Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (6 page)

After the death of her husband, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria wore only black clothing, thus beginning the tradition of wearing black to funerals. Many of our funeral traditions were direct carryovers from the
British Isles. In almost every respect we have adopted British funeral traditions, while changing only some of the terminology. In the United States, the word “casket” has been used for generations, while “coffin” is still used exclusively throughout England. In addition, we refer to “cemeteries,” while the British refer to them as “graveyards.” The British will still use the terms “undertaker” and “mortician,” while “funeral director” is a much more commonly used expression in the Unites States. George Bernard Shaw may have stated it best when he said, “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.”

Ron and I frequently dined at a favorite restaurant from our school days at Dorsey High. They had excellent food for a drive-in. One day, we happened to meet the assistant chef, Bill Carnes. We started talking about what we did for a living and how we provided our employees with free rent and payment for each call they made. He seemed very interested in this arrangement and said he would like to participate after his shift was over at the restaurant. By furnishing our own in-house chef in exchange for a room, we found the perfect solution for the crew’s meal breaks

Our first-call men ranged in age from about 17 to 20, while Bill was at least 50 and was missing four teeth. We never envisioned the possibility that he would ever assist on any calls. Our most complex manpower issue the first few years wasn’t finding enough students willing to do this type of work, but rather a recurring phenomenon of timing. We wouldn’t get any calls for three or four hours, and then two or three might come in within thirty minutes of each other.

One busy evening our biggest customer, Utter-McKinley, phoned in a house call while our other two crews were already out. This was one of those times we needed to resort to some pretty drastic solutions. I asked Bill if he had a suit and if he would be willing to go on a call with me. When he got dressed, it was obvious that his suit was too big and looked very old.

We had a first-call car but were down to our last cot and no more cot covers. Knowing that it would look terrible to make a house call without a cot cover, I thought, “What would Scarlett O’Hara do?” I went into the chapel that had been sitting unused and took down a maroon velvet drape. The only problem was that it had brass rings sewed along the top seam about a foot apart. After that, my biggest concern was to tell Bill to keep his mouth shut just before we entered the mortuary prep room.

When the night attendant heard us come in, he came downstairs from his apartment to give us a hand. The cots we had were old and only eleven inches in height, whereas the prep table was waist-high. The revolutionary Ferno-Washington Model #22 cot hadn’t been invented yet, which was the first truly one-man cot. It was engineered so it could be lifted up and locked in place, level with the embalming table. We lifted the cot while the night man pulled the deceased onto the table. The velvet drape that I had so carefully folded just before we entered the prep room slipped off the foot end of the cot. Out flopped the end with the brass rings. If that wasn’t bad enough, Bill must have seen the humor in my feeble attempt to disguise it and broke out in a big toothless grin, once again proving that Murphy’s Law never fails.

We purchased our first new vehicle, which was a 1958 Chevy Sedan Delivery. It was readily apparent that a good source of revenue would be statewide body transportation and graveside services, to areas as far as 400 miles away. Early in our entry into making these calls, we got an order from the manager of Utter-McKinley’s Highland Park branch, requesting a special favor. He wanted to know if it would be possible to also take the son of the deceased in the hearse with his mother’s casket for a graveside service in Cambria, California. In a sympathetic gesture I agreed, deciding to make the drive myself.

It took over four hours to get there, so we had plenty of time to talk. He asked me if we would be furnishing one of “them gadgets” to lower the casket into the grave, and I explained that the cemeteries always provide these. When we arrived in Cambria, the two gravediggers had just finished spending four hours opening the grave by hand because they had no backhoe. More significantly, they had no lowering device, either. The picturesque town’s slogan was “Where the Pines Meet the Sea,” but it felt like a more appropriate description would have been “Where the Sea Meets the Stone Age.” After driving into the downtown area and purchasing some rope, we finally got the casket lowered into the ground.

