Freezing People is (Not) Easy

by Bob Nelson

  Our plan was to have CSC contract with CI to perform perfusions and store suspended members. Despite our current meager funds, we felt assured about the future of cryonics. With that optimism and Russ Stanley’s donation, we wanted a permanent storage facility.

  Finding and setting up the proposed facility was far more difficult than I had imagined. Since the law limited storage of bodies at a mortuary to less than six months, the city of Buena Park wanted Marie, Helen, and Russ out of the Rennaker Mortuary. The health department had extended the deadline for us several times but was getting impatient. Joseph Klockgether had pleaded with me, “Build your vault, Bob, and get your people out of here.” If we couldn’t store bodies at Joseph’s mortuary, how could we get past regulations for storing them at our own facility?

  The answer turned out to be surprisingly simple and practical. We could build an underground vault in a cemetery. There we would be immune from the local laws of legal disposition of our frozen patients. I also had to face the grim possibility of failure, since the technology was still experimental. With the patients already in a cemetery, they would be considered legally interred. Should the cryonics program dissolve, they could remain in the vault unless family members decided otherwise.

  It sounded so uncomplicated, but finding a willing cemetery wasn’t easy. Joseph used his contacts, but the answer we kept hearing was “No, there’s no precedent for such interments.”

  Of course I knew the real reason for the rejections. Cemetery directors didn’t mind dealing with dead people—just as long as they stayed dead. Future reanimation was all too new and strange for them to accept. After months of abysmal luck, a beam of Southern California sun finally permeated through.

  My mother-in-law had recently purchased two plots at the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, a suburb of Los Angeles. It was a beautiful place with rolling hills, surrounded by picturesque mountains—an ideal place to be dead, I suppose. I found their number in the Yellow Pages and called the office. I explained that CSC was a nonprofit cryobiological research organization and that we were looking for a place to store medical remains for research. I received an appointment to see the owner, Frank Enderle, immediately.

  He was a cordial gentleman and listened politely. As soon as I mentioned cryonics, he leaned back in his chair and knew exactly what I wanted. To my surprise, he told me he would think about it. His brother was on the California State Cemetery Board, and he wanted his brother’s legal advice before making a decision.

  Frank wasn’t bothered by the idea of hosting a cryonics facility as long as the cemetery had no liability. Once he received the go-ahead from his brother, he responded to me, insisting that the underground facility be constructed using the rigorous mausoleum code.

  On my third visit, Frank drove me through the cemetery to choose a location. Just two hundred feet beyond the main offices, I found the perfect spot. The ground was level and situated close to the road, making it easily accessible to liquid-nitrogen delivery trucks. I didn’t really expect Frank to agree, but he once again surprised me, and I successfully obtained that location.

  Although Frank was not interested in cryonics, he was intrigued by its novelty. While I wrote out the check for the large plot, his general manager, a tall lanky man named Chuck, walked into the office.

  Frank asked him, “Do you have any objections to having the cryonics vault on cemetery grounds?”

  My heart was in my mouth; I feared he might say something to obstruct us.

  A thoughtful look flashed across Chuck’s face. “I do have one concern. How many frozen people could be in that vault?”

  I put on my most trustworthy, concerned expression and answered, “At the very most—twenty.”

  After a long pause, he looked me straight in the eye. “What are you going to do if they wake up and start fucking and fighting down there?”

  My serious face broke into a huge grin. It was good to know that they had a sense of humor. They certainly needed it in later years.

  I contracted a company to build the vault. It was constructed of steel rebar and cement, much like a swimming pool, with interior dimensions of twelve by eighteen feet. A door was built into the steel roof, which slid horizontally on rollers. A ladder led from the door at grass level to the bottom. Meanwhile, we had to find a capsule for our frozen heroes to rest in long-term suspension—but the capsules weren’t cheap.

  At this point, between the plot of land and the construction of the still-unfinished vault, CSC had spent close to seven thousand dollars of Russ’s ten-thousand-dollar donation.

