Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (8 page)

Jimmy had quit for ethical reasons. Woods’ Glendale Mortuary had been using Cal Hearse’s services for years. Late one night, one of Art Simpson’s employees dropped a case (the coroners office’s term for each body they handled) off there. The owner’s wife just happened to look out their apartment window and saw the man stealing bricks from their parking lot. When Jimmy Woods called Cal Hearse and reported what had happened, Art Simpson wouldn’t do anything about it, so Jimmy Houston quit.

We told Dave that we hadn’t heard, but asked him what it had to do with us. He said he would like to set up a meeting with the four of us at his mortuary. We told Dave that we doubted that Jimmy would agree to such a meeting, because it was obvious he didn’t like us one bit. Dave assured us that he had encouraged him to meet with us and he was willing. Jimmy agreed to become our manager at a cut in salary. This was a fortuitous event because he brought with him years of practical experience that would prove to be providential, all thanks to Dave.

That very day in October 1959, Jimmy proclaimed that our first order of business would be to buy three brand-new hearses. We never thought that we could qualify for a loan to finance a $25,000 purchase at our ages, so he and Dave got together and, along with one other mortuary owner, raised enough money for the down payments. We went to the bank with hat in hand to try to secure financing. The bank manager wanted to know our credit history, and all we could report was eighteen consecutive payments of $13.11 made to Bank of America a year and a half earlier for a typewriter we had purchased to type DCs. Remarkably, the bank gave us the loan, and we were even able to pay everyone back in one year.

Two of our new hearses were already in Los Angeles, but the third one still had to be built at the Superior Coach factory in Lima, Ohio. It was scheduled to be ready in December, so the hearse salesman agreed to let us use their demo hearse, but only until the day that the new one was ready to be picked up. I flew to Chicago to catch another flight to Dayton, but the airport was closed just after landing because of snow. The trains were still running, so I took a taxi from the airport to the train station. On the way there, the cab got caught in a snowdrift, so it was necessary for me to get out and push it until it broke free. No seats were left on the train because everyone traveling by air had been diverted to rail travel, so I stood the entire trip.

After I left the factory with the new hearse, all went well until my first gas stop. For some reason the battery had died, so they gave me a jump-start. After I reached the outskirts of the town, the dash lights dimmed and the engine started to miss. There was one lonely house off to the left, but as I started to cut across the highway the engine went dead, leaving me on the wrong side of the highway in a black car at night, with no lights and a fast-approaching truck. I flagged him down, and he helped me push the hearse off the highway. The man in the house let me call for a tow truck.

Great. Here I was, on the outskirts of a little Podunk town in my California summer suit, with the temperature hovering around twenty degrees, waiting for the cavalry to arrive. There were no mechanics facilities open at this time, so an all-night service station was my only option. On closer inspection, I realized that the bracket that held tension on the generator belt was missing, and that was why the battery wasn’t getting any charge. There were some tailpipe brackets in the station garage that looked strong enough to make my own bracket with some bending and drilling. The attendant agreed to let me use some of the shop tools if I
purchased a bracket. In about twenty minutes, it was finished and it actually worked.

We had ordered a side-loading hearse, which required the installation of a hydraulic reservoir and pulley system to operate the levelizer. In these cases the generator had to be moved to the left side of the engine, which then needed a tension-adjusting bracket not produced by Cadillac. The factory’s representative was surprised by my phone call about this blunder. He offered to pay all of my expenses and ship me a new custom bracket by special delivery. I informed him that there was no big rush, because my homemade bracket had already survived 2,000 miles of driving.

The Cadillac division of General Motors produced a hearse in the 1920s, but eventually some dedicated coachbuilders sprang up to build the bodies of hearses. Cadillac would ship the five Ohio hearse manufacturers a commercial chassis, which had a windshield, a complete front end, drivetrain, and wheels. The windshields were about ten inches higher than those on a normal car. The hearse’s roof had to be taller to get a casket into the side or rear doors without having to remove the flowers from the top of the casket.