For long trips we were using an old van because it had always been an iffy proposition transporting caskets in old hearses up and down the state. I was returning to LA on California’s notorious grade called the “Grapevine,” which ran from the San Fernando Valley to the bottom of the San Joaquin Valley, just short of Bakersfield. This grade was so steep that it had escarpment ramps for trucks to use in case their brakes failed from overheating. I was just starting up the grade from the north end,
heading back to Los Angeles, when the motor froze. Not wanting to call an expensive tow truck, we decided to use one of our old Packard hearses to see if we could push the van up the grade.

The Grapevine, a mountainous section of the I-5, is one of very few highways in the state that gets closed during snowstorms in the dead of winter, but snowplows had cleared it earlier that day. Because the van was blocking the flow of air to the radiator of the hearse, it overheated—even though it was very cold at that altitude. As we pushed it along, we could go only so far and then we would have to stop and let the engine cool, which took about thirty minutes. It was the middle of the night, so we climbed into the back of the hearse and tried to get some sleep. This time, we didn’t have the comfort of a mattress but instead were lying on a table covered with metal rollers. Between the cold temperature and uncomfortable table, it was a very long night.

There were few opportunities to ever watch TV or do any reading, unless you counted the Burma-Shave signs on the state highways. Without a doubt, the single most difficult problem we encountered was never getting enough sleep. We felt lucky just to get a few extra nods here and there. The most humorous description of this working condition is in Loretta Lynn’s hit record,
Coal Miner’s Daughter
. In one verse she recounts, “The work we done was hard, at night we’d sleep ’cause we were tarred.” Well, at least it rhymes.

A year or so after we had leased our Victorian mortuary, a man from the Los Angeles City Planning Commission came for a visit. He informed me that the Grand Avenue off-ramp of the soon-to-be-built Santa Monica Freeway would be coming right through this parcel of land. After all the restoration we had done, it was time to find another place. We got two months of free rent before we had to leave, but the water heater started leaking when we still had five weeks to go. Installing a new one was out of the question, but we all needed the use of the shower. After purchasing two bottles of radiator stop-leak fluid, I disconnected the water supply to the water heater and poured it into the storage tank. After I reconnected the water supply twelve hours later, the leak had stopped. The downside was that we all smelled like a leaky radiator.

We were beginning to threaten our only competitor in the funeral car livery business, California Hearse Service, which had been in business for about twenty-five years and had an extensive fleet of Cadillac hearses. They would be a formidable competitor if we were to ever try to take away any of their business. I remember wondering at the time, who came up with the term “livery service”? The word “livery” is indicative of a stable, where you pay someone for housing and feeding your horse. Well, I guess horse and hearse sound alike.

At this point we were like David, while the owner of Cal Hearse was the Goliath of the funeral car business. We were about to become the burr under his saddle. The owner’s name was Art Simpson, but considering his attitude, it should have been Bart Simpson. When anyone called him with a complaint he would pretty much blow it off, knowing he was the only game in town. He employed a full-time mechanic, who knew all the eccentricities with hearses and their foibles, of which there were many.

Unlike cars, hearses had hydraulic or mechanical electric tables that were capable of bringing a casket out either side of the hearse or out the back end. These hearses also had hydraulic levelizers, which are different from anything you would ordinarily deal with on an automobile. The levelizer was used to raise one side of the hearse at the curb in front of a church to compensate for the slant in the gutters. Without a levelizer, the two four-foot-wide doors would strike the curb.

McGlynn’s Mortuary called and proposed that we purchase some newer hearses, so they could rent them from us instead of using Cal Hearse. At that time their hearse was a 1948 Packard, and many other firms in town had this same year and model. Forest Lawn, who owned (and owns) the most famous cemeteries in the United States, had two ’48 Packard hearses for sale at its Hollywood Hills facility, so we purchased both of them.

Word always got around very quickly and before long some of the drivers for Cal Hearse switched over to us, which was great because they brought with them years of experience. Art must have seen the writing on the wall, because we kept expanding while his business declined. The three biggest mortuary chain operators in Los Angeles County all had full-time mechanics maintaining their fleets. Eventually, this became one of my most important functions because the five major hearse-manufacturing companies all had different methods of powering the tables in their hearses.

