Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (7 page)

Culver City had two firms that rotated each month as acting coroner. One of them called and directed us to a small cottage on our first suicide
call. During the ’30s and ’40s, LA had many bungalow courts—multiple small structures having only one bedroom. Anyone looking at old movies from that era can see them in abundance, especially in Old Hollywood, where these bungalows were often occupied by starving artists trying to break into the motion picture industry. A uniformed police officer was already there waiting outside, which told you one of two things. It was going to be bloody, or worse, it might have been a decomposed body, in which case the officer always stayed outside. During our early years, Ron and I were almost always together because we had only two additional employees at the time doing first calls.

We opened the door, paused for a few seconds, and just looked at each other in shock. In the center of the room sat a man wearing shorts and an undershirt, with a high-powered hunting rifle resting on his chest and his big toe inside the rifle’s trigger guard. The muzzle blast took off most of his head, so here was a guy just sitting there with a chin on his neck and nothing more. Skull fragments and brain matter were all over the walls, and a large pool of blood was on the floor. We spent about forty-five minutes cleaning up the place. Yuck! Later, we learned that wasn’t part of our responsibility.

Another bad coroner’s case we were given was also in Culver City. A man was in his car where he had committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning about eight days earlier. The bloating squeezed him between the steering wheel and the seat. Ron kept running outside for some fresh air, leaving me alone to try to pull him out. He said that the smell was really making him sick. My response was, “No shit, Sherlock, now get back in here and let’s get this guy out.”

The Los Angeles County Health Department declined to accept one DC on which the doctor had written the cause of death (COD) as silicosis, which is better known by its common name, “black lung” or “coal miner’s disease.” The department instructed me to take the DC to the coroner’s office, because it was considered an industrial disease and the department wished to confirm the diagnosis. UCLA had already done an autopsy, but when the coroner’s doctor undid the sutures and opened him up, he discovered the man had been totally eviscerated.

When an embalmer prepares a posted case, he places the internal organs in plastic viscera bags and then returns them to the stomach cavity. The only thing the coroner’s doctor found inside this individual was a couple of bloody paper towels. That was when the proverbial
you-know-what hit the fan. The coroner went ballistic and demanded a full investigation. UCLA was required to return all the organs they had removed, and the story made all the newspapers. At least we finally found out what the term “visceral” meant when describing a gut feeling.

By the time we arrived on some of these calls, the coroner’s investigator had already gone. There was usually a coroner’s seal on the door, so we had to break it in order to gain entrance. In those days, they had very meager technology in forensic pathology and the lab could do only limited toxicology and microscopic examinations. Many times it took weeks to run these tests, so the coroner would sign a temporary DC that had no cause of death but simply said “Pending Tox and Cajal,” meaning toxicological evaluation of the blood and microscopic examination of tissue. Everyone just referred to these DCs as pending certificates, which could be filed at the health department to obtain permits. These certified copies enabled families to settle a person’s affairs that were not dependent on a cause of death being given. Usually they issued what was called the final DC after the test results became available.

The coroner’s office was often criticized for not bringing every case into their facility and only performing an autopsy if the deceased was younger. An older person rated a more scrutinized investigation only if the remains had a gunshot wound, a protruding knife, or ligature marks on the throat. In all other cases the pathologist would do a sign-out, which meant no autopsy or any further investigation. That was because of the vast resources that would be required to determine the exact cause of death for every person in which foul play was not suspected. As a result, the coroner would make an educated guess about the cause of death based on the person’s age and other easily ascertainable evidence. Because of the arbitrary nature of that policy, some even joked that if the coroner’s doctor showed up at your mortuary on a Wednesday, the diagnosis du jour would be arteriosclerotic heart disease, representing hardening of the arteries with plaque caused by cholesterol.

The five basic categories of death were murder, suicide, accidental, natural, and undetermined. If the death occurred in another state, the out-of-state permit for disposition had to be refiled at the county health department for a funeral service in California. It has been estimated that only one in five doctors receives any training on how to complete a death certificate properly. According to Dr. Kenneth Iserson’s
Death to Dust
, only 70 percent of them do it correctly.

In one sensational case, Dr. Peter Veger listed Los Angeles smog as a contributing cause of death on a DC. The health department wanted him to sign another one and leave out this part of his diagnosis, but he refused, so it became necessary to take up the issue with the coroner’s office. If a DC is signed by an attending physician, it’s the responsibility of the health department to determine the allowable causes of death that can appear on the DC. In cases where the circumstances of death occur by any means other than natural causes, the coroner must “rule on it” (make a determination on the cause of death). His purview includes suicides, homicides, auto accidents, industrial accidents, or any other circumstance when death is the result of an external force.

In the case of Dr. Veger’s DC, the coroner didn’t want any part of going on the record saying Los Angeles smog had contributed to the deceased’s death, so they instructed the health department to let it be filed “as is.” The newspapers soon had bold headlines reading “Smog Kills LA Resident.” In today’s litigious society, people would probably be suing Los Angeles for allowing it to be smoggy.

In Los Angeles, the problem wasn’t just carbon monoxide emissions from motor vehicles, but also a lack of sufficient airflow. When Native Americans first inhabited the area, they called it the “Valley of Smoke” because the soot from their campfires kept hovering in the sky afterward.

