CLOWNING AROUND AT THE FUNERAL HOME

 

 

People often ask me if I was frightened growing up in a funeral home. Yes, I was. But not for reasons you might think.

When an entire month passed in its lazy way and no one died – that was scary. Caskets to buy, hearses to maintain, and all that. I overheard my parents’ tense voices discussing the competition, revealing that, no - Alfred hadn’t received a death call all month, either. It was like death held its breath. I thought of the stillness in that.

I’ll tell you what else scared me - Petal the clown. Every year when the woody scent of autumn pranced through the air, the participants of the Tobacco Festival Parade gathered around the corner from our funeral home. Main Street transformed into a circus-like atmosphere, as if we’d all gathered under the Big Top. At eight o’clock in the morning beauty pageant contestants in satin evening gowns climbed atop the floats, shivering as they shielded their bouffants from the breeze. In the moments leading up to the start of the parade, organizers barked instructions over the drumbeats of the high school bands as they warmed up. All was chaos as parade goers and participants scrambled to their places.

Just before the convertible carrying the Grand Marshall began to roll down Main Street, several participants broke ranks to answer the call of nature. It was inevitable; they’d been waiting for hours. Many would pop into one of the three churches on our block, and a few rushed into our funeral home where, unless we were “busy”, our house of mourning hosted a jolly, excited bunch.

Just when the funeral home became quite again, a clown came lumbering in with minutes to spare in a wave of sweat and the stale, rank odour of a bender. I’d never seen a clown in person before, though I’d noticed signs in larger towns.

I was expecting someone colourful, happy and, well, funny.

His morning stubble grew out of the white patchy makeup. The sinister red smile was a bit runny with his perspiration, his teeth long and yellow. ‘Petal’ had become smeared on his nametag. The all-in-one-clown suit, dingy from wear and too few washes, billowed out, something like this:

Petal walked with a deliberate and heavy step towards me in flat exaggerated shoes. 

 He bent down, his macabre face in mine. “Where’s your bathroom?” he asked in a gruff, demanding voice.

I screamed.  He grabbed me by both arms, “What’s wrong with you, girl? Where is it?” I pointed, then ran to find my father who was outside filming the crowd before he, too, would enter the parade driving the love of his life, a 1937 Roadmaster Buick.

Meanwhile, Petal, was taking an awfully long time. My father said it had something to do with his costume. I couldn’t imagine. He stumbled out with a curse, the tip of one of those long shoes fought with the carpet.

A half hour later, when the parade was in full swing, Petal sauntered by the funeral home waving to the crowd, throwing candy to children. He pulled out a horn with a large rubber bulb at the end of it from a deep pocket, aimed it at me, and honked. There was something mean about it.

I never learned who Petal was without the grease paint on his face. My father didn’t know him either, and he knew everyone. I’ve had a healthy fear of clowns since. 

A troupe of clowns - my nightmare.

 

THE HAPPY-GO-LUCKY FUNERAL PARLOUR

Late in the afternoon, possibly the coldest London has seen this year, I headed for the second time in a month to Drury Lane.

I think it was Dickens’ Sketches By Boz in which I first read of Drury Lane in his essay, Gin-Shops:

“we will make for Drury-Lane, through the narrow streets and dirty courts which divide it from Oxford-street, and that classical spot adjoining the brewery at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, best known to the initiated as the Rookery."

I would have been in high school in Kentucky when I read about gin shops, a rookery and the wretched houses teeming with the whole of humanity in its less than humane state. A setting so completely foreign to me, this Drury Lane, that my only point of reference would have been a little moonshine shack in the backwoods of our “dry” county.

How strange then that I set off with purpose the other day to discover what lay behind the ornately flanked door of the Happy-Go-Lucky Funeral Parlour on Drury Lane.

In vain I had already searched Google for a phone number, a website, something, anything I could use to contact them in advance to make an appointment. I had hopes of an interview with an undertaker who I’d already imagined as kind and respectful.  (If you don’t already know, I grew up in a funeral home.)

Nothing. I found no information whatsoever - this should have been a warning of some kind. What sort of funeral home doesn’t want to be found?

I arrived to find the entrance shuttered.

