Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (28 page)

Another funeral director showed up from out of town in a beautiful motor home, pulling a small trailer, and requested that a body we were holding be placed in the trailer. Ron inquired and was told that the director and his wife had decided to make this trip in conjunction with a pickup they had to make in the LA area. His wife agreed to this arrangement only if the body was not carried in the motor home.

There was also one occasion when a family went into a mortuary client of ours to make funeral arrangements. The counselor asked where the death had occurred so he could dispatch someone to remove the deceased and bring the body to the mortuary. They said it wouldn’t be necessary to pick him up because they had him sitting in the backseat of the car. The director walked out to the car and there he was, still wearing his hat.

One of our client mortuaries was in a part of Los Angeles known as Hyde Park. After many years the owner retired and sold the business to a gentleman we had known for years, Bob Bonefoy. He and his wife were in their fifties and lived in an apartment above the funeral home. Hyde Park had seen a big increase in crime. One night, the couple heard noises coming from downstairs, so Bob went down to investigate. His wife heard a gunshot and went down to see what had happened. She found him on the floor of the embalming room, and he whispered to her, “They finally got me.” Strangely, Bob had told his wife that sooner or later they were going to be the victims of the criminal element that had inundated the neighborhood. His gunshot wound turned out to be fatal. The LAPD conducted an extensive investigation, but they were not able to determine who had committed the crime.

A few years went by and the case had gone cold. Acting on a tip, the narcotics division of the police department discovered a drug dealer’s lab close to the mortuary. Along with many drug-producing materials were boxes of embalming fluid that had the name of Bob’s mortuary printed on the cartons. Apparently, drug dealers had discovered that marijuana dipped in formaldehyde made the drug much more potent. The drug dealer must have been using too much of his own products because he
didn’t discard the empty boxes but simply used them to store some of his equipment. He was subsequently convicted of burglary and murder.

I’m sure that many people assumed that Ron and I were wealthy because of all the business we conducted. Someone at a local gym overheard two men in the next row of lockers discussing a home invasion they were planning. The eavesdropper clearly heard them discussing the fact that one of the owners of Abbott & Hast had a safe in his house that probably contained a great deal of money. The man contacted the LAPD and informed them about what he had overheard.

A detective called our home that evening and informed me that they were conducting an investigation of this apparent plot. He asked if our home was in the Hollywood Hills and if we had a safe in the house, both of which were correct. He gave me his name and instructed me to lock all the doors and windows and turn on all our outside lights.

The kids were very frightened, so I had Kathy take them into our den and close the door. To confirm everything, I made a quick call to the police, who told me that one of their detectives was in the field investigating just such a case. They verified his name. I placed a chair in the center of the living room and sat there with my shotgun.

Almost an hour went by before they called back and told me they had determined that Ron was the target. When three detectives arrived at Ron’s house, they filled him in on what was afoot and said they were going to hide in his bedroom until the perpetrators arrived. Sure enough, two young men showed up and said they were friends of someone Ron knew. He served them drinks and waited to see what would develop. That evening, some other friends showed up shortly after the would-be home invaders. Two hours later, the detectives got tired of waiting so they came out of the bedroom and confronted the two individuals, who denied everything. The detectives told them that if anything happened, they would be the first to be arrested.

In most states, to become a licensed embalmer you must attend an accredited college of mortuary science and serve an apprenticeship under the direction of a licensed embalmer. After becoming licensed, the embalmer is required to sign the death certificates. There is quite an art to preparing a body, so the classes cover not only arterial embalming, but also facial reconstruction, cosmetology, and hair preparation.

Before the embalming process is started, it is necessary to “set the features,” which is accomplished through a number of procedures. A product developed in the late ’40s was used to glue the lips together after the jaw is pinned and wired closed. That glue was sold under the brand name Lip Lock, well before that expression took on a whole different meaning. Now, it is amusing (at least to those in the funeral business) to hear someone use that phrase in describing a prolonged kiss.

After the lips are glued, a type of mild stain is applied, which in the trade is called “orange juice.” When the body is drained of blood, the deceased becomes very pale, so the stain compensates for the lack of natural color. Next, cotton is packed into the nasal passages and pink eye caps are inserted, which look like half ping-pong balls with barbs on them. The reason the eye caps are pink is to provide color to the closed eyelids. These are secured over the eyeballs and the lids are pulled down so that the undersides of the eyelids are held in place by these barbed caps.

A deceased man is clean-shaven during preparation, since the myth persisted for decades that the beard can continue to grow for a short time after death. The subject was addressed factually on
CSI
. Beards don’t grow after death, but when the skin on the face starts to dehydrate it causes shrinkage and exposes the whiskers.

Nearly everyone has heard the term rigor mortis, which is used to describe the rigidity that occurs in the body after death. Many crime
scene investigators use this rigidity to help determine how long a person has been deceased, but in about eight hours it goes away. This flaccidity, or softening of the muscles, can also be used to determine when the death occurred.

CSI
is one of my favorite TV shows. No big surprise there. I’m sure they spend a great deal of money on special effects, and they constantly use terms and jargon that we have been hearing for over forty years. The shows are usually very accurate, except when the investigator declares that the death occurred twelve hours earlier, as determined by the liver temperature. This is technically known as algor mortis. In order to perform this test, clothing must be removed to access the abdomen, but the bodies on the show are usually fully dressed when this procedure is conducted.

The body loses two degrees of temperature the first hour and one degree per hour after death, but this is not always constant, due to extremes in ambient temperature. To determine “liver temp,” they take a long, thin, pointed metal rod with a temperature gauge on the opposite end, much like one you would use to check if your holiday turkey was thoroughly cooked. The liver is the body’s largest internal organ, so it is the best choice to use in determining approximate time of death. The first time I went on a coroner’s call and arrived before the deputy coroner had performed this test, I had no choice but to stand there and observe the procedure.

