Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (23 page)

We went on to complete many more of these procedures over the following years. That resulted in our disinterring the famous mountain man John “Liver-Eating” Johnston, portrayed by Robert Redford in the film
Jeremiah Johnson
. By the time we were hired by a historical society for this job in 1974, Johnston had been buried about eighty years. All we were able to recover were small pieces of the fibula and tibia, the lower leg bones. Although there wasn’t much left of him, the historical society was delighted to take what we had recovered back to Cody, Wyoming. The bone fragments were placed beneath a monument in his memory, and Robert Redford served as the pallbearer. History has recorded that Johnson had cannibalized as many as 200 Crow Indians. I wonder if that was the origin of the expression “eating crow”? Naah.

The government was paying a paltry $245 benefit to families of veterans to cover burial costs, which was used to pay for a casket and transportation. Whenever possible, we would try to schedule two services on the same day. There was no charge for the plot or the color guard, which consisted of six uniformed soldiers acting as casket bearers and a bugler.

Another seven soldiers firing three times consecutively performed the twenty-one-gun salute. The origin of this ritual dates back over 200 years and has experienced some modifications or additions. During the time when the great world powers were fighting major sea battles, each side knew the names of their enemy’s ships and how many cannons each ship possessed. Upon approaching a foreign port they would fire their cannons into the open sea, as a gesture of good faith. The opposition knew that reloading was slow, putting them in range of their own cannons.

The tradition that later arose began as a naval salute alone, but it evolved into the demonstration of honor that it is today. After the salute has been completed, the color guard tri-folds the flag and the bugler plays. Friends and family seem to be able to hold it together until the haunting sound of “Taps” begins. That always evokes an outpouring of emotion.

The Westwood VA cemetery was filled by 1976. We continued our services for the $245 allowance, but now we were transporting bodies to the next-nearest VA facility, Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego. Eventually, Fort Rosecrans was also nearing capacity. Then, the
next-nearest VA cemetery was in the Willamette Valley, near Eugene, Oregon, almost 1,000 miles from Los Angeles. It greatly upset the veterans organizations as no California mortuary would consider making such a trip for the $245 fee that the government allowed. The politicians finally got the message and started to plan a new VA cemetery in California, but it was expected to take about three years.

We felt this was unacceptable for our veterans, so we decided that the only way to correct this injustice was to come up with an interim solution. We purchased a large truck and equipped it with a heavy-duty hydraulic lift at the rear. I designed and ordered six three-tiered racks with large rubber wheels and had them custom built to our specifications by our friends at Ferno. This would enable us to transport up to eighteen caskets. We then informed all the mortuaries of our new service.

It would take two days to get to the Willamette Valley, followed by one full day at the cemetery and two days to return. We made the same trip each week and in three years put 120,000 miles on the truck. Finally, the new national cemetery was ready to open in Riverside, California, so we sold our truck and began taking four at a time to Riverside in a lift van.

When the VA realized that we had been providing veterans services for years, they called us directly about the possibility of having a program for indigent veterans. We informed them that we were willing to furnish a casket and transport the deceased seventy miles to Riverside for the amount allowed by the government, which had been adjusted from the paltry $245 to a whopping $255. Nevertheless, we always felt privileged to serve our country’s veterans and their families.

Abbott & Hast’s Ford truck, used for transporting veterans to VA cemeteries.

We rented hearses every year for Halloween parties, birthdays, and weddings. Our most unusual hearse rental was to a group of guys who wanted our driver to take them to a hospital to pick up their friend as a joke. He had jumped off the roof of his friend’s house trying to land in the swimming pool but was about two feet short. The man didn’t quite appreciate the humorous side of the gesture, especially when our driver took a detour through a cemetery, as requested.

In the ’70s, the California Department of Transportation created a dedicated carpool lane on the Santa Monica Freeway. Intended to promote ride sharing, this “diamond lane” was only for vehicles carrying multiple passengers. Many people viewed it as discriminatory, so they formed a group of volunteers to drive in the diamond lane with only one occupant per car, in violation of the law. They hired me to drive a hearse leading the procession, with my stipulation that one of their volunteers ride in the hearse with me. The rest of them received citations, and they didn’t achieve their objective of changing the law.

That same year, a funeral director went to court to explain that he had been given an erroneous ticket for using the diamond lane. He pointed out that there was nothing in the law that said his passenger had to be alive, so he was found not guilty. His argument worked, but it didn’t work so well for several pregnant women who claimed they had passengers as well.

While movie rentals were a nice supplement, the core of our business was still accommodations. A mortuary has a variety of ways to advertise its business, but a funeral car livery service doesn’t. We were well known in our local industry, but we needed to get more statewide exposure. A trade journal published in LA called
Mortuary Management
had subscribers all over the United States, especially on the West Coast. Many industry suppliers, like casket manufacturers, funeral car builders, and embalming fluid chemical companies, ran half- or full-page ads in this magazine.