What a disappointment. I stood shivering for a few minutes before I walked away towards Longacre. Then I stopped halfway down the street. What a wimp, what a wuss I was. How silly to give up so quickly. I did an about-face, marched back and opened the door to a shop across the street from the Happy-Go-Lucky. Full to the brim with artist supplies, brushes sprouting from every corner, a young woman emerged from the back to greet me.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, but do you know anything about the funeral parlour across the street?”

“As a matter of fact, I just tried to Google them the other day and couldn’t find out a thing.”

“Yes, I tried that, too. Zero.”

“I’ve never even seen anyone come out of there,” she said.

“Oh, I have. On Valentine’s Day. I walked by with two friends and a man stepped out of the funeral parlour holding a broom. He wished us a Happy Valentine’s Day. That’s why I came back. Life does exist in there somewhere.”

She laughed.

 

I crossed the street and again had almost given up when I began to snoop around the restaurant next door to the Happy-Go-Lucky. There are velvet-cushioned seats, the kind that are normally tucked underneath a lady’s dressing table, framed in floral displays and set along the wall of the building. They looked forlorn outside in the cloudy cold. Overly dramatic arches of greenery created a covered path to the restaurant’s entrance.

I stepped inside and was immediately visually accosted by the lavish décor. It was late afternoon, before the magic of the light of the numerous chandeliers struck the glassware. The tired, cheap designs and gimmicks were apparent; a mix of Gothic, Rococo and others I didn’t recognize. It looked like the morning after of a bacchanalia of decorators. Then it struck me that the murals bore a curious similarity to the painting above the funeral parlour’s entrance.

It was quiet in the restaurant, no customers yet filled the elaborate balcony seating, the opera boxes, or the long tables set for the evening – the place was huge. A waiter approached and when he heard my questions he referred me to yet another waiter who finally introduced me to the hostess. An older woman who had been sitting in a dark corner watching me rose and made her way toward me.

“Do you know anything about the funeral home next door?”

“No, no,” she said in a thick accent that I couldn’t quite place, her language formal. “It is not a funeral home. It is our office.”

“Ah. I see. Why, then? Why do you advertise it as a funeral home?”

“It is just a joke. We think it is funny. You know, most funeral homes – they are so serious.”

I began to feel a bit sour.

I put my gloves back on and as I did so these were her last words to me:

“Please do not die in here. We will not be able to take care of you.”

WIDOW BURNING

 

My undertaker father never cremated a body. Our small town, an insular Southern community, had no crematorium and was pro burial, as were most small towns at that time. During my childhood cremation was thought of as distasteful and unnatural; the practice was spoken of in whispers. Only upon one occasion, that I recall, did a family request that their patriarch be cremated. On that day, my father drove the corpse to another town an hour away, the nearest dot on the map to fulfil the family’s wishes.

My imagination went wild:  How did the skin burn? What do flaming muscles look like? How long did it take? Was there an odour?

I finally moved away from that house of death, and as an adult quickly adjusted and embraced cremation as a wholly valid choice. Other departures from the conventional casket burial have emerged; natural, or green burials, biodegradable coffins, and so on. But sometimes I still stumble upon a death ritual that challenges my strongly held value of live and let live. This was the case when I learned of the ancient custom of widow burning.

“…loosening their hair, and unveiling their faces, they went to the gate of zenåna, and presented themselves before the assembled populace. All opposition to their wishes now ceased. They were regarded as sacred to the departed monarch. Devout ejaculations poured incessantly from their lips. Their movements became invested with a mysterious significance; and their words were treasured up as prophetic.

Meantime the pile had been prepared. The eight victims, dressed in their richest attire, and mounted on horseback, moved with procession to the cemetery. There they stripped off their ornaments and jewels, distributed gifts to the bystanders, and lastly, mounting the pile, they took their places beside the corpse. As the Maharåna had left no son, his nephew, the present Sovereign, applied the torch. The crash of music, the chanting of the priests, and the cries of the multitude arose simultaneously, and the tragedy was consummated.”

“The Sacrifice of Sati”, by two queens and six concubines in India on the 30^th of August, 1888 as described in WIDOW-BURNING by Henry Jeffryes Bushby.