  We lucked into finding a tank that could hold thirty patients at an industrial liquidation yard in Los Angeles. Only slight modifications were necessary, since it had all the instrumentation to monitor the core temperature and liquid nitrogen boil-off.

  The top of the massive capsule had a sealed lid, which allowed access to the patients. The five-thousand-dollar price tag was a bargain; the original purchase invoice showed the capsule had cost nearly $150,000. There were, however, some serious downsides. First, the capsule was too large to fit in the plot we had already purchased, and we didn’t have the money to build a new, larger vault. Second, we’d need a lot of liquid nitrogen to fill its cavernous interior, as well as the money to maintain it. Marshall and I figured five or six paying suspensions would finance the capsule, but we had an immediate need for our current cases.

  In the end we banked on our optimism and took a leap of faith with the big capsule. CSC had around twenty-five-hundred dollars left in its bank account, and I arranged for a loan to pay the rest. Frank allowed us to store the capsule in the cemetery’s heavy-equipment yard until we found it a permanent home and Cryonic Interment could begin using it. We were excited about the future. Soon we would have the paying suspensions to operate our new, state-of-the-art facility.

  I was selling cryonics and our new facility to the public, traveling the country, giving presentations, and talking about CSC’s new capabilities. After interviews on several national television and radio talk shows, I was flying high and feeling golden. A guy like me from my background, on radio and television, was seen as an expert?

  Bob Nelson during a radio interview in Los Angeles

  My wife was amused by the media attention but embarrassed by its bizarreness. She focused on the children and tried filling the void created by my long hours away from home. The kids enjoyed seeing their dad interviewed on TV at first, but it soon became mundane. One time I sat down to watch the replay of an interview with Channel 5 News; however, my daughter Lori was already watching a program and didn’t care to switch the channel to see her dad.

  I always felt confident that with all the exposure, we were just one phone call, one more TV appearance, one interview, just one more day away from financial solvency. I hated feeling so focused on cash though. I had such big goals—we were fighting for the future of humanity—and yet here I was in this position of going after the money.

  Robert Prehoda and Dr. Brunol still came to dinners and gave talks, but since there was no money, they just gradually faded away. In our newsletter we boasted of the world’s first cryotorium—a proclamation I later regretted, because my detractors claimed I had overstated our accomplishments. But we were desperate for paying suspensions, and I thought a little exaggeration was justified. Hundreds of letters and phone calls were pouring into CSC, and people were signing up. Still, there were no new patients, and the expenses just continued to mount. I didn’t know how much longer I could hang on, but I couldn’t think about failure. Somehow, I hoped we could save our frozen heroes.

  Artist conception of future CSC cryonics facility

  In late 1968 we encountered another turn of fortune. Louis Nisco had been in cryonic suspension at Cryo-Care Equipment Corporation in Phoenix, Arizona, for a year. His daughter, Marie Brown, was des
perate. She could no longer afford the monthly storage and liquid-nitrogen maintenance payments, and Ed Hope, who owned the company, was threatening to terminate the suspension. Marie had purchased her father’s capsule from Ed for forty-eight hundred dollars. She still owed fifteen hundred dollars and was making monthly payments along with storage and liquid nitrogen fees. She couldn’t keep up with the payments and wanted my help. I called Ed Hope to get his side of the story. Ed was a businessman, pure and simple. His main line of work was manufacturing wigs, but when he saw an opportunity to make money, he added on the business of cryonics capsules.

  Ed and I appeared together once on the Louis Lomax television show. That was during the summer of 1966, and it was my first-ever TV appearance. The producer of the show asked if I could bring a visual demonstration. I told him I had just returned from a visit to Ed’s Cryo-Care facility in Phoenix and would ask him if he could bring a capsule to the show. I didn’t need to ask Ed twice. The Louis Lomax show was nationally syndicated, and it meant big-time sales potential to Ed. He showed up at my house two days before the show, pulling a trailer with Cryo-Care and Human Suspended Animation Equipment plastered all over it. My wife was mortified about what the neighbors thought.

