services (flowers, postcards, urns, bronze tablets, and undertaking services) added another $800,000. By 1959 annual sales exceeded $7 million, of which over $4 million represented sale of cemetery space.
What happens to all this money? Is it really all plowed back for beautification of the Park? If so, it would pay for an awful lot of fertilizer and statuary.
The Forest Lawn
Well, yes. Only the operative phrase there is “over expenses.”
Forest Lawn Memorial-Park Association, Inc., the nonprofit cemetery corporation, was the sun around which clustered a galaxy of Eaton-controlled commercial corporations and holding companies. One of these, the Forest Lawn Company, a Nevada corporation, was a land company. Another, a holding company, owned over 99 percent of the land company’s stock; one was a life insurance company (since sold); one was a mortgage and loan company. To the nonprofit corporation, owning no land, was entrusted the actual operation of the cemetery—the mortuary, the flower shop, the sale of graves, crypts, vaults, statuary, postcards, souvenirs. Discreetly behind the scenes was Eaton’s land company, skimming off 50 percent of the proceeds of sales of lots, plots, and graves, and 60 percent of the gross on all sales of niches, crypts, vaults, and other mausoleum space (exclusive of sums collected for endowment care).
It seems curious that the additional land that is needed from time to time for expansion of the existing “Parks” and the development of new ones is not acquired by the cemetery directly. This would save for the beautification of the cemeteries and the ennoblement of mankind the middleman’s profit that is now taken by the land company. Direct purchase of land by the cemetery company would result in substantial tax savings as well, since the land which is taxable in the hands of the land company would be tax-exempt if owned by the nonprofit cemetery. More curious still is the fact that the land company buys and develops the land with money which it borrows from the cemetery at only 3 percent interest. As of 1959 Eaton’s land company had borrowed over $5 million from the nonprofit company at this exceptionally favorable rate.
All in all, Eaton’s commercial companies seem to come off astonishingly well in their dealings with the friendly Memorial-Park company. In a stupendous display of Christ-in-businessmanship, his land company in 1959 sold the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather and two other churches to the nonprofit company for eighteen times their depreciated cost, thereby realizing a bonnie profit of over $1 million. To ease the pain of the capital gains tax on this transaction, the Memorial-Park is paying the purchase price, plus 4 percent interest, in installments of $100,000 per year.
As Mrs. St. Johns says of Dr. Hubert Eaton, “He was a businessman-idealist with an inspiration, whose plan’s greatness lay in its simplicity.”
The Dreamer is not through yet. In 1954 he announced his discovery of the Memorial Impulse. He says he might have called this force of nature the Memorial Instinct, but preferred to defer to “psychologists and scientists” who feel the term “instinct” is imprecise. The Memorial Impulse is a primary urge founded in man’s biological nature, and it gives rise to the desire to build (as one might have already guessed) memorials. It is also an indispensable factor in the growth of any civilization.
There are a number of ways to turn the Memorial Impulse, “as old as love and just as deathless,” to cash account. “Let every salesman’s motto be:
The Memorial Impulse can also be channeled to remedy what was perhaps a tactical error in the early days of the Dream: insistence upon the use of small, uniform bronze grave markers.
Eaton mused that while there was universal agreement that the elimination of tombstones was a good thing, nevertheless the tombstones did serve a purpose: they were a “great assist” to the Memorial Impulse. The “great assist” that was unwittingly discarded, we learn, is the good old epitaph. There just isn’t room for it on the 12-by- 24-inch bronze tablets currently in fashion. True, the little markers permit of vast, almost unbroken areas of grass —the “sweeping lawns” of the original Builder’s Creed—but since bronze markers are priced by the square inch, more or less, their size also limits the amount that can be charged for them. Now that the Impulse has been discovered, this can be corrected, and the epitaph was slated for a comeback that may radically alter the appearance of the memorial park, transforming its sweeping green lawns into seas of bronze. Eaton suggests that cemetery owners should be thinking in terms of “ever-larger” bronze tablets, big enough, in fact, to contain complete epitaphs and historical data—big enough to cover the entire grave! This, he says, would be a most “convenient outlet” for the client’s Memorial Impulse.
10. CREMATION
Cremation is not an end in itself, but the process which prepares the human remains for inurnment in a beautiful and everlasting memorial.
Nationwide, there has been a phenomenal growth in cremation since
Preference for cremation varies greatly from region to region. In 1993 (the last date for which a state-by- state breakdown is available) Mississippi had the lowest cremation rate, 2.6 percent; and Nevada the highest, with 58 percent. In general, all the Southern states with the exception of Florida (40 percent) have very low cremation figures. Midwest are medium low; New England, fairly high, West Coast, high.
While national and state statistics show that cremation is gaining ground, a further breakdown by counties is revealing as to who chooses cremation. For example, while 41 percent of Californians are cremated, in the San Francisco Bay Area the figure is 60 percent, and in affluent, trendsetting Marin County, 70 percent. In Sarasota, Florida, an upscale retirement area, the cremation rate is over 70 percent, while for the state as a whole it’s 40 percent.
In the 1960s, the Catholic Church lifted its ban against cremation, thus making it permissible for members of most major religious faiths to use this method of disposition.
How to explain this extraordinary increase in the resort to the retort?
A common reaction of people who learn for the first time some of the facts and figures connected with the American way of death is to say, “None of that for me! I’m going to beat this racket. I just want to be cremated, and avoid all the fuss and expense.” Cremation is no doubt a simple, tidy solution to the disposal of the dead. It appeals to the nature lover and the poet, who visualize their mortal remains scattered over sunny hillside or remote strand. It is commended by environmentalists and by those who would like to see an end to all the malarkey that surrounds the usual kind of funeral. It has appeal for the economy-minded; logically one would expect the expense to be but a fraction of that incurred for earth burial. And, to continue along that seditious line of thought, why not bypass the undertaker altogether, by taking the corpse directly to a crematory, there to be consigned to the flames—the only expense incurred: a modest crematory charge?
It is true that in most countries where cremation is on the increase, the objectives of economy and simplicity are well served. In England, for example—where there were three cremations in 1885—it is today the mode of disposal for 72 percent of the dead. The average crematory charge of $280 includes amenities such as use of a chapel, not usually available in North American crematories. Specifications for the coffin to be used are the simplest, “easily combustible wood, not painted or varnished”; to facilitate the scattering of the ashes, they are