In 1959, we leased what had been Los Angeles’ first Automobile Club of Southern California building. It was a brick, two-story structure, and we figured the upstairs offices could be turned into individual dormitory rooms, while the downstairs would be our offices. It also had a fifteen-car garage connected to the rear of the building. Each employee would have use of the kitchen, shower, and recreation room.

Most people assume that the funeral business is a depressing one to work in, but it can also be interesting and full of surprises. As compensation for being somber so much of the time, we shared a lot of goofy inside jokes among ourselves. There was great camaraderie among all of us because everyone lived in the building. It was like living in a frat house, and every evening we would all gather in the recreation room and have wrestling matches or play pool. We pulled pranks on one another, the likes of which could have been portrayed in John Belushi’s
Animal House
, except in our case there was no alcohol.

Ron and I were about the same age as our crew, and they never felt subservient to us because we went on calls with them regularly. When a call came in the middle of the night, we had to decide whose turn it was to make the call. This wasn’t always easy, so we set up a system. Every student making a night call got one dollar extra for each call he made. Like everything else, the guys came up with a term for this policy, calling it “a buck a bod.” A first-call man could augment his income by as much as $40 on this system. The only client who ever gave our employees a gratuity was David Malloy. At that time you could go to a bank and request $2 bills, so Dave would give each of our men a tip using these bills.

We would often have lighthearted discussions in the recreation room. On one occasion the conversation turned to everyone’s favorite radio station, KFWB. It was the most popular station for young people because
it played the current favorites, but everyone also agreed that the best and funniest disc jockey on the air was Gary Owens, who worked there. We got to play a joke on him. One day Gary gave a traffic report that a cattle truck had turned over on the Pasadena Freeway, requiring the California Highway Patrol to respond and round up the cows wandering about. Because of the freeway’s tight turns, the same thing happened again a short time later, so Gary named his traffic update the “Moo Cow Report.”

One of our first-call staff, Frankie Bonnet, lived in Glendale, where the Altadena Dairy had a full-size fiberglass cow in front of their facility. We had a large flower truck that was big enough to hold the cow. A couple of our guys asked permission to use the truck to ”borrow” the cow, with the proviso that if they got caught, we would disavow any knowledge of their actions. Our boys returned about 11
P.M
. with the cow, which looked so lifelike that Frankie got down on his haunches and pretended to milk it.

The next morning Frankie and I went to the station on Hollywood Boulevard, where they did the broadcast from the second-floor studio. We pushed the visitor button and said we needed to talk to Gary about his Moo Cow Report. KFWB continuously broadcasted from a speaker above the stairway entrance, so anyone walking down Hollywood Boulevard could hear the broadcast. Just before playing the next song, Gary said on the air that a Moo Cow Delegation was waiting downstairs.

When he saw the cow, he couldn’t believe it. He was very cordial and even gave us some free records, including “Tom Dooley,” which began the career of the Kingston Trio. We requested that when he was done with the borrowed heifer that he would have someone return it to the dairy, and he agreed. A few days later he mailed me a picture of himself, sitting backward on the cow. He was wearing his trademark Earl C. Festoon 1941 wide necktie. We were surprised when we first met him because this man with the golden voice looked like a hippie, with his long hair in a ponytail.

One night, a first call came in after midnight. After writing up the work order, Ron went to awaken two of our students. He came back into the apartment with a blank look on his face and informed me that every room was empty. Even the guys who were not on duty and usually in their rooms were also gone. The whole building seemed to be totally empty, but suddenly there was a great roar of laughter coming from the kitchen, where the crew had hidden themselves. Our employee Drake Jasso called in the fake order because it was April 1 and this was their big April fool’s gag on us. Everyone thought it was a riot seeing their boss running up
and down the hallway in his briefs and T-shirt, knocking on all the doors and calling people's names but not finding a single person.

Our crew always had many jokes about us. They called our company “Grab It and Fast” to play on the sound of Abbott and Hast, and would say that our slogan was “You stab ’em, we slab ’em,” or “We don’t want you to die, but if you die we want you.” They called me the worker and Ron the schmoozer, because I was always working on cars and he would spend most of his time on the phone doing PR work. They’d also joked that our business was “Half-Hast.”

Utter-McKinley Mortuary also had a joke about their name. One of their employees would say, “If you are about to kick the bucket, your dying breath should be used to utter McKinley.” But if you believe that a name can be indicative of one’s profession, then there were a number of people destined to be in the funeral business. There was the Amigone Funeral Home (am I gone?) and other ironic names like Bury and Roberts, Dunaway (done away), and Farwell (farewell). One of the funniest was Goodbody Funeral Home. How’s that for branding?

Allan and Ron with their fleet of vehicles, in front of their downtown Los Angeles office.

By this time, we were giving Cal Hearse a run for their money. I had to go to their facility every Saturday on my Triumph, since you could only file DCs at the Los Angeles County Health Department during the workweek. The county had an arrangement with them to do these filings on weekends and Cal Hearse’s manager, Jimmy Houston, would glower at me with an adversarial look every time I rode into their fleet garage. We had been renting our two ’48 Packards to their old customers for a lot less, so he obviously resented us.

One day we got a call from our friend Dave Malloy, a well-respected funeral director who originated the Hollywood Christmas Parade down Hollywood Boulevard. Dave had been using Cal Hearse for years, but had also started using us for some of his funeral car rentals and all of his first calls. He phoned us to ask if we had heard that Jimmy had quit Cal Hearse after being their manager for many years.