  Three minutes before the show, Ed was still in his dressing room. I went in and asked what was keeping him. He was frantic. He couldn’t find his toupee and refused to go onstage without it. At that moment Lomax grabbed me and said we had only one minute left—forget about Ed. He got me onto the soundstage just in time. I was a nervous wreck; it felt like I had eaten a cotton ball sandwich for lunch. Lomax introduced me to the live audience as “the guy who could get you frozen and bring you back.” My secretary told me afterwards that I looked like someone desperately in need of a bathroom. I managed to parrot some of the things I’d heard Professor Ettinger say about cryonics, and our forty-five-minute segment stretched to an hour and fifteen minutes. An audience member asked if people should wear something warm for their suspension, which loosened me up. Eventually Ed came out, wig neatly arranged on his melon, and demonstrated his capsule. He managed to mention his phone number, just in case someone wanted to buy one.

  Ed Hope was ruthless; if he couldn’t make a buck, then he wouldn’t waste his time. When I asked him about Marie’s situation, he told me, “If that capsule isn’t out of here in two weeks, I’m going to kick the fucking thing into the street. Is there any part of that you don’t understand?”

  I understood all right—Ed meant exactly what he said. I called Marie, and she was badly shaken and needed an immediate resolution. I saw an opportunity: I badly needed a capsule, since the big one couldn’t be used yet, and she needed someone to store her father at a price she could afford. I offered to pay the remaining balance she owed on the capsule and to take charge of her father’s suspension. In return, I asked that she donate her father and the capsule to CSC and continue making payments of $150 per month to cover the costs of storage and liquid nitrogen. I told her of our plans to eventually get our large capsule ready and that we would transfer her father to the capsule at that time. She gratefully accepted.

  I mentioned there might be some shuffling of bodies before we got our large capsule functioning, but I didn’t provide specifics. In truth, I wanted to open her father’s capsule and place Marie Sweet, Helen Kline, and Russ Stanley in there with him. I wasn’t completely honest with her, but I figured that since she was donating the capsule to CSC, we could do what we wanted—and we had a real need. I reasoned that if they were reanimated, it would be more fun to be part of a group of survivors rather than be a lonely, solitary product of an experiment. Nevertheless, of all my dealings in cryonics, this omission bothered my conscience the most.

  Marshall Neel drew up the papers that donated Louis Nisco’s body to CSC under the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, along with the capsule, and Marie signed them. I called Ed and informed him that I would drive to Arizona to retrieve the Nisco capsule the next day.

  He asked, “Did she give you any money for me?”

  When I responded no, he said, “Come and get the fucking thing before I do something I’ll be sorry for.”

  Ed was paying for the liquid nitrogen himself, something he detested. He confided, “I’m getting out of this fucking business. It’s all a bunch of crazy people and crazy problems.”

  I’d never met anyone so contradictory with his name—nothing about him made me think of hope—Ed Avarice would have been far more appropriate. I told him the CSC was prepared to give him the fifteen hundred dollars owed by Marie upon picking up the capsule. Suddenly we became very popular with Ed.

  I rented a heavy-duty truck and trailer and set off to pick up the capsule. A close friend, Fred Martin, joined me for the ride. Fred was an insurance wizard who was developing a plan to provide coverage for suspension costs. We arrived at Cryo-Care on a Saturday morning, and Ed treated us to breakfast at his favorite hangout. Mouth agape, I watched him devour a huge stack of blueberry pancakes along with three eggs, sausage, bacon, two huge scoops of vanilla ice cream, milk, and countless cups of coffee. Yes, Ed Hope was a big man. For me he was a reinterpretation of Scrooge’s comment to Jacob Marley: “There’s more of gravy than of grave about you.”

  We started back to California that same morning. On the way, outside some little Arizona town, we ran out of fuel thanks to a faulty gas gauge on the rental truck. I was debating my options when I saw a highway patrolman in my rearview mirror. Great! I looked over at Fred and raised my eyebrows, trying to signal to him to play it cool.

