Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (31 page)

Cremation grew in popularity, not only because the service was less expensive, but because follow-up options, such as remains transportation, were more economical as well. Often, people on the West Coast who wanted to return their family members to eastern states would have them cremated first and ship the ashes. Obviously, this was much cheaper than shipping the remains, but it had its own problems. You can’t look at cremated remains and recognize them as your relative, so you have to accept them on faith. It had become common for funeral directors to send us ashes through the U.S. Postal Service. More than once, we
received a box of ashes that had been broken while going through the mail. These ashes were from mortuaries in landlocked states that had seen our scattering service advertised in
Mortuary Management
.

One thing about cremation is that it’s final. If there’s a mistake, that’s a bell you can’t unring. One of our client mortuaries once sent a body to Rosedale Cemetery and Crematory but soon realized that they had sent the wrong one. A preponderance of the crematories in Los Angeles County are located within cemeteries. Rosedale was contacted in a big panic and told to shut down the retort. By the time we got there, they had already removed the body from the furnace because the casket was nothing but charcoal. As strange as it sounds, the body was in relatively good condition, even though the furnace burns at 1,800 degrees. We estimated her weight at about eighty pounds, since all of the fat had rendered out of her body. She looked much like a Native American, because her skin was deep red and her face looked like tanned leather.

A number of lawsuits in the industry arose from misplaced or switched ashes. Sometimes families were given their loved one’s ashes, only to have someone else call a while later, asking when they would be picking the ashes up. Some of these errors were caused by paperwork snafus, in conjunction with the inability to identify ashes when there was a mix-up.

Before the advent of DNA analysis, forensic odontologists identified the dead by comparing their dental records, but teeth are destroyed during cremation, so that identification process did not help in this situation. Gold teeth did not aid the identification process either, because they were usually removed from the ashes before being returned to the family. It was a well-known fact that many crematory employees sifted through cremated remains and removed the gold. The only crematory we served that consistently did not follow this practice was Forest Lawn, because we would often see gold in cremains that families would bring to our boat for scattering at sea.

To avoid any legal liabilities, most crematoriums would post a sign on their walls that read something like “All metallic objects are removed from cremated remains before packaging.” I believe that any inquiries as to the meaning of this signage could be explained away by merely suggesting that it pertained only to things like screws, latches, and hinges.

One of our employees, Jack Farina, went to work for the Pierce Brothers crematorium called Chapel of the Pines, adjacent to Rosedale Cemetery. Sometimes after a service there, it was nice to stop and visit with Jack, who was now in charge of running the crematory. There was a closet in the workroom, and he showed me many shelves stacked with boxes of cremains. Some were from recent cremations in the ’80s, but many dated back to the ’60s. He told me that some families did not pick the cremains up after being notified that they were ready. In fact, about 5 percent of all ashes in the U.S. are never claimed. Even though we offered to scatter them at sea at no charge, Pierce Brothers didn’t want to do any unauthorized disposals, so they just stored them.

During one of my visits with Jack at the crematory, I saw some strange metal objects of varied length sitting on his workbench. They looked like railroad spikes with a mushroom head. Jack told me they were artificial hip replacements that didn’t melt during cremation. It seemed strange that he hadn’t just disposed of them, but he said that one day he dropped one and it made a very pleasant ring, almost like a tuning fork. They all had a different pitch depending on their length, and he offered to save me a few. I told Kathy about them and jokingly explained that they could be made into a nice wind chime for our patio. She said, “Sure, you can hang them there if you want to, but that’s where you’ll be sleeping.”

After a cremation is completed, there are always some bones still partially intact. Some crematories have an apparatus to crush them, but smaller operations crush them manually on a steel plate, using a large hammer. This is called “processing,” so cremains will fit in a box once they are reduced to a fine gravel consistency. They are then strained through a wire mesh and metal objects are removed.

It was not uncommon for deceased women to have their diamond wedding ring on during a visitation. The mortuary would typically be instructed to remove it and other jewelry before proceeding to the crematory. An employee of one of the firms we served said that he had forgotten to perform this task. When the family called and asked when they could come to pick up the diamond ring, the mortuary discovered that it hadn’t been removed. In a panic, they were able to locate the jewels among the ashes. Although the settings had melted, the diamonds were in perfect condition.

Our mortuary’s cremation rate eventually arose to about 70 percent of our services. We had to conduct about five cremations to achieve
the same amount of profit generated by a full-service funeral. We were maintaining a glorious building in the heart of downtown where it cost about $300 a month just to run the air conditioner. Over the years it had become quite apparent that radical changes in people’s perception of the value of funerals were occurring.

Cremation services also conflicted with funeral homes’ historical pricing structure, which was product oriented toward the casket, with the various funeral services provided as accompaniments to that purchase. The final “nail in the coffin” for the traditional funeral industry’s casketbased pricing structure occurred in 1984, when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) instituted the Funeral Rule. It required that a general price list be provided to consumers before making their arrangements, which explained the cost of individual goods and services offered by the mortuary. It was tantamount to handing the family a menu that they could selectively choose from.

