Marcia happens to be the owner of two FPW crypts, bought by her parents in 1960 for $1,705. When her parents died they were cremated elsewhere, and over the years Marcia had made sporadic efforts to unload the crypts. FPW declined to buy them back; “I was told they had very little value because they were in the ‘old, outdoor’ section of the mausoleum.” She told me, “The desirable crypts are now in the new air-conditioned section.” Marcia next proposed to donate the crypts to a local church or nursing home for the use of a destitute family. “The cemetery told me that transfers of the crypts to ‘unknown persons’ is prohibited. I asked if that didn’t infringe on my rights as the legal owner. But they said that the cemetery reserved the right to have the final say as to who would be buried there. At this point I lost interest in the problem, bouncing between the comical absurdity of the whole thing and righteous indignation.”
In the spring of 1995, I had arranged an interview with Robert Waltrip, SCI founder and CEO, in Houston about these matters. I had many extremely friendly phone conversations with Bill Barrett, whose full title is “director of corporate communications of SCI Management Corporation,” in Houston. Just when a date for our meeting had been set, I got a fax from Mr. Barrett: “I regret to report that Mr. Waltrip’s travel and business commitments over the next couple of months are going to make it impossible to schedule time to visit you.”
This was sad news indeed. I had been most keenly looking forward to a long, informative chat with Mr. Waltrip. But the reason for canceling the interview could be glimpsed in an article written by Mr. Barrett for “Inside SCI: A Publication for SCI Employees and Affiliates” slipped to me by a disaffected former SCI employee. Mr. Barrett warns his readers: “An interview with the media is serious business. The image and reputation of your business is at stake. If the preparation leads you to conclude it is not in your best interest to do the interview, don’t.”
An address given by Mr. Barrett at the Conference of the American Cemetery Association in April 1995 on “how to identify and respond to a crisis situation” elaborates. Some excerpts:
1. Define the problem. Is it life threatening or simply a corporate embarrassment?…
2. Control the information being released. Assign a single spokesperson when possible.… If you have to have more than one, it is important that everyone sing from the same song-book.…
3. Select a crisis team. Your lawyer should either be a part of that team, or at least have the opportunity to review the strategy.…
4. Know where you are going. Before agreeing to do an interview, you have the right to know the name of the reporter you will be talking with and whether or not the reporter has already drawn a conclusion from the information he or she has.…
5. Be prepared. No amount of work you do in preparation for a media interview is wasted. And sometimes this work leads you to the conclusion that it is not in your best interest to do the interview. If that is the case, don’t! I was asked once to have someone appear on the Phil Donahue show to defend the industry against allegations by some members of the clergy and grieving families. No Way!
How could I hope to succeed where Donahue failed? I decided to try another tack and metamorphose into Marcia Carter’s beloved old Aunt Jessie from England.
Aunt Jessie seemed like the perfect solution. Alone in the world, her British contemporaries long dead, she would welcome the idea of Houston as a final resting place, close to her niece’s family. Marcia phoned for an appointment, and together we repaired to Forest Park Westheimer on May 26, 1995. (Dates are important in this line of work; Forest Park’s general price list notes that “these prices are effective as of March 10, 1995, but are subject to change without notice.”)
A stylish young “pre-need counselor” named Sandy showed us around. Marcia said she was keen to see everything, since she might want to do some advance planning for her own family. Very sensible, Sandy said. And she should decide soon, as the prices for crypts would be going up on June 1. “You mean six days from now? That doesn’t give us much time … and how much more would they cost?” Sandy didn’t know the actual cost; that’s up to the head office, which hasn’t yet announced the new prices. But the prices of crypts normally double about every five years, she said. (Mulling this over later, Aunt Jessie and Marcia reckoned that at this rate Marcia’s existing crypts must now be worth $217,600.)
