Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (26 page)

About half of all my sales were to people who did business with me repeatedly over the years. One of these repeat customers was June Amarao, who also shipped forty-foot containers full of car parts to the Philippines and suffered a great loss when one such container on the dock fell into the sea during the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan.

Bernie Ileto was another repeat customer. He was the son of a family that owned several mortuaries in the Philippines. The bills of lading for these shipments always showed the destination as “Metro Manila,” but on one occasion I asked Bernie where these two hearses would end up. When he said “Cabanatuan,” a shiver went down my spine. The Bataan Death March in World War II began there and continued for sixty miles in extremely hot weather without food or water. Most of the victims were already suffering with malnutrition and war-related diseases. An estimated 10,000 American and Philippine prisoners of war died on that forced march.

Another Filipino dealer named Ray was in the process of buying his fifth hearse from me, but said it could not be shipped right away because of the two-cars-per-year rule. He picked out a fairly late model from my
inventory but asked me to hold the car for about four months. Three months later, Ray called me and asked if it was possible to get a refund because the farm that his family owned was buried under fifteen feet of volcanic ash from the Mount Pinatubo eruption and he was going to have to help them recover financially. The same eruption caused the closure of Clark Air Base, which was about nine miles away and had been used by the United States for decades. The commanding officer of the base was slow to react during the volcano’s early warning signs, so the government’s geologist told him that he better have plenty of jam in his pockets because he was going to be toast. He got the message.

Our neighbors in the Hollywood Hills didn’t seem to get upset seeing funeral cars in our driveway, although seeing me unloading bags of groceries from the back of a hearse would occasionally raise some eyebrows. Kathy was fairly tolerant of my shenanigans as long as she could distance herself from them. One night, I drove a used station wagon home that was being converted for a mortuary. The only visible modification so far was the installation of the full vinyl top. The landau bars hadn’t been installed; it had no curtains and no sandblasted palm leafs on the tailgate window yet.

Kathy said she wanted to go out to dinner that night, so I suggested that we use the wagon because my car had been left at work. I told her that no one would ever pay attention to it. Kathy finally agreed, but she let me know that she did not like driving around in a funeral car as we did when we were dating.

At the restaurant, the host seated us in a booth that faced the street where the wagon was parked. A short time later, two old ladies were seated in the booth next to us. One of them spotted the car and said, “Look, someone parked a hearse in front of the restaurant. That’s disgusting!” I thought Kathy was going to throw her fettuccine at me.

I always drove old station wagons so that I could haul broken cots home for repairs. After my fourth one, Kathy said that I would reincarnate as a
drundulet
, which is Russian for jalopy.

In early 1978, there was a continuous three-week rain in Los Angeles. Our office received a call at five in the morning from the owner of the Verdugo Hills Cemetery in Tujunga. This cemetery belonged to a man who also owned the Los Angeles Mortuary. He said that there had been a massive mudslide at the cemetery and that caskets and bodies were scattered everywhere. As usual, the night dispatcher called me for instructions. I called several of our crew members and requested they meet me at the cemetery with shovels, knee boots, and raincoats.

The night before, someone a mile down from the cemetery had called the police department and reported finding a body in the gutter as he walked his dog. The coroner picked up the body, and it was taken downtown. The embalmer washed the mud off the body and prepared to make an incision, but to his great surprise there was a sutured incision on the body, telling him that this corpse had already been embalmed.

In the pale light that precedes the morning sun, residents in the area started calling the police department as body parts were being discovered in the streets and yards of homes downhill from the cemetery. Doug Scott and I arrived at the same time just before the sun was coming up. Through the mist it was barely possible to see much more than the gentle rolling hills coming into view. As we drove closer the silhouette of many half-buried caskets became eerily visible, like the set of some gruesome horror movie.

Dr. Thomas Noguchi showed up at 9
A.M
. and immediately started making the obligatory introductions to the many representatives who had arrived from various city and county departments. He included me because I was representing the cemetery owner. Filmed and recorded by all the news media, Dr. Noguchi stated that he would be taking over this operation and that all remains were going to be transported downtown for identification.

After the news conference concluded, I took him aside and brought to his attention that he really didn’t have any jurisdiction in this matter. These people had been legally buried under permits issued by the Los Angeles County Health Department. I reminded him that a coroner could only perform an exhumation with a court order signed by a judge. Since this was definitely not his purview and that of his staff, he deferred to my assessment. He even seemed to be somewhat relieved that this burden had been removed from his office, which was understaffed and under-funded, and sent me a thank you letter for assuming responsibility of the job.

One of his deputies informed me that there was a body in a residential area a mile down the hill. They had placed a sheet over it and told us its exact location. We drove down to where the body was and found the neighborhood kids all sitting astride their bikes waiting to get a cheap thrill. The kids weren’t about to leave and miss all the fun, but I told my assistant to watch them scatter when we exposed the corpse. They were in a semicircle about six feet away when I pulled the sheet off. The body of an elderly man was nude, quite dehydrated, and white as a sheet. His eyes were sunken in and his mouth was open. A movie special-effects department could not have created a more grotesque sight. To my amazement, the kids just sat there and didn’t even blink. I guess the younger generations have been exposed to so much TV and movie gore that they’re jaded.