The embalming colleges hold detailed classes on these subjects, as well as facial restoration for victims of traumatic incidents. This is needed when the family requests a viewing, and the hope is to have the deceased look the way the family remembers him or her. Restoration is accomplished through a procedure that involves the application of wax to fill in wounds, which are then covered by cosmetics.

Before an artery and vein are raised, the embalming machine is filled with several gallons of water and formaldehyde. The larger the body, the more fluid it takes, at approximately one gallon for each forty pounds of body weight. The embalming machine is a simple pump that has a pressure of only eight to ten pounds. Some people think that embalming is a fairly recent technique, but it began back in 1867, when August Wilhelm von Hofmann used pressure embalming during the Civil War to preserve soldiers’ bodies for transport back home.

Neither Ron nor I ever became embalmers, but we always had one or more on staff after we opened our own funeral home. Not all mortuaries have an embalmer on staff, so they call an independent trade embalmer, who works for many firms. We, too, used a trade embalmer for after-hours procedures.

An embalmer can sometimes be put at risk when he is not notified that the deceased died of a communicable disease, the most common of these being active tuberculosis, which can be highly contagious. Tests for TB even forty-eight hours after embalming showed the pathogen that causes the disease still present. In the ’80s, the most common risk to embalmers was exposure to AIDS. Hospitals were supposed to put red toe-tags on such cases, but it wasn’t always done.

For the first few years of the disease, embalmers had been unknowingly preparing these cases while no one knew the underlying cause of death. Doctors were signing DCs on AIDS cases with the COD as Kaposi’s sarcoma, malignant tumors that grow in different parts of the anatomy’s connective tissue, but most notably appear as facial lesions. For this reason the industry standardized universal preventive measures that obligated embalmers to wear additional protective gear.

Doctors in the United States and France simultaneously discovered the virus that causes AIDS. Almost immediately, some mortuaries started charging extra fees for these cases or refused to handle them, but we continued serving these families. We even started getting referrals from a hospice in LA for the medical care of its AIDS victims.

The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office was an interesting place to visit because of the fascinating stories told by the deputies during my frequent stops there. The business office consisted of many individual desks, where the deputies sat and took telephone notifications of deaths that were called in each day by police officers, as well as funeral directors when a DC signing took a wrong turn or was disallowed by the county health department.

The original coroner’s offices were on the ground floor of the Los Angeles County Hall of Records, while the embalming room was on another floor. The coroner’s office was rapidly outgrowing the entire facility, so a decision was made to build a much larger facility right next to the USC County General Hospital. The new business office entrance was on North Mission Road, but in order to access the area where the
prep room and refrigerators were, you had to pull into the driveway on Marengo Street. As soon as you backed into the removal area at the rear of the building and exited your vehicle, you would notice that the air was heavy with a terrible smell. There was an industrial-grade bug zapper at this rear entrance, which continually emitted buzzing noises as it killed the flying insects.

This entrance took you into a room that was the heart of most of the activity and where all the paperwork was processed. At the rear of the room was a door that led to a hallway. Refrigerated body storage areas were on the left side and a larger room was on the right side, where there were multiple embalming tables and lab facilities. I’m sure that this large new facility was badly needed, but the original coroner’s office was quite pleasant compared to this one with all the rank odors flowing into the room where DCs were obtained. This office alone has handled as many as 20,000 cases per year and inspired the TV series
North Mission Road
.

Not everyone could tolerate the situations often encountered in this profession. Many people over the years told me that they knew at a fairly young age that the funeral business interested them. Vocational tests were given to all seniors in our high school, but if they had me rank a list of potential career choices that included funeral director it would probably have come in near the end of my list. The upside of the profession is being able to assist people in situations that would be imponderable for them without someone’s experienced assistance.

Los Angeles is well known for its ethnic diversity, and the nature of our business enabled us to have unique relationships with a wide variety of clients. Few businesses provide exposure to as many people of different faiths and traditions as we encountered. Serving so many different people enabled us to see varied aspects of their cultures, particularly the interesting ways they care for their dead.

Russians were among the many cultures in LA. The most unusual Russians were called Molokan, the old believers, whose name was derived from
moloko
, the Russian word for milk. The Molokan religion dates back several hundred years when its people were being persecuted for many reasons, including the drinking of milk during Russian Orthodox fasting periods. Furthermore, many of their gatherings had been originally held in caves along the shore of a river that appeared to be white because of its high mineral content.

Dave Malloy was the only funeral director who conducted their funerals because he knew exactly how to accommodate them. They always purchased the same white octagon casket that he would order from a casket company that knew how to custom-fabricate them. These caskets allowed Dave to completely remove the entire one-piece lid. The funerals were conducted in large meeting halls with nothing to indicate their function. Nothing in the room resembled a place of worship, only wooden benches. The casket was placed in the center of the room, with the lid set to the side. A deceased male was always dressed in all-white clothing and shoes.

There were two Asian funeral homes in LA, but Gutierrez & Weber, a Hispanic mortuary, did a great many Chinese services because of their location, which was directly across the street from Chinatown. Fukui Mortuary exclusively served the Japanese community, but the Mission Nisei Mortuary, with its Chinese manager, served both cultures. All of
our evening services were either Japanese funerals or Catholic rosaries. The Japanese always had their graveside services the following morning, which were very traditional rituals, exactly like the ones conducted in their homeland, with incense burning, gong ringing, and exotic chanting.