Sandy showed us everything. As Aunt Jessie, I was especially interested in the crypts, so unlike the ones in Westminister Abbey. More like mini-mini high-rise condos, I said. These coffin-sized concrete boxes, six to a tier, were variously priced from $7,395 to $8,895. Why the $1,500 difference, inasmuch as they appear to be identical? The more expensive ones are at heart level, Sandy explained, adding, “Oh, by the way, there’s an opening and closing charge of $660 per vault.”
The following day Marcia phoned the SCI headquarters to inquire about the June 1 price increase for the crypts. There was a certain amount of foot-dragging, during which she was shunted from executive to executive; eventually Mr. Pat Geary, manager of Memorial Oaks, yet another SCI mortuary-cemetery combination, rang back to say that there was no increase planned for the crypts, Sandy was mistaken. (Or was she merely following suggestions given in sales courses? Marcia wondered.)
For some days thereafter, Marcia strove to sort out what the total cost would be for Forest Park’s cheapest plan—first, if one of the crypts was used; second, for a “direct burial” or a “direct cremation,” meaning no “viewing” of the body and no religious service.
“Well, I must say, these people really don’t like to talk prices!” she said. David Dettling, funeral director at Forest Park, was less than forthcoming about the first item, “Minimum Services.” “He could not/would not break it down,” Marcia told me. “There’s no way of avoiding that charge, even if we are able to perform most of the things enumerated ourselves.”
Next on the price list: PREPARATION OF THE BODY. Embalming, $425. Refrigeration, $425. “They get their $425 either way,” said Marcia. “If you choose not to be embalmed, then you have to be refrigerated, even if you have direct cremation. Mr. Dettling also told me that an unembalmed body can only be viewed by the legal next of kin, and then only for a few moments. This has to do with liability of the funeral home for ‘blood-borne pathogens’!!” (One of the more dazzling flights of fancy; as any pathologist will tell you, a dead body presents no risk whatsoever of infecting the living when there’s no contagious disease.)
After many telephone discussions with various SCI personnel, Marcia got some figures.
First, direct cremation:
“Minimum Services” for direct cremation (SCI
has magnanimously reduced the price from $1,682)
$1,252
Transportation of the body from place of death
$ 355
Refrigeration
$ 425
Cardboard box
$ 275
Crematory charge
$ 475
Vehicle for picking up certificates
$ 100
Total
$2,882
Next, assuming that Aunt Jessie breathes her last in Houston and ends up in one of Marcia’s already paid for crypts, the cost would be:
“Minimum Services”
$1,682
Transportation of body from place of death to funeral home
$ 355
Refrigeration/embalming
$ 425
Minimum sealed (gasketed) casket
$2,598
Transferring body from funeral home to crypt
$ 275
Open/close crypt (removing and replacing the faceplate)
$ 660
Vehicle for picking up permits
$ 100
Total
$6,095
(Opening/closing crypt charges rise to $685 on Saturday, $780 on Saturday afternoon, $975 on holidays. Never on Sunday.)
I asked why they charge $275 to take the body the two h
undred yards from the funeral home out to the crypt. “That seemed exorbitant,” said Marcia. “He said it’s a fixed fee within a fifty-mile radius. Even so close, it’s the same because of the ‘cost of maintaining the vehicles, their insurance, and so forth.’ Outrageous! Also, I asked why the minimum service fee of $1,682 couldn’t be discounted for immediate burial the same as it was for cremation, and he said, ‘Well, they do that to make cremation a little cheaper than burial.”
These arrangements may be all very well for Marcia; she’s obviously not your typical Houston funeral buyer. She’s going to dump Aunt Jessie in an old, unair-conditioned crypt in the cheapest casket, no opportunity for neighbors to come and visit her, no religious service or memorial gathering. Those who are inclined to even a modicum of ceremony would have to add a few items from the FPW price list to the above rock-bottom minimum:
Use of facilities and staff services for visitation (per day)
$ 98
Funeral service in FWP chapel, or
$725
Staff and services in other facility, or
$725
Chapel for memorial service without remains present
$725
Equipment and staff services for service at graveside
$515
Additional charge for use of facilities/staff on Sunday or holiday
$600
Caskets from $2,598 to $25,145
Copper vault (resists the entrance of outside elements)
$20,378
There is lots more—clothing up to $192, flowers up to $2,000, memorial booklet, commemorative flag case—but why go on? Readers can check out the SCI facilities in their own communities via 1-800-9CARING.*
What happens to all that money? According to Graef S. Crystal, corporate-compensation expert, SCI is one of ten companies out of a total of 414 that he studied in 1995 whose directors and chief executives were most overpaid (New York Times, June 27, 1995). The directors, he reckons, are overpaid by 95 percent, and CEO Robert Waltrip, founder and brains behind the company, by 62 percent.