The Verdugo Hills Cemetery mudslide had its roots in an engineering miscalculation. When a grave is opened, more dirt is set aside than will go back in when the grave is closed. Over the years, all this extra dirt was dumped in one corner of the cemetery that had a steep incline, and they didn’t use a compactor to properly compress the side of this hill. When the cemetery was nearing its capacity, the owner made a fateful decision to start doing burials in this hillside. This set the stage for the inevitable, after a few weeks of steady rain.

Because a large portion of the hillside was still unstable, LA County officials realized they would have to step in and remove all the remaining bodies. Another slide would surely happen if nothing were done to prevent it. We were already quite involved, so they asked us to put in a bid to do the job. We proposed to disinter and reinter all the bodies, place them in disaster pouches, and bury them in a special, mass burial grave located in a stable part of the cemetery. We proposed a cost of $250 per body, which included everything, and they gave us the contract.

We knew that these were not going to be simple disinterments, since many of the caskets had been in the ground for years and few would be in concrete vaults. The county assigned a supervisor to oversee the task and make sure they got a correct tally. We rented a forty-foot office trailer, had it delivered on-site, and began the arduous task of uncovering an entire corner of the cemetery.

It took approximately four months to complete the project, and Ron practically lived in the trailer the entire time. By midsummer, the ground had hardened considerably because of the claylike consistency of the earth. An area of 400 square feet was opened on a flat part of the cemetery to inter the more than 200 bodies. In recognition of this considerable undertaking, Ron received a framed certificate of achievement from a grateful LA County.

One evening, Kathy and I settled in to watch
Quincy, M.E
., starring Jack Klugman. All of a sudden, the same scene that was so vivid in my memory came to life. As dawn broke, a hillside slowly emerged into view shrouded in the early morning mist, with numerous caskets protruding from the ground. A chill ran through me. The thing that surprised me the most was seeing something exactly as it appeared on that foggy morning. It never occurred to me that that scene would someday be re-created in such a realistic and graphic manner. They had captured the very essence of what we had seen at dawn, when we first arrived at the cemetery. The set decorator did an outstanding job creating a realistic scene, although the plot of the episode deviated from the actual event.

Sometimes events in life cause abrupt and major turnarounds. These changes often come as a shock and are perceived as misfortune, but as they say, when one door closes, another opens.

One morning while working at the garage, our manager, Steve McAninch, called to notify me that there was a fire at the mansion. It was balls to the wall around every street corner. I had with me a small hand-held fire extinguisher from the garage to put out what was probably no more than a wastebasket fire. The scene that struck me as I rounded the final corner was a sky filled with smoke and flames billowing out of the building’s second floor.

Three employees were standing on the parking lot and, thankfully, our other drivers were all out on services. Steve didn’t even know if anyone was still inside because students would sometimes sleep in their dorm rooms after their night shifts were over. I ran into the building and upstairs to the dormitory rooms. Everything was dark because the fire had already cut the power. The hallway to the dorm rooms was engulfed in flames, and there were no responses to my calls. After I inhaled a lot of smoke, dizziness set in, along with the realization that this could end up being my own funeral pyre. I had to crouch down low to get enough air to get back downstairs.

Steve suspected that one of our student employees caused the fire after having been wakened to make a first call. He had apparently lit a cigarette while preparing himself but neglected to put it out when leaving his room. The fire must have been burning for at least fifteen minutes while the dispatchers downstairs were totally unaware.

Fortunately, another student was asleep upstairs who had worked the night shift and was no longer on call. He kept hearing some crackling noises, which he thought was just the sound of rain, since it had rained the night before. The sound got louder, so he looked up from his bed and
noticed an orange glow coming from under his door. When he got out of bed and opened his door, he saw that the whole left side of the hallway was on fire. He grabbed his raincoat and ran through the flames, down the stairs, and into the dispatch office.

The fire investigators said that based on the time the original driver left and the onset of the fire, the cigarette had burned down until it fell from the ashtray. After a half hour of smoldering on the floor, the fire ignited. All the destruction occurred in only half of the upstairs, but smoke and water had damaged the entire building. It cost our insurance company $130,000 to completely redo everything, inside and out.

The biggest change came when we found out that we could not rebuild the separate dormitory rooms because of fire regulations, so that area was returned to its original state as one large room. As a result of no longer having a dorm, we discontinued doing first calls and body transportation. It was obvious we needed to replace the income we were going to lose.

The funereal procedures we had been performing for over twenty years were analogous to those performed by a mortuary, and that made us feel completely qualified to operate our own stand-alone business. The problem was that we would be going into competition with our own customers. We contacted all the mortuaries that we served and invited them to a meeting at our newly refurbished building. Representatives of most of the firms showed up. We gave them our word that we would never let any of their patrons know that we had our own mortuary if they continued to support our funeral livery service.

The Abbott & Hast colonial mansion in 1978.

About sixty people attended the meeting. After listening to our proposal, one mortuary owner spoke up and asked the inevitable
question: “Why should we continue using you under these circumstances?” Before we could answer, Phil Bagues stood up to comment on our behalf. He was the nephew of Manuel Bagues, who owned a very successful mortuary in East Los Angeles that we had been serving for years. Phil said, “I’m sure a lot of you are upset about this decision, but when push comes to shove and equipment becomes much more expensive, you’re not going to be the ones who are going to have to incur those costs, so just deal with it.”