Mortuaries were also required to get written permission from a family to embalm a body, which was problematic because embalming is not just for the appearance of the body, but also an important factor in keeping the remains preserved. The new law resulted in every mortuary having to install a refrigerator for the remains until the family came in and signed the necessary form.

The upheaval in the funeral industry didn’t end there. This was a time when the ownership of mortuaries was evolving rapidly. There were a few publicly traded corporations that started buying up all the family-owned mortuaries in high-volume areas all over the United States. In almost every case these corporations, referred to in the industry as “consolidators,” would not change the name of the firm they had purchased. In many instances, they would also keep the former owners on the payroll as managers.

Their advantage was that by operating several funeral providers in one community, they could utilize economies of scale, such as having only one embalming facility for three locations. Ron had even written an editorial in
Mortuary Management
about a man in Texas who had a chain of mortuaries with very small facilities and low prices. The article was entitled “Is There a McDonalds in the Funeral Industry?” Apparently, he didn’t like the reference and filed a lawsuit against us. In all the years we had published
Mortuary Management
, this was the first time we were sued for libel. Our insurance company made an out-of-court settlement with him.

As a result of funeral price consciousness in the public and the Funeral Rule, casket retailers began popping up all over California and all they did was sell caskets, not services. We served our share of families that provided their own casket, including some that they had built, painted, and decorated themselves. We always used what was provided because a mortuary is legally required to use any casket provided by a family, even if they bought it from a competitor.

Being forced to use a casket purchased elsewhere is inherently unfair, in my humble opinion. Imagine what would happen if you took a raw steak into your local restaurant and asked the chef to cook it for you, but the restaurant charged you only for the side dishes. For that matter, what does happen if you take your favorite wine to a restaurant to accompany the meal? Wine is a major source of markup for restaurants, so many restaurants charge a corkage fee equivalent to their cheapest bottle, to recoup at least some of the potential lost revenue. However, a funeral home is prohibited from charging a handling fee, even though caskets are sometimes delivered inside a great deal of packaging that staff members have to remove and discard.

Funeral directors would call Ron to ask him if he had any thoughts about this financial threat to our industry, and he was always very candid in his response. His most frequent response was that funeral directors should price their products and services individually and competitively, rather than basing charges on the casket price, as had traditionally been done.

At one point, a funeral director went to one of these casket stores to see who was manufacturing them. He identified the caskets as being distributed by the Inland Casket Company. We had been purchasing many of our caskets from Inland, so when Ron was asked what he thought about the situation, he simply said that we would probably not be buying from them any more. As a result, we got sued for restraint of trade. We paid up because this was what the government considered a violation of antitrust laws. What a load of crap, when you can’t even state your opinion about something.

One day, my friend Tim Waters called me with a business proposition. He knew a couple in North Hollywood who owned a picture car rental company called Hollywood Picture Vehicles. Among their cars were five ambulances, two detective cars, six Checker cabs, and a hearse I had sold them. They wanted to sell the business, so Tim approached me about joining with him to buy it. They agreed to take half the asking price of $20,000 as a down payment and the balance in monthly installments.

Kathy saw this as an opportunity to get involved in this business herself. She was very active and liked to exercise at least three days a week. It seemed to me that going back to work would have cramped her lifestyle, but she jumped at the chance to become the office manager for us. After we consummated the deal she started answering the phones and checking cars in and out.

Several months into the business, we received a letter from the California Secretary of State’s office stating that the previous owners had used the business as collateral for a loan on which they had defaulted. We consulted an attorney and were informed that under the terms of such a lien, we would have to pay it off to keep the business. We tried to cancel the deal, but the sellers had already spent the down payment money.

The attorney said our only other option would be to break up the business. Neither one of us could use the name of the company, keep the phone number, or retain more than 49 percent of the vehicles. We finally agreed that Tim would take the ambulances and a number of other vehicles, I would take the Checker cabs, and we would sell five of the vehicles. After that, we operated independently. Kathy was out of a job, but she never mentioned working again. The cabs became part of our rental fleet, and I eventually bought four more because they were a popular rental item.

Checker Motors Corporation stopped producing Checker cabs in the early ’80s and they had been slowly disappearing by attrition. They had been produced for about thirty years in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and during that entire time there were only minimal changes. The only noticeable change came after the government forced all car manufacturers to beef up their bumpers.

Checkers were really an ingenious innovation because cab companies need cars that are roomy inside, last a long time, are cheap to repair, and don’t cost too much. They ran very basic, small-block Chevrolet engines. The exterior underwent some minor changes from time to time but mostly remained the same over many years. Amazingly, a number of Checkers have been documented to have a million miles on them.

It often became necessary to match existing film shots made on the East Coast with current ones taken in downtown Los Angeles, hence backgrounds were filled with lots of Checkers, looking like New York or Chicago. The TV show
Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer
, starring Stacy Keach, was shot mostly if not entirely in LA, even though it was supposed to take place in New York. Besides being rented for films, Checker cabs were popular in TV commercials and photo shoots. One of my Checkers was even used on the cover of a Dolly Parton album.

One of Hollywood Picture Vehicles’ Checker Cab rental cars in 1984.