The term Suttee, or Sati, is applied to the person; the act or the rite of widow burning is Sahagamana. An expert in ancient civilizations tells me that many peoples have had a custom of sacrificing the dependents of the dead including servants and slaves. In addition, other authorities believe that Scythians gave birth to the idea of voluntary death, or “sacrifice” of the deceased’s widow specifically, and planted the seeds of the practice in lands they settled. In India, where Sahagamana was most prominently practiced, its birth is traced in 300 BC. In Eastern Europe, especially in the Ukraine and South Russia, the Scythians practiced the ritual in the 6th to the 4th century B.C.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, no travel to India was complete without a reference to the Sati by a steady flow of eyewitness accounts. While many widows threw themselves upon the pyre voluntarily, many did not. The use of drugs, force and restraints to prevent escape were witnessed in horror. The woman was bound by cord, or in many instances, bamboo poles were used to push her down on top of her husband, or logs were thrown upon the woman as she lay on top of him. A Sati might be soaked in camphor, or ghee might be poured on her. It was reported that in an effort to shorten her suffering, a widow’s face was painted red with a mix of gunpowder and sulphur. Incense burned in concert with her flesh.

The practice was labelled as a voluntary sacrifice, a “supreme test of conjugal devotion” and the widow often paraded to her death in a bride’s dress among a crowd of thousands. The Sati should not solely be imagined as an elderly woman, but quite literally in many cases, a child-bride.

 

No religious sanction was ever attached to Sahagamana – all was superstition. There were reports of women who might have initially committed voluntarily, who then lost courage and fled the fire only to be thrown in by the crowd. In stark contrast in 1789-1814, other witnesses, both men and women, described how peaceful the Sati appeared and how the rite was performed “with great sensitivity”. As if those who pushed the widow into the flames extended a tender hand.

Sahagamana was to be found among many castes and at all social levels. By the end of the eighteenth century the practice was banned by European powers, but the ban was ignored, and though efforts have been made to reinforce laws against it, the most recent known case was in 1999. Much controversy surrounds this particular widow’s final act, as she was not known to have any desire to become a Sati. There were accusations of her having been coerced.

Sacrifice. Murder. Suicide. How best to categorize this ancient ritual? Is it even accurate to define it as a ritual? The Hindu Times in 2010 refers to it as the “Sati system” wherein it describes this memorial Sati stone that dates back to 1057, and has been carved with pictorial representation.

More often palm prints are a typical memorial used to honour the Sati.

 
The Sati stones can be found in the outskirts of the villages all over India. At times they’re placed at the spot where the widow became `Sati`. Unfortunately, the sculptures don’t tell us if the Sati walked willingly to her death.

 

SANTA VISITS THE FUNERAL HOME

Mr. Horace Duncan died on Christmas Eve. With this news, in my seventh year, my fourth living on top of my father’s funeral home, my heart sank. I stood downstairs in my father’s small office, my stance firm, arms folded at my chest.

"Why can’t Mrs. Duncan come by the day after Christmas? Why does she have to come tomorrow? It’s Christmas Day." 

My eyes accused him, as if he had caused Horace Duncan’s demise himself.

“It just ruins everything!” I continued. “What about Santa Clause? And the turkey? What about the smelly old oyster casserole?"

He stood looking out the front door, and nodded to a few of our community as they rushed down Main Street in the frosty air. They waved, never guessing they were on the tip of my father’s tongue as they strode by the funeral home. For here came The Undertaker’s Family Lecture, not for the first time, and certainly not the last. The clothes on my back, the food on my plate, the yearly vacation; all these were provided by the loyalty of the people of our town.

“And by our good friend Death,” I said under my breath.

“And if you think you’re upset, just think how poor Mrs. Duncan feels.”

I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t want to think about how Mrs. Duncan felt. From his point of view it was a sacrilege not to manifest compassion. I was just a young girl, and because death was never far away, in fact, just downstairs, I was already somewhat tired of it. And it was Christmas, for god’s sake.

We often worked Christmas around the dead and their families. Embalming time figured in the mix; the time-consuming little details of preparation in all its forms were still required whether Santa came or not. It was just another day for Mr. Death.

I should have trusted him more: My father was not one to let a dead body ruin a holiday. He had a plan.