It was extremely interesting to go to the national funeral directors convention and see five new hearses that were all built using the same Cadillac commercial chassis. They all looked different from one another except for the same Cadillac front end and taillights of that year’s model. The main difference between models was the rooflines, the number and shape of the windows, and the landau bars. The bars were a carryover from turn-of-the-century buggies with folding convertible tops. They were hinged in the middle and enabled the top of the buggy to have support in either the up or down position. Landau bars somehow made the transition to funeral cars in a decorative capacity only and have been used on them ever since.

One of the biggest changes in hearses came when Cadillac incorporated a significant engineering development for their commercial chassis: an x-frame with hollow tubing instead of the solid steel ones. For a normal automobile this hollow tubing worked fine, but for a side-loading coach, which most California firms used, it was sort of a disaster. The three new hearses we purchased could not have the side doors opened if the levelizer was on. Being less rigid, the body of the hearses would twist when the levelizer was activated.

I called Superior Coach Company and said they should bevel the closing latches, but they responded that it wouldn’t cure the problem. After two hours of grinding away, I successfully beveled the latches. I sent the company a film of the modification, so they finally sent two of their engineers to look at it. The factory responded that side-loading hearses accounted for only about 20 percent of their sales, and it would be too costly to make these changes. However, the next year, they had a new side-loading hearse at the funeral convention and it had beveled latches. I sent them a letter asking for a rebate of $500 for each hearse and promptly received a check for $1,500, which we used for a trip to Hawaii.

The year after my first hearse pickup, we ordered another new Superior hearse. I was hoping this trip would not be as eventful as the last one. One day before my departure, one of our drivers, who was an ex-fighter pilot, got smashed in his six o’clock by a truck during a rainstorm. This left us one hearse short of the four we had in service, and we had been getting busier by the month. I called Superior Coach to order a replacement quarter panel for our wrecked ’59 and requested that they place it in the back of the new coach I would be picking up two days later. A new quarter panel wasn’t available anywhere else, because all the hearse builders fabricate the body, with no two being exactly alike.

After leaving the factory, I stopped for some breakfast and wondered about the possibility of driving straight back to Los Angeles without stopping. Like most guys my age, I had a feeling of invincibility; otherwise something that hare-brained would never have occurred to me. Nevertheless, this would solve the problem of fixing the wrecked hearse faster and getting this new hearse in service sooner. To borrow a line from poet Robert Frost, “I had promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep”—and that happened to be a whopping 2,450 miles.

Some of the southwestern states still didn’t have any speed limits, so 100 miles per hour seemed like a nice round number. Cadillac hearses weighed 6,200 pounds at the time and rode really smoothly at high speeds. When I reached New Mexico, it was time to get the oil changed for the second time and get a lube job. Albuquerque had a large Cadillac dealership and they informed me it would be ready in about two hours. If only I could have curled up in the hearse for some much needed shut-eye.

Later that day, the highway had become straight and flat—ideal for cruising at about 110. It was dusk, and both sides of the highway were lined with hundreds of birds. Because of my high speed, they must have
heard me coming a long way off. They started to fly, but they all seemed to fly across the highway instead of away from it. By this time I hadn’t slept for well over thirty hours and the highway was extremely monotonous, but when a bird hit my windshield it was like getting a slap in the face. My mind couldn’t process exactly what had happened, but I instinctively looked in the rearview mirror, witnessing a scene almost like something you might expect to see in a cartoon. In the turbulence behind me, the air was completely full of flying feathers. A second later, the limp bird dropped through them and hit the highway. I rapidly dropped my speed to avoid having any more birds fall victim to my insane speeding.

My diet on the road consisted of candy bars, coffee, and a popular diet pill that contained ephedrine. The only trouble was that the combination of this chemical and lack of sleep would play tricks on my mind. A herd of sheep crossing the highway would suddenly vanish, or a hitchhiker became a signpost as it got closer.

