Los Angeles. All casketing and identifications, whenever possible, were being done at Dover. Many of the remains were not whole, so it was decided that they would be buried in one mass grave.

Their small staff needed our assistance because so much of this procedure involved transportation to and from LAX. Many of the victims were from California, so Ron contacted Westminster Memorial Park in Orange County. It agreed to furnish one large grave space at no charge. He also arranged for a priest, a minister, and a rabbi to conduct the graveside service.

At Douglass Mortuary you could stand on their front porch and observe the activities at LAX. Carroll Shelby had his test track parallel to the runway on a private portion of the airport and I saw them test his latest creation, the Shelby Ford Cobra. Sometimes their driver would see a jet was taking off and he would accelerate down the test track, leaving the jet plane in the dust.

The last plane crash that we worked on occurred in the skies over Cerritos, California. An Aeroméxico airliner had collided with a small private plane. Douglass Mortuary once again called on us to coordinate every aspect of the disaster. The airline supplied all the caskets, which in some cases contained as little as one limb. We furnished the cars for the funeral, and I drove a limo to pick up six Aeroméxico pilots who had flown in for the service. The emotion these fellow pilots felt was palpable.

The first of many United States national cemeteries was the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was dedicated in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address, four and a half months after the battle there that changed the tide of the Civil War. The Veterans Administration, which was established in 1930, assumed responsibility for the National Cemetery System from the Department of the Army in 1973.

Because we had become so well known in the funeral industry, the VA cemetery in Westwood often contacted us for assistance. We had already furnished most of the funeral homes in Los Angeles with cars for burials at this sole VA cemetery in Los Angeles County. When the wife of a veteran would die, even twenty or more years after her husband, the family would contact the VA to inquire if she could be interred in the same grave. Double-interment burials became popular in the late ’60s, but when these graves were originally dug, they were not excavated to the required depth of ten feet to accommodate the second burial.

In cases like these, it was necessary to open the original grave and lift the casket out in one piece. Then it was just a matter of removing the rest of the grave liner and digging another four feet of earth out with a backhoe. When this was accomplished, a new liner was installed, the original casket was replaced, and some of the extra dirt was used to cover the top, leaving the required six feet of space available for the second casket. The one thing that hadn’t been considered was what to do if the original casket had deteriorated and could not be removed in one piece. The cemetery’s first few attempts had gone fairly smoothly, but eventually it turned into a real crapshoot when some of the caskets began to crumble, and the cemetery workers refused to climb down and finish the job.

That’s where we came in—again. Our crew of four would get to work after the cemetery workers finished with the backhoe. Call me a latent
archaeologist, because this job never seemed boring to me. I was always fascinated by the idea of digging up prehistoric bones. In this case, they just weren’t that old.