On that Christmas Eve night the stairs creaked and groaned from the weight of a man dressed in red. Santa climbed the staircase of the funeral home to our living room. After an intake of breath, I succumbed to a moment of magic. Santa admired our tree and then sat on the sofa. As I climbed onto his lap and set about telling him that he better get busy because he had very little time left, that old familiar scent assaulted my nostrils.

I leaned into him, cupped my hands around his ear and whispered, “I know it’s you, Fount.”

It was the potent cocktail of the embalming room’s odour that first revealed his identity. A mixture of all the malodorous items in that dark room lingered upon his skin and hair, and floated in an invisible cloud around him. Then I took a good look at his hands. Shrivelled, wrinkled, from his recent chore, just like my father’s. And finally, the eyes of Fount, my father’s employee, were familiar.

Mrs. Duncan came by the next day, but she didn’t stay long. She just wanted to drop by with a suit for Horace. She brought a fruitcake. And something of those first four years of living in the funeral home gave me a little kick, and I felt badly for her. Then the sadness gradually faded, and the next thing I knew I was sitting at the big table laughing at the smelly old oyster casserole.

  Line block reproduction of a drawing by F.L.Griggs of St Mary's Church, Hitchin,1901. St Albans Museums

  

Martha Harper’s Haint

One day I was playing in the cemetery when a car pulled up beside me. A rough looking woman rolled down her window and poked her head out.

“Hey, little girl. Where’s that gravestone with them pictures on it?”

“You’ve passed it already. It’s right behind you.”

She turned the large white steering wheel of her beat up Plymouth Fury and parked, straddling the graveyard’s paved pathway and the grass.

I could just make out my father’s figure on the other side of the cemetery. He pointed to the yet undisturbed ground as he spoke with his gravediggers. Bobby and Luther were late again, a terrible problem because it was imperative that the grave be ready for the next day’s burial. The sun was beginning to set, and all hell would break loose unless the dirt began flying fairly quickly.

While Bobby and Luther worked, I followed the woman to my favourite gravestone. It was the colour of bleached slate, and on the bottom, copper picture frames in the shape of two ovals protruded from the stone. They were made more unusual by heavy protective covers. I squatted down and lifted the latch on the first one, and then the second, to reveal sepia photographs of the dead couple.

Rusting ceramic photograph - Carcassonne Cemetery

The woman sank to the ground beside me and melted into a mound. The crooked hem of her worn, baggy dress settled around her in a puff. Her coat looked to be a man’s duster jacket and she drew its tatty collar closed against the breeze. She stretched her legs out until her scuffed work boots rested near the grave. The boots were a sorry sight; the laces were missing and the tongues extended with a life of their own.

The woman placed her head on my small shoulder and I caught the sweet scent of bourbon. Then she began to cry. Though she was a stranger to me, and I was only about eight years old, I was accustomed to weeping. It was the background music at my house, the funeral home. I sat very still.

“These here people. They haunt me, ya know. ‘Specially that there woman. I seen her in my dreams a few times. She’s the spittin’ image of my dead mamma.”

“Well, these two people… they’ve been dead a long time. Maybe they’re related to you.” I offered.

She laughed, and then cried again. You can’t really talk to woman when she’s on a jag.

“I was pert near a wildcat when my mamma died. Still am. I’m Martha Harper, by the way, only daughter of Laura Sue Harper,” she slurred.

I was going to introduce myself, but she continued, “Don’t grow up to be a wildcat, girl. Don’t go givin’ your mamma heartache. Now, when I really need my mamma, she ain’t here in person. Sometimes her haint sits on the chair in my bedroom. Sounds crazy, don’t it, but I knowed she’s there. Scares me to death. She just sits there and stares at me. What does she want?”

The woman sat up, turned, and looked at me as if she expected an answer.

“Gosh, mam. I don’t know.”

Slowly she made her way up. Dried leaves stuck to her clothes, but she didn’t notice. She patted the gravestone and kissed the woman’s photo before she climbed into the back seat of her car.

“Gonna have a little nap now.” She lay supine and disappeared from view so that only the bottoms of those old boots dangled out the window. She called out from her resting place.

“Nice talkin’ to you, girl. And Happy Halloween.”

 

THE STORY OF THE BRONZE CASKET

Rarely has a piece of funereal furniture caused more controversy than in the remarkable journey of a particular bronze casket.

