The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [132]
Dear Mr. Krieger,
Thank you for your letter dated July 21 congratulating us on the Dills Committee Report and requesting 12 copies. The 12 copies of the report will be mailed to you under separate cover.
I want to correct a possible wrong impression as indicated in the first sentence of your letter. You congratulated us on “the very fine report that you have prepared and presented to the Dills Committee.” Although this may be one hundred percent correct, it should be presumed that this is a report of and by the Dills Committee, perhaps with some assistance.
Actually Warwick Carpenter and Don Welch wrote the report. I engineered the acceptance of the report by Dills and the actual filing of the report, which was interesting. One member of the committee actually read the report. He was the Assemblyman from Glendale, and Forest Lawn naturally wanted the report filed. He approved the report and his approval was acceptable to the others.
Sometime when we are in personal conversation, I would like to tell you more about the actual engineering of this affair. In the meantime, as you realize, the mechanics of this accomplishment should be kept confidential.
Cordially yours,
J. Wilfred Corr
Mr. J. Wilfred Corr later became the executive director of the American Institute of Funeral Directors. He contributed occasional articles to Mortuary Management in which he made ringing appeals for ever-higher ethical standards for funeral directors: “Perhaps we will live to see the triumph of ethical practices, born of American competition, fair dealing and common honesty.” Mr. Donald Welch was one of California’s most prosperous undertakers and the owner of a number of Southern California mortuaries. Mr. Warwick Carpenter was a market analyst who prepared the statistics on funeral costs used in the legislative committee report. According to Mortuary Management, the statistics were originally developed by Mr. Carpenter for Mr. Welch, “to illustrate an address he made before a national convention of funeral directors.” Mortuary Management opines that Mr. Carpenter “performed a very helpful service to funeral directors in California now under investigation.” The assemblyman from Glendale who actually read the report was the Honorable H. Allen Smith, who went on to Congress.
The report itself was liberally circulated by the undertakers, who rather naturally saw it as a first-rate public relations aid.
The ten years following the Collier’s article were relatively tranquil ones for the funeral industry, at least so far as the press was a matter of concern to it. Mr. Merle Welsh, at the time president of the National Funeral Directors Association, was able to report to the 1959 convention: “By our constant vigil there is a lessening of the derogatory and sensational in written matter. Several articles of which we have been apprised have either not been written or were watered down versions of that which they were originally intended.”
A year later, Casket & Sunnyside made the same point: “For many years only a very few derogatory articles about funeral service have been printed in national publications.… Many times the information that an author is planning such an article is leaked to a state association officer or to NFDA, so that the proper and accurate information may be given such writer without his asking for it. In practically all such instances, such proposed articles either never appear or appear without their ‘sensational exposé,’ entirely different articles than were at first planned.”
The funeral men were far from easy in their minds, however, for a new peril was appearing on the horizon. Said Mr. Welsh, “I could speak for hours on the problems and rumors of problems besetting funeral service as a result of the times.… There are memorial societies and church groups trying to reform funeral practices. There are promoters telling funeral directors to take on a plan or plans or else. There are writers who would like to reduce the American funeral program to a $150 disposal plan.… While it is true we have patches of blue