The Wit and Wisdom of Clem Zablocki

As a Milwaukee reporter,  I like many of my colleagues thought of Clement J. Zablocki (1912-1983) as that stocky ethnic Congressman from the Polish,  Serbian, Croat, Ukrainian, Hungarian,  Czech, Slovak, etc.,  South Side of Milwaukee.   I had covered a speech of his right after the aborted Cuban Invasion when he assured his audience that the U.S. would invade again.   In short, my original opinion was not high.

I first caught sight of his wit on the first day I ever spoke to him directly.  He called on a snowy early March day in Milwaukee.  Could I come over right away to talk about a job?

“I am just getting into the shower,”  I replied.  “Will there be time for that?”

“It all depends on how dirty you are,”  Zablocki quipped.

There would be many other instances of Clem’s wit over the years.

In 1962 during visit by President Kennedy to Milwaukee,  his motorcade from the airport was delayed at a intersection in the South Side.  Zablocki was seated next to him.  From the crowd a man shouted:  “Hey Clem, who’s your friend?”

Kennedy heard the jibe.  “Clem, is this your district? “ the President asked.

“Hell,”  Mr.  President,”  he replied, “most of these people are my relatives.”

With Milwaukee being crazy for parades,  the congressman often was asked to ride in an open car through city streets, waving to the crowd.   At one of the frequent delays,  a bystander shouted to him:  “Zablocki, you bum,  they won’t give me Social Security.”   It got very quiet in the vicinity.

Unfazed by the attack,  Clem shouted back:  “Of course not,  you’ve got to go to work first.”  The crowd convulsed in laughter.

On another occasion while we were doing the perfunctory sidewalk campaigning he was willing to do just once per  election campaign,  he left off shaking hands of passersby and headed into a local department store to buy a pair of shoes.   Helplessly, I  followed.

It was difficult to steer voters to him amid the racks of clothes but as a faithful spear-carrying campaign coordinator,  I tried.  “Would you like to meet your congressman,” I would whisper conspiratorially to housewives busying themselves in the undies department.  Most just looked at me.

At last I came across a rather flamboyantly dressed lady who replied:  “Oh, Zablocki,  I have never met Zablocki.  I would love to meet him.”

Just then the congressman, fresh from shoe buying, hove into view.  “There’s a constituent over here who is dying to meet you,”  I told him.   With a politician’s instinct for a voter,  Zablocki followed.

As soon as she saw him,  her face fell in disappointment.  “Oh, you’re such a short man.”  she cried,  “My first husband was a short man.  I don’t like short men.”

Zablocki was quick to reply:  “Lady,” said he, “I just want your vote,  I don’t want to marry you.”

In his congressional duties Clem could be insightful.   One of his colleagues in the House,  Congressman Clarence Long, was well known in the House for his oddball behavior and opaque speeches.   But he boasted a Ph.D. and liked to be addressed as “Doctor Long.”   

“He is living proof,” Zablocki asserted frequently, “that individuals can be educated beyond their capacity.”

Clem also shared the general feeling in the House that the members of the Senate,  usually referred to as “the other body,”  had attitudes of superiority not validated in performance.   He frequently was a House member of a conference committee on a bill with the Senate and found it frustrating that Senators who had not read the legislation spent inordinate time pontificating about it.  

“The problem with senators,”  Clem said, “is that too many of them get out of bed,  look into the bathroom mirror, and say, ‘Good morning Mr. President.”

Later when I had graduated from his personal staff to being his subcommittee director,  we traveled in 1970 with two other congressmen to Latin America to review military assistance and other matters.  One of the two was Jim Fulton,   a wealthy Republican from Pennsylvania with a reputation for eccentricity.  It also was whispered that he was gay.

During a visit to CINCSOUTH,  the U.S. military presence in the Panama Canal Zone,  which then was still firmly in American hands,  we were housed overnight in the officer guest quarters.  As chairman,  Zablocki was given a room of his own.  I was to stay in a double room with Fulton.

The implications were clear.  When the story got around that I had stayed the night with Fulton, innocent as it probably would be, the ribbing would have been merciless.  I  went to Clem: “They’ve put me in with Fulton.”

He saw the problem immediately. “There’s an extra bed in my room.  You can stay with me,” he said.  I breathed easier.  Clem went off to explain the change to Fulton, claiming that he needed me to help with a speech he was to give the next day.

In matter of fact I went out for a late night of dinner and drinking with an old friend who was stationed in the Canal Zone.   When I rolled in about 2 a.m.,  somewhat unsteady,  Zablocki was in bed asleep and the room was pitch black.   Trying to sneak in quietly,  I stumbled over an end table and sent an ashtray skittering over the wooden floor.