We weren’t sure how effective a half-page display ad would be, and we couldn’t afford one anyway, so Ron got the publisher, William Berg, to let us run a series of business-card-size ads. This provided us with great exposure because every third or fourth page had our small ad on it, featuring headshots of Ron and me with the captions: “Call Abbott & Hast for hearse service,” “Call Abbott & Hast for limousine service,” and so on. This was at a time when magazines set up their pages with a cut-and-paste format, so it worked out well for their art director, since many page layouts contained gaps that could be filled with a repetition of our many small ads.

Each year at the state conventions we attended, funeral directors would approach us asking if we owned the magazine because of our numerous ads. In spite of our assurance that we didn’t, it was assumed by many that we did. Then, in 1975, we got a call from Mr. Berg, who was retiring and thought we might want to purchase the publication. We acquired the company and changed the name from Berg Publications to Abbott & Hast Publications. Ironically, our acquisition just confirmed some people’s belief that we had owned it all along.

With a nationwide industry trade journal added to our business, we had become a sort of clearinghouse for anything that was going on in the funeral industry, and were often consulted on issues involving the funeral trade. Companies would also consult with us when a new technology was developed, including the first cryonics (frozen body preservation) firms in the mid-’70s. One company had developed a prototype and delivered a huge cylinder to our facility to be put on display. They held meetings and invited businesspeople to come and see the unit in an effort to attract investors. By the late ’70s, one of the companies, Cryonics Society of California, ran out of funds. Their machines were turned off, resulting in thawing and decomposing bodies.

As our business continued to expand, we wanted to design a new business card that people would keep and not just throw away. We went to our printer and asked him to print an imitation $50 bill, with a drawing of our new building in place of the United States Capitol building that is on the back of the real $50 note. The other side had numerous lines where people could write down their most often-called phone numbers. The business card was a big hit with everyone—except the U.S. Treasury. Two government agents came to our mortuary and confiscated every bill we had. They even fined our printer. We still liked the idea, so we had new
ones printed with an image of our building on just half the bill. When folded in half twice, it looked like a real $50.

When Mischa was asked as a youth if he would ever be interested in working for our mortuary, his answer was an unequivocal no. He reminded me of one occasion when we were both going upstairs on the freight elevator. A decomposed body on a cot was being taken up to the prep room. A sheet covered the body, so the only thing showing was the man’s feet, which reminded him of the Incredible Hulk, with his bilious green color. He said that being close to that body convinced him to never consider working in the business. However, during their high school years, Mischa and Greg were both interested in working for our magazine, which was next door to the mortuary.

The “News Briefs” section of
Mortuary Management
, which Greg began editing when he was 16, always reported on issues concerned with lawsuits, criminal investigations, or anything else of interest in the funeral industry. Over the last thirty-five years, we have published enough bizarre and fascinating stories to fill an entire book. For instance, we reported on the amazing fact that some books at the nation’s most prestigious libraries are bound in human skin, including a collection at Harvard University’s library. Because human skin was cheap, durable, and waterproof, doctors were asked to retrieve it from amputations or unclaimed bodies.

We also ran some articles about body farms, the most famous of which is the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility. More than 1,000 people have willed their remains to these farms in the last ten years, and a large number of crimes have been solved as a result of thorough examination and documentation of insect life cycles and other natural indicators on the collected corpses. A proposal from a Texas university to start a similar body farm was turned down because of the phenomenon known as “NIMBY,” or “Not In My Back Yard.” It would have been especially disturbing to people who lived downwind.

The covers of
Mortuary Management
have always been well known for featuring scenic photographs. We always provided a description of where the photo was taken and tried to have the covers reflect the seasons, like flowers in spring and snow scenes in winter. Over the years, Greg and I furnished the majority of the photographs, but we also acquired photos that we would have been unlikely to take ourselves, including underwater scenes, volcanoes, lightning, and fireworks.

One photo that Greg acquired from another source was the best example of its subject that we had ever seen. It was an upward-facing shot of the top half of the Statue of Liberty, which clearly showed the beautiful green patina that copper turns to as it weathers. Cover photos were always chosen far in advance of publication, so it was poignant when readers called in after 9/11 to say they were moved to see that photo appear on our September 2001 issue.

Our magazine covers became so popular that some readers requested prints suitable for framing, a service we were happy to accommodate. One such reader, Guy Thompson of Thompson’s Harveson & Cole in Fort Worth, Texas, ordered six framed prints of religious structures that had appeared on various covers. He put them on display at his funeral home. To complete this collection, he included a watercolor of a restored cathedral in Baltimore, Maryland, and then graciously sent us a photo of his church gallery wall.

Funeral director Guy Thompson’s gallery wall, displaying several
Mortuary Management
cover photos.