I asked Mr. Crystal how much the SCI directors get. A total package, comprising annual retainers, meeting fees, stock options, pension benefits, and deferred compensation, of $102,000 maybe more, he said. “Fair pay, considering the size and performance of the company, would be $49,700,” And the CEO? “He gets a total value of $4,321,000. Using the same factors, a fair package would be $2,670,000.” He added that the CEO’s performance has been “unremarkable, neither very good nor very bad, for the past ten years; but it has improved recently.”
Heading the list of these high-priced directors is Anthony L. Coelho, president and CEO of Wertheim Schroder Investment Services, Inc., better known as Tony Coelho, former Democratic congressman from California. In 1989, under a cloud of scandal, he resigned from the House of Representatives, relinquishing his powerful position as majority whip, just one step ahead of a Justice Department and House Ethics Committee investigation involving his personal investment in a junk bond that was completed with the help of a savings and loan executive (Wall Street Journal, March 29, 1994).
As chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 1981 through 1986, according to the Washington Post (January 8, 1995), Coelho, some say, “sold his party’s soul by vastly expanding contributions of business PACs and the expectations those contributors felt in return.”
In 1994, rehabilitated by the passage of time, he joined President Clinton’s inner circle of advisors. But like the Grim Reaper himself, Mr. Coelho is a bipartisan sort of fellow: “I love Bob Dole!” he told the Washington Post in an interview. “I have great friends on the Republican side. [Lobbyist] Jim Lake and I are as close as brothers!”
All of which bodes exceedingly well for the future of SCI’s global village of the dead.
* The FAMSA Web site, www.funerals.org/famsa/chains.htm, posts a listing of chain-owned mortuaries, although the rapid rate of acquisitions makes it hard to keep up with the latest on who owns what.
17
Funerals in England Then and Now
A public exhibition of an embalmed body, as that of Lenin in Moscow, would [in England] presumably be dealt with as a revolting spectacle and therefore a public nuisance.
—ALFRED FELLOWS, The Law of Burial
In order to appreciate the changes in the funeral landscape that are currently taking place in England, it will be useful to revisit the scene as it existed thirty years ago.
Funerals in England Then
American funeral directors often say, “England is about fifty years behinds us.” To the English, this might sound like a veiled note of warning: does it mean, for example, that fifty years from now much of England’s green and pleasant land will have been converted into Memorial Gardens of Eternal Peace? From Sherwood Forest to Forest Lawn in one easy step? It requires more than a little imagination to visualize a bluff English squire and his hard-riding, rugged-faced lady transformed into Beautiful Memory Pictures, their erstwhile stony and disapproving features remolded by the hand of a Restorative Artist into unfamiliar expressions of benign sweetness. Would their caskets be named (like the American “Valley Forge”) after famous battles—the “Battle of Britain,” in delectable shades of Royal Air Force blue, or “Flodden Field,” with an archery motif? Or perhaps (like the American “Colonial Classic”) after periods in English history: the Restoration Rolick, the Crusader, Knighthood in Flower, the Victorian Voluptuous with overstuffed horsehair interior made expressly to simulate the finest drawing-room furniture of the period? Would the squire and his wife be decked out as for the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, he in top hat and cutaway, she in trailing flowered chiffon, or more simply in Harris tweeds complemented by Practical Burial Gum Boots?
