The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [2]
I have not included the atypical funerals: quaint death customs still practiced by certain Indian tribes, the rites accorded Gypsy kings and queens, the New Orleans jazz funerals, the great movie and gangland funerals which had their heyday in the thirties and still occur from time to time. I have regretfully avoided these byways, intriguing though they are, for the main highway—the “average,” “typical” American funerary practices, surely fully as curious as any of the customs derived from ancient folklore or modern variants.
INTRODUCTION
To trace the origins of this book: my husband, Bob Treuhaft, got fired up on the subject of the funeral industry in the mid-to-late 1950s. A labor lawyer, he represented a number of trade unions. To his annoyance, he began to notice that when the breadwinner of a union family died, the hard-fought-for death benefit, achieved often through bitter struggle and intended for the benefit of the surviving spouse and children, would end up in the pockets of an undertaker. “These people seem to know exactly how much a warehouse worker gets, and how much an office secretary,” he would complain, “and they set the price of the funeral accordingly.”
Bob’s idea of a solution was to organize a nonprofit group which through contract with a local undertaker would obtain simple, cheap funerals for its members at a fraction of the going rate. Thus was born the Bay Area Funeral Society (BAFS), its membership running heavily to Unitarians, co-op members, university professors and other eggheads. I am sorry to say I rather mocked these good folks, calling them the Necrophilists and teasing them about their Layaway Plan. Why pick on the wretched undertakers? I asked Bob. Are we not robbed ten times more by the pharmaceutical industry, the car manufacturers, the landlord?
After reading some of the trade magazines he brought home, I saw the point. Their very names were captivating: Casket & Sunnyside, Mortuary Management, and my favorite, Concept: The Journal of Creative Ideas for Cemeteries. Once hooked, I found them to be compulsive reading, revealing a fantasy world I never knew existed: “Futurama, the casket styled for the future …” “The True Companion Crypt, where husband and wife may be truly together forever.…” Spotting an ad for “The Practical Burial Footwear Company of Columbus, Ohio,” I sent for samples and was rewarded with a package containing the “Fit-a-Fut Oxford.” As a leaflet explains, these oxfords were specially designed, after two years of research, to fit the deceased foot after rigor mortis sets in. They are “fit-a-fut” because they lace up at the back as well as in the front, and the soles slope downwards. (Unfortunately, our son Benji, then in high school, wore them around the house, and they soon fell apart.)
Bob suggested that I write an article about the Bay Area Funeral Society, drawing on the trade magazines and their flights of rhetoric against the BAFS, the clergy, and anybody else who favored a return to simpler funerals. I did so, in a piece entitled “St. Peter, Don’t You Call Me,” which was rejected by every major magazine on the ground that it was too distasteful a subject.
It eventually found a home in Frontier, an obscure liberal monthly published in Los Angeles, circulation 2,000, in its issue of November 1958.
Prodded by Bob, the funeral society ordered 10,000 reprints and distributed these far and wide. An immediate consequence was an invitation for me to appear on Caspar Weinberger’s weekly television program, “Profile, Bay Area,” in a debate on the Bay Area Funeral Society featuring a Unitarian minister and myself versus two undertakers, who proved to be wildly comic adversaries.
Developments now came thick and fast. Terrence O’Flaherty, television columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, reported that the program had generated more mail to his column than any public event since The Bad Seed was performed at a local junior high school. Roul Tunley, a staff writer on the Saturday Evening Post, read O’Flaherty’s column and decided that the