My education in caskets began at an early age. There are all sorts today, and even in days of yore when there weren’t all sorts, there were choices. At the time my father owned his funeral home there were obvious differences between a coffin and a casket; a coffin was made solely of wood and shaped similarly to the human body, narrowing at the head and feet. A casket is rectangular, the same width from top to bottom. Generally padded and lined, they’re lowered into the ground after the grave has been lined with a vault. The biggest difference between a casket and a coffin is that the casket opens at the top so the head and shoulders of the deceased may be viewed. Though the least expensive casket was constructed of plywood and covered in a felt-like cloth, caskets were usually forged of various metals. The most expensive casket was bronze. 

The story begins with an undertaker who became greedy.

Vernon O’Neal received a phone call one November afternoon in 1963. A man’s voice on the other end requested the O’Neal Funeral Home’s best casket for immediate delivery to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Vernon chose a solid bronze casket with a white satin lining. It weighed over 400 pounds when empty and came with a hefty price tag as well - $3,995.00. In 2012, that translates to roughly $30,000.

Vernon waited for his colleagues to return from a lunch break and subsequently set out, unknowingly, to President Kennedy’s tragic emergency room scene. After a brief moment of recovery from witnessing the results of the bullet that shattered President Kennedy’s skull, he quickly set to work alongside several emergency room nurses to protect the expensive casket. They used a plastic mattress covering to line the inside and wrapped the President’s head in several bed sheets and another around his body.

A kafuffle and swearing match developed in the hallway of the hospital between the Secret Service and the authorities in Dallas who insisted that they had legal rights to perform the autopsy. The Secret Service, on a mission to take the President’s body back to Washington, forced their way past the Dallas medical examiner, police and justice of the peace. The President’s bronze casket was loaded onto Air Force One at Love Field and finally arrived in Washington, D.C.

At the Bethesda Naval Hospital, another funeral home entered the story. The bronze casket could no longer be used. Despite the effort to protect it, the inside was stained with the President’s blood and missing a handle from the scuffle in the emergency room corridor and subsequent flight. Washington’s Gawler Funeral Home provided the casket that would be seen on the world’s television screens. The elegant flag-draped casket made from hand-rubbed, five-hundred-year-old African mahogany would eventually rest in Arlington National Cemetery.

But what of the bronze casket?  Less than two months after the President’s burial Vernon O’Neal invoiced the government for $3,995.00. The government’s view was that the bill was “excessive” and subsequently O’Neal offered a $500 discount. The government was still hesitant to agree to pay. They learned, however, that what O’Neal really wanted was the casket, which was stored in a warehouse in Washington, still in possession of the Gawler funeral home. Vernon had plans for that bronze casket. He’d been offered $100,000 from a party interested in placing it on public display and possibly even conducting a tour around the country, a blatant and tasteless cashing in on the tragedy of the assassination.

Appalled, the Kennedy family urgently requested the government to pay O’Neal, which they did, and the General Services Administration took possession of the casket in 1965. That year the House of Representatives passed a bill that required any object related to the assassination to be preserved as evidence. Enter the bronze casket once again. A congressman from Texas wrote to the Attorney General who had replaced Bobby Kennedy a year before, and suggested that the casket had no value for anyone other than “the morbidly curious” and recommended that it be destroyed. Attorney General Katzenbach agreed.

The Air Force drilled forty holes into the casket and filled it with three 80-pound sandbags to ensure its inability to float to the surface or wash ashore. It was then placed in a pine box that was also drilled full of holes. On February 18, 1966 the Air Force set out to the Atlantic Ocean with the bronze casket in a C130 transport plane. The drop point, several miles off the Maryland and Delaware coastline was chosen because it wasn’t near shipping or air lanes. Also, members of the Air Force knew that at one time the President had mentioned that he liked to be buried at sea in this location. According to released documents, the casket lies 9,000ft down at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

 

A SPARK OF CELEBRITY AT THE FUNERAL HOME 

I once asked my father if anyone famous lived in our town. When I think back to this I am amazed that he answered seriously.

“No, no one famous lives here.”

“Not even the Egg Man?”

“No, not even.”

“Why not?”

“Well, we live in a small town and most famous people live in large cities.”