  The officer pulled up alongside my window. “What’s the problem?”

  Thinking of our unusual cargo, I tried to act nonchalant; but I was sweating from the heat. “I’m not sure. It feels like we ran out of gas, but the gauge shows we’ve got a third of a tank.”

  The policeman perched his sunglasses in his hair, rolled up his sleeves, and lifted the hood of the truck. After a few minutes of tinkering, he confirmed we were out of gas. I just sat there, sticking to the fake leather seat and dreading that he’d ask me to step out of the truck to show him what I was hauling in the trailer. Instead he pulled out a clear plastic hose from his trunk and hooked it up to a special spot on his carburetor. Out rushed gas directly into my tank, three gallons free of charge, courtesy of rinky-dink Arizona. As we drove off, I asked our cargo, Louis Nisco, to say good-bye to the officer.

  Back at Joseph’s mortuary, our luck hadn’t changed. Marie broke all our agreements and never gave the CSC the monthly payments she promised. Not long after we transferred the capsule to the mortuary, she sent me a handwritten note that she was leaving the fate of her father to me and whatever happened was in CSC’s hands. We needed the income badly, but in a way I was elated. Her letter freed me from worry over her possibly discovering I had used the capsule for several people, as well as any liability. Or so I thought. I didn’t hear from Marie again until years later, under far different circumstances.

  I felt the curious warmth of hope mingled with apprehension. However, I should have refused Ed Hope’s offer to take ownership of the capsule and keep its patient at -320°F for the next several hundred years. This prototype leaked badly and required a vacuum pump continuously to maintain a half-decent vacuum between the outer wall and inner chamber. The liquid nitrogen needed replacing every week instead of just once a month, but the allure of placing our four patients into this single capsule was far too thrilling to turn down. Hauling dry ice a hundred miles every week for two years was a nightmare of labor and expense, especially since only Russ had left any money to pay for this journey.

  On a cold morning in March 1969, I met Joseph Klockgether in his mortuary garage with a huge agenda for the day. We were opening the Louis Nisco capsule and placing the other three patients inside. I couldn’t sleep the night before; I was too worried about this daunting task. If not sealed perfectly, we risked making an already leaky, decrepit capsule even worse.

&nb
sp; These patients—Marie, Helen, and Russ—had been our friends and our kindred spirits in the cryonics movement. This was the first time in history anyone had attempted such lifesaving efforts; we respected this maiden voyage and did everything possible to honor them. It was my fervent hope this capsule would save these people who were gambling on future technology.

  Ray Fields, a welding expert, had called me to offer his services. After examining his credentials and prior work, I agreed. He was eager to help, arriving at the mortuary garage before I did. We needed three hours to open the capsule, as the cut had to be perfect so that it could be welded back exactly as before and sealed correctly. During this time, Marie, Helen, and Russ remained in their temporary storage container with dry ice. New to our mission, Ray stared in awe at their perfectly preserved bodies.

  Ray hovered over the capsule with his diamond saw, preparing to make the first cut. His face was scrunched up, looking concerned. “Is he going to be okay?” he asked, gesturing to the now-drained capsule with Louis Nisco still inside.

  I was pouring some coffee for Joseph and me from the percolator. “Don’t worry; a body at liquid-nitrogen temperature doesn’t thaw in a few hours, so we have plenty of time. Just think about Thanksgiving turkey. Every year, my wife Elaine leaves a fifteen-pounder on our kitchen counter overnight to thaw. In the morning, its center is usually still frozen.”

  Ray nodded, understanding, his attention focused on the sliver-thin cut progressing along the stainless-steel capsule.

  I felt a little odd talking turkey, but I had needed to reach for strange analogies to explain cryonics principles over the years. “Now imagine that same bird weighed 120 pounds and was frozen at 320 degrees below zero; that turkey would be frozen solid for days. Louis is quite safe—as long as we don’t spend a week trying to get this perfect.”