Work Stories Lost: The Dying Industry

Dearest Rachel –

I promised myself, at the beginning of the year, that when Daniel and I would go over to the folks’ for dinner, I would make an effort to record the conversations we would have when we gathered in the family room after the meal. The point of this was not so much to save a print of Dad’s voice – he’d lost a fair amount of the stentorian quality it had maybe ten years ago already, and in any event, I have (obviously) different reasons for wanting to save and reproduce yours as opposed to his – as to collect a record of some of the life stories that he had, and would tell us.

I didn’t exactly fail in keeping this promise, but I wasn’t particularly successful at it, either. Yes, I eventually forgot about it, for the most part, but that was also in part due to the Heisenberg effect. There were a couple of times where I could be suitably surreptitious in getting the recording going, but once he was aware that I had my phone out there for that purpose, he would be noticeably less forthcoming with said stories, by the simple dint of being aware of being observed and recorded. While our silences were always companionable, they weren’t what I had in mind when I would turn on the recording function, and so I rather let myself ‘forget’ to bother.

This means, of course, that I didn’t get much down in terms of the stories of his life experiences. I suppose I got more than I would have, if I hadn’t made the promise to myself, but in comparison to other, more uncodified promises to oneself (such as, say, my weight loss journey), this one took off about as well as most peoples’ New Year’s resolutions.

All of which is rather a pity, as he had some colorful tales to tell, and I wish I could remember them all. I do remember a few of them, and I suppose I should try to get them written down here and now, while I can still remember them, but I’m afraid they’re going to come out more like they’re done in pastel.

Bear in mind, most of these don’t have a particular point to them, because most of life doesn’t have a moral to it, to speak of. These things are going to go everywhere and nowhere, and I hope you don’t mind that fact. I’m also probably going to bemoan the fact that I don’t have all the details of this story or that; i’ll try to keep my complaints to a minimum, but it does bother me when I don’t have the ability to fill it all in properly. But what should I expect, when it’s not my story to tell?

***

I always found it funny that, for a man as ‘hail fellow well met’ as my dad, he would’ve taken an aptitude test in high school that suggested he was best suited for the funeral industry, of all things. Considering who (or perhaps, rather what) one deals with in that business, one would think that people skills would be rather a less necessary thing. Moreover, there’s something that I’ve always found amusing about how he took the word of a high school aptitude test as gospel when it came time for selecting his future career. Maybe it’s a generational thing; that wouldn’t be the sort of thing I would literally hang my future on, in terms of making a decision (although, in fairness, I based my career choice on the example of his cousin Dennis, and his success in the profession, completely unaware of certain soft skills that Dennis had that I didn’t). Ours was a more cynical and jaded age; we wouldn’t necessarily trust a mere aptitude test when it came down to making such decisions.

Of course, I could be oversimplifying how it happened, but this is the way it was related to me – or at least how I understood it – at this point, this is how I’m going to relate it to posterity in turn. So maybe, while some of the stories won’t be as colorful as they were in reality, this is one place where I’m actually going to be adding color for once. Don’t get used to it, though.

***

In any event, he enrolled in, and graduated from, Worsheim Mortuary College, and began a career in the funeral home industry, which, now that he’s about to become a client, seems particularly appropriate to relate about. Then again, things back then weren’t nearly as corporatized as they are now; funeral homes were still, at least on the surface, family businesses (which, given the fact that they are still called funeral homes, you might actually expect).

Of course, the ‘families’ that referred to him as their ‘son’ were decidedly different from his own. One of his better jobs shortly after graduating was working for a Jewish family; a niche market, if there ever was one, but necessary one, considering the differences in customs between Jew and gentile. To be sure, they performed funerals for both kinds of clients (no matter where you are, there are always more gentiles than Jews to serve), but were the go-to place for Jewish funerals in the area. Apparently, however, dad was able to ‘pass’ with the mere expedient of wearing a yarmulke. It didn’t hurt that he knew his way around the Bible; as long as he wasn’t required to read and speak Hebrew, he could really manage to fit in.