Poor old us. The sum of celebrity sightings in the town where I grew up was:

Celebrity – 0

Regular people – a little less than 9,000

Apparently we were once a hotbed for any travelling performer who passed through. In 1903 an architect from Chicago swooped down to Kentucky and built an opera house in our town.

                             

There was nothing even faintly operatic about the kind of shows that somehow reached our little enclave. The religious element was so fierce that to call it what it really was, a theatre, was not allowed. The opera house debuted one night stands with performers who made themselves at home for a few hours in the dressing rooms. Vaudeville and minstrel shows played to audiences who sat eagerly in the boxes and balcony. Lectures were popular, as were home talent shows in which I can only imagine parents and spouses elongated their posture and puffed their chests out proudly while neighbours cringed inwardly.

The opera house closed during the war and like a product on an assembly line, it was passed from owner to owner.

At long last the drought grew to an end when the biggest celebrity our town had seen in a living breathing person stopped by our funeral home out of necessity. He was also the smallest celebrity to ever walk among us.

My father called him a live wire. His personality contained a tall dose of high-octane charisma, though he stood less than four feet tall at his adult height. His real name was Johnny Roventini, but by a stroke of luck in 1933 he became the most famous product spokesperson for Philip Morris Tobacco Company, so much so, that he became known only as Johnny Philip Morris.

In 1929 the construction of the Hotel New Yorker was complete.

Along with its 43 stories and 2,500 rooms, it boasted that ‘the hotel's bell boys were 'as snappy-looking as West Pointers’.  Their uniform: red-trimmed black cap with a chin strap, a bright red tunic with gold buttons, red-striped black trousers, and white gloves.

In 1933 Mr. Biow of the Biow Agency landed the lucrative Philip Morris Tobacco account. In a stroke of Mad Men genius, he focused on the fact that the cigarettes had a man’s name and thought it might be unique for a bellboy to page the non-existent Philip Morris. Biow was advised to sit in the lobby of the Hotel New Yorker to observe a 22-year-old bellhop. Johnny Roventini had suffered a pituitary gland disorder that not only halted his growth, but also the development of his voice, which he now used to call out a perfect B-flat tone naturally and clearly for every ‘page’.

Mr. Biow approached Johnny with a dollar in hand and asked him to page Philip Morris. The bellboy was unaware that Mr. Morris didn’t exist and repeatedly called out, “Call for Philip Morris” in his distinctive voice. Johnny was upset that his page went unanswered, not knowing he was essentially auditioning. Later he was quoted in Variety, "I went around the lobby yelling my head off, but Philip Morris didn't answer my call. I had no idea that Philip Morris was a cigarette.”

Johnny became a living trademark. For the next forty years he was never seen out of his bellboy uniform and was heard around the world, first in radio advertising, and then in broadcast media, notably helping the I Love Lucy show kick-start its success.

The demand for thousands of pubic appearances in store openings, parades and other public events summoned the need for dozens of “Johnny Juniors” who made it possible for him to be in two places at once. But there were no impostors in our town; we met the genuine Johnny. We lived in tobacco country and every year the Tobacco Festival took an all-consuming and prideful place in the autumn line-up of events. One would think we were organizing Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was the perfect venue for Philip Morris, and Johnny was a parade-appearing aficionado by that time.

For twelve years he sat on the back of a white convertible in our parade and called his page for Philip Morris without amplification. And the crowd went wild…

Our funeral home, which was on the residential end of Main Street, provided the perfect position in which to view the parade. I ran back and forth from a window upstairs to other vantage points, both downstairs and on our stoop where our front door was open to the community. Before and after the parade, Johnny came running into the funeral home badly in need of a cold drink and to answer the call of nature. He took the time to shake everyone’s hand and thanked us for our hospitality. I absolutely dogged my father to search for me if I wasn’t around for Johnny’s arrival. For a couple of those twelve years my younger sister was near his height and could not understand why he spoke to her as if he were an adult. Even though he was well into middle age when we met him, she couldn’t grasp his miniature stature and basically wanted him to be her playmate. She was especially confused when he patted her on the head. I’ll never forget his kindness and his full acceptance of how people reacted to him. 

By 1970 Congress had banned the advertising of cigarettes on television and radio. Johnny retired in 1974. He never married and died at the age of 88.

Click here to hear his call.