The most bizarre thing I saw was the shadow of a giant hand on the road ahead. A ruby ring appeared to be on the finger that turned out to be the taillights of a car about a mile ahead of me. Seeing these strange things should have been a clear message that I should stop and smell the coffee. There were only a few hundred miles to go, so I just rolled down the driver’s window and let in some nice cool air to help me stay awake.

Just before dawn I could see some lights off in the distance that appeared to have halos around them, so it looked like the glass in the windshield was defective. Soon there were more lights and more halos, as if all the windows had defective glass. Suddenly, it dawned on me that the driver’s window was down and the glass was not the problem. After all those hours of driving my eyes were giving out, but Los Angeles was now only about six hours away, so stopping was not an option. Who said Capricorns are stubborn?

I finally arrived home. In a little more than forty-five hours, I had racked up over 2,400 miles. Even with all the gas stops, two oil changes, and a two-hour layover in New Mexico, I had still averaged fifty miles per hour over the entire trip. I slept for twenty-four hours and woke up four pounds lighter. The new hearse went out on its first service on Monday morning.

Six months later it was time for another twenty-four-hour drive, with some new twists. There were three bodies to either pick up or deliver
up and down the state. My last drop would be in Yreka, California, just shy of the Oregon border. After driving all day and night, I arrived there about six in the morning and took a short nap until the mortuary opened at 8
A.M
. Then it was time to head back to Los Angeles, but for no apparent reason a California Highway Patrol officer flagged me down. He approached my window and asked if I worked for Abbott & Hast Company. He explained that the owner of the mortuary in Yreka contacted them to intercept me with a message to call the office. Ron had just missed me by ten minutes, so the funeral home owner had offered to call his buddies at the local CHP office. Ron was assured that they would spot the vehicle as it passed through the little town of Weed. The only question running through my mind was, who the hell named the town Weed?

When I phoned Ron, he said we had been given a first call at a hospital in San Francisco, easy to reach on my way back. We always carried an extra fold-up stretcher in the storage compartment, so it would be easy to pull the body off the one-man cot onto the folding model and use the more versatile version to make the call.

Shortly after that next pickup I drove through the town of Merced. On the outskirts of town was farmland, with a very large, freshly plowed field on the right side of Highway 99. There was an old ’40s sedan ahead of me in the slow lane doing about thirty miles per hour. At the same time, a pickup truck on a dirt road was coming from the plowed field. It was approaching the highway at a high rate of speed, trailing a huge cloud of dust.

The man in the right lane must have been startled by the pickup, because without any warning he swerved into the fast lane and slammed on his brakes. I headed for the median strip in the center of the highway, but he just kept coming left. At the last second I cranked the steering wheel to the right with all my strength to avoid him, but back he came to the right lane. It was as if he was tracking my movement. Everywhere I went, there he was. My tires were screeching as I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. Just before I slammed into him there was enough time to think: “This is really going to hurt.”

The crash was loud enough to wake the dead. Fortunately, it didn’t. The impact was so great that the bolts holding the bench seat to the floor of my station wagon sheared off. The steering wheel collapsed on both sides, and my face struck one of the broken ends, punching a crescent-shaped hole above my upper lip. I was completely bent over the collapsed steering
wheel because the seat had moved about a foot and a half forward, while the stretcher behind me had become airborne, coming to rest on my neck and shoulders.

My first thought was wondering what part of my body had been most injured. The answer came quickly, with the feeling of warm blood soaking my white dress shirt. The driver’s door wouldn’t budge, but I was able to push the cot on my shoulders back far enough to roll down the window and crawl out of the crumpled wreck. My next task was to drag both cots back into the rear of the car. Since I was bleeding profusely, blood got all over the white sheets covering the bodies.

About this time, the man from the pickup truck stuck his head in the open tailgate and inquired about my condition. When he saw the bodies and the blood, he said, “My God, is them folks dead?” I assured him they were dead before the accident. Obviously quite shaken, he went to check on the occupants of the other car, a family of six on their Sunday drive to the local church.