program to provide counsel and assistance for lot owners after the at-need sale has been made.” The program works like this: first a letter is sent to the family announcing that the Cedar Park memorial counselor and director of the Family Counseling Service will call upon them shortly “to secure the information necessary for the Historical Record and present you with a photographic record of the services at Cedar Memorial.” Three days later, the counselor arrives at the home and “suggests the purchase of a bronze memorial.” But that is not all; in the middle of the month following the service, the counselor is after the family again, this time to invite them to a “counseling program” at the cemetery chapel. This in turn is followed up by yet another personal visit; “Dr. Dill always visits them if a memorial has not been selected.”
Another cemetery writer describes the conflict of interest between undertaker and cemetery: “You are all familiar with the situation wherein the mortician gives a telephone order for your bare minimum, telling you to put it on his bill and not contact the family? He is trying to be a good fellow in the eyes of the family he is serving, but more than that, he is scared to death that if we see them, we’ll oversell them, and he will suffer in his sale or will have to wait for his money.”[7]
The cemeteries are not taking it lying down. They have developed their own potent counterweapon—“pre- need” sales, for which salesmen roam the neighborhoods of metropolis and suburb like thieving schoolboys in an orchard, snatching the fruit before it has fallen from the tree. They have outflanked their adversary here by getting to the prospect not hours ahead—but probably
Robert Waltrip of SCI, Ray Loewen of the Loewen Group, and Charles Stewart of Stewart Enterprises, the head honchos of the Big Three of the corporate funeral world, have been pitted in a worldwide race to buy up cemeteries with integrated undertaking establishments. Known in the trade as combos, these have proven to be prodigious money mills.
That such combinations may be illegal in states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York, which acknowledge the traditional view that cemeteries are not meant to be for-profit enterprises, has thus far not been seen by the corporate buccaneers as a deterrent.
Louisiana-based Stewart recently negotiated an agreement with the Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest (home to nearly 4 million Catholics), to build and operate mortuaries in its six biggest cemeteries. In return for this invaluable endorsement, the Church, to the anguished distress of the independent Catholic funeral directors in the diocese, will receive a percentage of the proceeds from each funeral Stewart performs at the cemeteries.
“Sinful,” Father Henry Wasielewski (whose crusade against funeral profiteers is addressed in chapter 14, “The Nosy Clergy”) calls the deal. “Most Stewart mortuaries charge thousands more than many independents for the same funeral.” It seems unlikely that Stewart, in its new role as purveyor of Catholic funerals in southern California, will share Father Henry’s view that a funeral is a sacred ritual that belongs in church. “It should be as simple as the white pall that covers a Catholic casket, signifying man’s equality and humility in death.”
Then there’s the touchy problem of who gets to sell the vault. Vaultmanship is very big these days; at least 60 percent of all Americans wind up in one of these stout rectangular metal or concrete containers, which may cost anywhere from several hundred to a few thousand dollars. Vault selling is ordinarily the prerogative of the funeral director, to whom the vault manufacturers address their message: “Think of your last ten clients. Think how many of that ten had the means and would actually have welcomed an opportunity to choose a finer vault. Makes sense, doesn’t it, to give them that opportunity? You’ll be surprised how many will choose this finer Clark Vault and be grateful to you for recommending it.”
Vault men, when they get together among themselves, can be a convivial and jolly lot, prone to their own kind of family jokes; the Wilbert Burial Vault Company, for instance, gives an annual picnic featuring barbecued chicken, ribs, and “vaultburgers.” This bonhomie does not extend to their relations with the cemetery people, whom they are constantly hauling into court. At one time, lawsuits were raging in various parts of the country, brought by vault manufacturers against the cemeteries, to enjoin the latter from going into the business of selling vaults. The theory is that the cemeteries, operating as nonprofit organizations, have no business selling things. The monument makers, too, have entered the fray with the same complaint, for the cemeteries have lately taken to banning the old-fashioned tombstones and selling their own bronze markers. They are slowly driving the monument makers out of business. In some cases, the monument makers have secured injunctions prohibiting the cemeteries from selling monuments, markers, or memorials of any kind. This is a cruel blow to the cemeteries, for they count heavily on the sale of bronze markers.
The cemeteries fight back by making things as rough as possible for both vault and monument companies. They may charge an arbitrary toll for use of their roads in connection with vault installations. They may require that all vaults be installed by cemetery personnel. They won’t permit monument makers to install the foundations for their Smiling Christs, Rocks of Ages, and other Items of Dignity, Strength, and Lasting Beauty; instead, they insist that these be installed by the cemetery, which sets a stiff fee for the service.
The backstage squabbling among the various branches of the funeral business has long been a matter of concern to some of the more farsighted industry leaders, who are understandably fearful that the customer will eventually catch on.
These leaders believe that, rather than engage in such unseemly quarrels over the customer’s dollar, they should instead concertedly strive to upgrade the standard of dying. A cemetery spokesman, decrying the friction between cemetery and undertaker, writes:
How simple it is to sell a product or an idea if we but believe in it. If we have the opportunity to foster the sentiment behind the funeral service, we must not fail to do so. Strengthen the idea behind the funeral customs, committals and the like. The family will receive additional mental satisfaction and comfort when the service is complete and in keeping with the deceased’s station in life; and from a strictly mercenary angle, it will pay big dividends in establishing the thought of perpetuity and memorialization in the mind of the family.
He acknowledges the funeral director’s pioneering role in conditioning the market:
Without question, the tremendous advancement in funeral customs in America must be credited to the funeral director and not to the demands of the public, not even ourselves. He has carried on assiduously an educational campaign which has resulted indirectly in a public desire for funeral sentiment and memorialization.
The lesson to be learned, then, is to promote harmony backstage for a smooth and profitable public performance. Another cemetery writer, reproving his fellow cemetery operators for their jealousy of “the success and dollar income of the funeral directors,” suggests one good way in which the cemetery men can effect a rapprochement with these rivals: “Have a yearly meeting with them. Feed them a good dinner, distribute a small token. Last year, we gave them all a set of cuff links made of granite from our mausoleum. Last but not least set up a memorial council. It won’t cure all ills, but I can assure you it will help. I believe it can control legislation….”
The memorial council idea actually originated in another quarter, with the flower industry, which had long been urging that industries that profit from funerals unite in common cause. As the president of the Society of American Florists said, “Funeral directors, as well as florists, are in danger of being swept away along with sentiment and tradition by those who do not realize the true value of the traditional American funeral practice…. Cooperation between florists and funeral director is essential as it is only one step from ‘no flowers’ to ‘no funeral.’”
The florists, whose language is often pretty flowery, convened the first meeting of the allied funeral industries under the alliterative designation “Symposium on Sentiment.” The announced purpose of the symposium was “to combat the forces which are attacking sentiment, memorialization and the rights of the individual in freedom of expression”—in blunter words, to combat the religious leaders and the memorial societies who advocate simpler, less expensive funerals. As the editor of the