Now that we had these two newer hearses, we still had to use them occasionally just to deliver flowers on busy days. On one such morning, I made a flower delivery and headed back across town for a funeral at McGlynn’s. One of our older drivers would be meeting me there and continue on with the hearse so I could return to the office and start my DC signings. The service that morning was just a short blessing at the mortuary for a 2-year-old child. The priest had already finished by the time of my arrival, so he said that he would meet us at Holy Cross Cemetery for the interment.

Because the blessing was so brief, our older driver hadn’t arrived there yet, and they were ready to form the procession. I immediately started brushing the flower petals from the hearse when the manager, Bob Johnson, informed me that it was time to leave and expected me to drive the hearse. Having never done this before, I was very reluctant to even attempt it without some rudimentary training. It didn’t seem to matter to Bob, the person who encouraged us to start our flower delivery service. Informing him of my lack of experience, he responded: “This will be a good opportunity for you to get some practice.”

Rather than being dressed in formal attire, I was wearing my motorcycle uniform. The motorcycle escort that day was Lyle Chown, and he gave me a “crash course”— no, that’s not a good choice of words—so, let’s say, a very quick dissertation on the do’s and don’ts of funeral procession etiquette. We pulled out of the mortuary parking lot with about twelve cars.

Being very nervous wasn’t helping my concentration, so as we approached the first main intersection my eyes were focused on the side-view mirror, trying to see where Lyle was. I forgot that he had instructed me to turn right on Century Boulevard. Just about then he came up alongside the procession, flashing his lights at me and screaming, “Right! Right!” The hearse was well into the intersection, but luckily we were
moving slowly enough to all make a very wide right-hand turn. We arrived without incident. From that time on, Lyle took credit for teaching me the ropes, as he continued escorting all of our hearse drivers and me for the next twenty-five years.

Escorts were all required to wear slate-gray uniforms, so as not to be confused with the Los Angeles Police Department’s dark blues or the California Highway Patrol’s tans. They all rode Harley “hogs,” just as all the police departments did. The “hogs” were cumbersome and lacked the precision of English motorcycles. Later, many of the escorts started to buy the new Kawasaki 750-cubic-centimeter bikes. All escorts’ motors had to be painted the traditional black and white and have two amber (not red) lights on either side of the headlights in order to pass inspection by the CHP.

Very quickly, we got to know every funeral escort in Los Angeles and considered them good friends. When my father died, the escorts contacted each other and we ended up with almost as many of them on their motorcycles as cars in the procession.

In no time, we were making first calls and flower deliveries for almost every mortuary in Los Angeles and the surrounding counties. After a funeral arrangement counselor completed gathering the vital statistics for the DC and noted the type of service the family had chosen, he would then call a vehicle order in to “the kids,” as we were known the first few years. We were very pleased when we got a call from the county coroner’s office offering us a verbal contract to do all their overflow calls, which were numerous.

In the late ’50s, the coroner’s office was relatively small and didn’t have enough employees to cover all of the calls, so they came up with a program they called “Coroner of the Month.” The mortuaries participating in this program were always located in the outlying communities, which were farthest from downtown and would have taken the greatest time for the investigators to reach, so many of them used us to make their death calls. These designated mortuaries liked the program, because they always did more business during their assigned coroner’s month.

On these calls our employees would interview the families and fill out a Mortuary Death Report, which would describe the family’s observations of any symptoms or conditions noted just prior to the person’s death. Each of our first-call cars was supplied with all the necessary paperwork that had been provided by the coroner’s office. In a city the size of Los Angeles, the coroner’s office should have been much larger to cover an area that ran from the northwest boundary of the San Fernando Valley to the port area, which are approximately sixty miles apart. The coroner’s office would send a pathologist to whichever mortuary had picked up a case, and would review the death report to help him determine whether he would do an autopsy or a sign-out on the DC.