And when I talk about being referred to as their ‘son,’ this was the one operation where that was quite literally true. There may have been a certain level of jocularity involved in it, but this particular family treated him well, right down to the fact that, when he went to pick up a client, they insisted on letting him drive their Rolls-Royce, rather than use his own car (which, as you might expect for a fellow recently out of college, was more of a car in name only). He made a point of letting me know that that was a singular – and slightly scary – experience, to be entrusted with such a machine. I think he was more afraid of damaging it, than awed by it, because I don’t remember him telling me anything about what it was like to drive it.

However, this job didn’t last, for reasons he never really went into. It may just be that changing jobs frequently is more the norm than I experienced in my career, and he just moved on to another place, with no hard feelings between himself and the Jewish family he worked for.

He eventually found himself working for a guy named Ernie, and that’s the best way I could describe him. He was the quintessential ‘guy who knows a guy,’ in an industry – and a city in general – where who you knew was infinitely more important than what you knew, and this guy knew a lot of people. The man had connections with the Chicago police department (an unsurprisingly productive source of customers, when you think about it – even dealing with John Does could be lucrative, as the city would be billed back for them), as well, as most of the local Catholic parishes. If a widow wanted a Catholic burial for a husband, who was, let’s just say, not a regular attender, he could grease the skids between the grieving family and the parish priest. A C-note could cover a multitude of sins.

Ernie’s business afforded other, ahem, ‘comforts’ to certain widows as well as the assurances that their husbands would be committed to consecrated ground. Dad himself was offered a phone number on occasion – and while he invariably turned it down, he had colleagues that were not so scrupulous. Ernie himself seemed to think of it as all part of the service, although he respected Dad’s decision to not be a part of it, and didn’t make it a mandatory thing for his staff to do. Of course, for certain widows, and certain young men, it wasn’t as if Ernie had to push them together.

You might guess that, between the graft, corruption and other practices, Ernie’s lifestyle was particularly dissolute. However, the way Dad told it, this wasn’t all that uncommon in the industry. Dealing with death (and those who were dealing with their loved one’s death) on a routine basis could be draining, to say the least; it may be one of the reasons he got out of the business. I think one of his last straws was picking up his first infant client, but the details are, perhaps, understandably, fuzzy; it’s not like it would be the sort of thing you’d want to talk about.

Ernie himself was both a chainsmoker and a heavy drinker (although that was more common generally those days); he didn’t make it out of his forties, according to Dad – although that wasn’t until long after he was out of the business. There was one time when Dad caught him at his desk, well into a glass of whiskey, and having lit up three cigarettes practically at once, and asked to speak to his boss frankly. Having been given permission to do so, he pointed out what Ernie was doing, and suggested that he desperately needed a vacation.

Ernie acknowledged his situation, and brightened considerably at Dad’s suggestion; he even knew just what he needed. He proceeded to get on the phone, and called, in succession, his travel agent, a high mucky-muck in the police department, and somebody (I don’t remember who) who could arrange for, let’s just say, feminine entertainment for a room in Las Vegas with himself and his police department contact for the following four days. This was his idea of a vacation; maybe he planned to write it off on his taxes as a business expense.

Honestly, for all his concerns about how I turned into rather a cynic, it astonishes me that Dad didn’t become one orders of magnitude worse than myself, being steeped in the practices of this particular business. Then again, he got out of it fairly quickly, so there’s that – maybe he didn’t have enough time to get sufficiently jaded.

And speaking of time, honey, I had planned to tell more of Dad’s work stories that I could remember, but it seems I remember more details than I thought. I’ll save some of the stuff from Sears for another time; these take a while to scribe, after all, and I could use a break. I don’t think I’ll get any more out of him; it seems he’s survived the night, but he’s in no condition to speak, let alone tell stories. What I have in my head is all I’m going to get, and I’m going to have to get these out sooner rather than later, but until then, keep an eye on us all, and wish us luck. We’re going to need it.