Out of the darkness came a familiar voice:  “Maybe you should have stayed with Fulton.” 

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Hearse/Ambulances — One More Time

                                

For more than a decade, I have been struck by the variety of paperweights and similar items issued by the funeral homes of America that depicted the kind of vehicles used by those practitioners.  My particular fascination has been for those early horseless carriages that undertakers employed to do double duty — using them both as ambulances and hearses, a practice later outlawed by federal law.  Four prior posts [see Note] have featured 36 such artifacts but new examples continue to appear.  The result is a fifth post on an old subject.

Dual-purpose transport preceded the motorized era.  Shown here is an ashtray bearing the photo of a horse-drawn hearse for the McCreary-Horner Undertaking Company. But looked at closely one sees a red cross in a rear window — the universal symbol of an ambulance.  Because the company provided a telephone number but no address, it has been impossible to find out further information on this funeral service.

The paperweight that follows is a variant on one featured in an earlier post.  The earlier version seemingly was coy about the core business of Ziegenhein Bros. of St. Louis, Missouri. It showed a vehicle that has many attributes of a hearse but gave its purpose as “L. and U.” -- to be understood as livery and undertaker. The second version makes clear that the Ziegenheins also were running an “auto  ambulance service,” adding that it was available day and night.  The Ziegenhein family has continued to run a funeral business in St. Louis.

Celluloid pocket mirrors, as the one shown here, allowed a wider range of colors and sharper images than paperweights.  It was issued by Tetley, Sletten & Dahl of La Cross, Wisconsin. This company was begun about 1905 by Theodore K. Dahl who later took on partners Tetley and Sletten.  Upon their departure Dahl became the sole owner and operated it until his death in 1935.  Thereafter it was managed by his daughter, Esther, one of few women funeral directors, until her death in 1959.

Carroll & Mast featured a light colored vehicle that might be taken for a single purpose ambulance. The label on the paperweight terms it a “motor ambulance.” Look closely, however, at the rear window of the vehicle.  It displays a stained glass motif very common on the hearses of the day.  If one of these showed up in the neighborhood onlookers could never be sure if it was headed to the hospital or the burying grounds. 

With $200 in cash and a blueprint D.H. Cummings of Richmond, Indiana, in 1917 launched the Lorraine Car Company, also known as the Motor Hearse Corp. of America. The blueprint was of a hearse, and the funeral car trade was the focus of Cummings' new business.  By 1919 the company offered a large line of both conservative 12-column carved-panel hearses, as the one shown here, and more modern limousine-style coaches.  The owner was forced by an economic turndown in 1921 to sell to another Richmond manufacturer who three years later also folded.

At the beginning of the 20th Century many black Memphians began establishing their own businesses. First among them, the oldest African American business in Memphis, was T. H. Hayes and Sons Funeral Home.  It was founded and operated by Thomas Henry Hayes, working with his wife, and their two sons.  Hayes’ range of services were affordable, it is said, to the working classes as well as to elites.  Hayes featured both horse drawn and motor hearses, like the one shown here on a weight.

Sitting in the driveway of the Wilson Funeral Directors of Amsterdam, New York, is  yet another vehicle that might have been used as an ambulance.  Edwin L. Wilson, designating himself a “funeral director and embalmer,” in 1925 advertised that he offered automobile equipment.”  A suggestion that Wilson also provided ambulance services was his promise of a “lady attendant.”  She might be appreciated by someone on the way to a hospital; less so on the way to the cemetery.

The Stormer Funeral Home was founded in 1904 by Aaron M. Stormer in Quincy, Illinois.  He later brought his son, Coley, into the business.  By glancing to the lower left of the company’s advertising paperweight, a motor vehicle is visible that likely is one of the Stormer fleet of vehicles. 

 The hearse/ambulance motor hybrid lasted some 70 years.  Until as late as 1979 hearses could be combination coaches. Stricter Federal standards were decreed for ambulances.  The hybrids were unable to meet those requirements and manufacturing was discontinued.  In many smaller communities even today, however, ambulance services continue to be the business of the local undertaker.  The distinction between their vehicles is no longer at issue.

Note:  Prior posts on ambulance/hearses and paperweights have appeared on this blog as Where to Buddy?  Hospital or Graveyard?, July 17, 2009;  Chasing the Ambulance:  But Wait….Is it a Hearse?, May 24, 2013; Funeral Home Ambulances:  A Conflict of Interest? November 5, 2016;  and Wrapping Up Hearse Ambulances, September 1, 2018.