There has been heard in America a singing radio commercial whose words, set to the tune of “Rock of Ages,” go like this:
Chambers’ caskets are just fine,
Made of sandalwood and pine.
If your loved ones have to go,
Call Columbus 690.
If your loved ones pass away,
Have them pass the Chambers way.
Chambers’ customers all sing:
“Death, oh death, where is thy sting?”
This might be going a little too far for England, but it would be rash to underestimate the penetrating power of American enterprise.
Jingles like this may one day be beamed on commercial telly and adorn billboards in the countryside: “Repose with your mate / Near the bones of the great / By appointment, I ween / To H.M. the Queen.”—Westminster Memory Gardens, Ltd. Or, “Your Heart in the Highlands-Forever!”—Happy Hebridean Haven, Ltd.
Fanciful, perhaps, yet perhaps also the English would be well advised to note that American missionary schemes to “civilize” English funerals are already under way, and some headway has been recorded.
As early as 1926, a member of National Selected Morticians reported to his colleagues on what had most impressed him on a visit to England: “I spent a day in Liverpool with a fine gentleman, one of the very best. They know very little about embalming in any other part of the world, outside of America. They are going to. England has been agitating the matter. I take one of their journals, and they commenced agitating a couple of years ago. I think if we could send some missionaries over there, we would do them a world of good.…”
It took a long time for our missionaries to show tangible results for their efforts. The Brits seemed to like being fifty years behind their Yank counterparts.
It is of little use to ask English friends to describe the procedures in a typical funeral, because so few have been to one. Whereas Americans flock to the funeral of a coworker, a neighbor, or a casual acquaintance, in England only the closest relations go; consequently many people, even those of middle age, have never actually seen a funeral. Some are, perhaps understandably, reluctant to make inquiries. One friend wrote, “I have not yet been to call at _______ Undertakers, although I walk past th
ere every day; I fear I have the superstitious feeling of an old horse passing the knacker’s yard.”
Another friend spent some time with a country undertaker and sent a full report: “First and foremost, he said—and this is borne out by my own feelings and the experience of everybody I have asked—that we aren’t even on the fringe of imitating Americans yet, and there will have to be a big change in the psychology of everybody concerned before we do. This at least is one area where there’s no attempt to produce a milk-and-water copy of the American original. The undertaker is quite definitely regarded as a tradesman—no cachet attached to the job whatsoever; and in the country he is almost invariably the local builder as well. About embalming, the local man said he’s only had to embalm one corpse in ten years (the family was abroad and the funeral had to be delayed ten days), and there’s not the slightest indication that it is likely to grow in popularity. The whole mentality of burying here is that the dead should be disposed of with quiet respectability and the minimum of fuss and publicity. Decent and quiet, you might say.”
Further investigation convinced me that there were contradictory forces at work. There are those within the trade who are envious of their American counterparts, who would love nothing better than to transplant the American way to England’s unreceptive soil. They find themselves, however, up against the relentless English common sense and preference for the ordinary way of doing things. An English undertaker, speaking at a Dallas meeting of National Selected Morticians, explained the difficulty: “The chief reason why our average is low is the very fact that I have tried to tell you about British character—their desire for moderation. In our own selection room we display a full range of hardwood caskets, oak, walnut, and mahogany. Yet of the clients who can afford the best, 90 percent would choose the traditional coffin. They would say of the caskets, ‘Very beautiful, but too big, too elaborate! We will have an oak coffin like we had for grandfather!’ This is a problem that has concerned us for many years.… I must tell you, also, that our presentation must be accomplished without the use of cosmetics. Heavy cosmetizing would bring the strongest complaints from our clients. They tell us quite firmly, ‘I don’t want Mother touched up!’ ” He does, however, mention “an aspect of American funeral service which appears to be more readily accepted by our British public. All over the country funeral directors are building funeral homes, putting in private chapels and rest rooms.* They are not comparable with the beautiful buildings I have already seen this last week, but nevertheless, our men have recognized the need and are now beginning to provide the facilities.”
The American Way of Death Revisited Page 25