Funeral Home Ambulances: A Conflict of Interest?

There was a time in America when funeral homes were the chief purveyor of  ambulance services, a phenomenon I have highlighted in two earlier posts [see references below]. Someone needing immediate hospital attention often would be transported there by the local undertaker who frequently issued artifacts such as paperweights to advertise the service.

Memphis blogger Vance Lauderdale sees this practice as a business conflict: “This is just so wrong.  It would be like morticians sitting in the emergency rooms, with an embalming kit in their laps.”  Among the Memphis undertakers to whom he was referring was Spencer Company.   Its scalloped glass weight advertised “Superior Ambulance Service.”  The stained glass windows at the rear would indicate that their vehicle also doubled as a hearse.

A fancier ambulance with a longer body and front mounted spare tire graced thescalloped paperweight from John V. May.  May, a lifelong resident of Chicago, opened his undertaking business in 1914 on Milwaukee Avenue.  As was often the case he and his family lived on the premises.  Many other morticians were completing with May for customers and his ambulance service was a way of setting himself apart and gaining a business advantage.

Like May, John A. Gentleman was an undertaker, opening his Omaha, Nebraska, funeral home in 1906.  In the 1920s the firm moved to the “Gold Coast” area of Omaha at 34th and Farnam Street and issued a paperweight featuring his ambulance.  Gentleman worked 50 years as an undertaker, before retiring in 1956 and selling his business to new owners who kept his name on the funeral home, one still in operation.

An acclaimed African-American business in Memphis was T. H. Hayes and Sons Funeral Home, run by Thomas Henry Hayes, his wife, and two sons.  The father founded it in 1902.  It is said that his range of services were affordable to the working class as well as to the elite.  In addition to his ambulance Hayes had ten rigs, five hearses, carriages, and 12 horses in his stables.  When the funeral home closed in the early 1970s it was acclaimed Memphis oldest African- American owned business. 

One of the few vehicles whose make was identified on an advertising artifact was this Holmes Sedan from the Ludlow Ambulance Service.  The Holmes was a popular air-cooled American automobile built from 1918 to 1923 in Canton, Ohio. The car was famous for its louvered front grill that included a series of horizontal slits bringing in air any.  An embezzlement by a top company executive in 1921 sealed the fate of the company founded by Engineer Arthur Holmes and it failed in 1923.

Perhaps the King Ambulance weight does not belong in this list.  It was truly a doctor and hospital-based service, unaffiliated with any funeral home.  Founded in 1886 and one of the first physicians exchanges and nurses registries in San Francisco, it was housed in a renovated Victorian mansion in the center city.  In 1954 King merged with American Ambulance.  The resulting King-American Ambulance Company has established itself as the longest operating private ambulance service in San Francisco and the West Coast.

The Peoples Undertaking Company, a Dallas, Texas, business that advertised as the home of the “Peoples Burial Association,” issued this celluloid item that is described as a “paper clip and hook.”  It occurs to me that It also might have been hung on a Christmas tree as an ornament, although it lacks a certain festive flavor.  I have been unable to find any information on this establishment.  The building shown here for 500 South Good Street appears to have been replaced.

With this celluloid pocket mirror we appear to return to an ambulance clearly being part of a funeral home business, this one in Norfolk, Virginia.  It is from L. R. Cromer and Company that appears to be the forerunner of a still extant funeral business in the that city.  

Often in small town America, even into mid-20th Century, the undertaker also was a furniture dealer.  Makes sense. The funeral director was buying caskets, a kind of furniture, why not add tables and chairs?  Bayermann & Krug of Racine, Wisconsin, combined those businesses and added an ambulance service.  They issued a clothes brush for their clients that up close reveals a vehicle with a red cross in the window motoring along.  

Last month I did a post on paperweights that were issued by coffin makers to advertise their works.  One outfit particularly known and collected for their casket and animal form weights has been Crane & Breed.  At that time I was unaware that this Cincinnati company also built hearses — hearses that could double as ambulances, as in the photo here.  This model was described thus:  “The body is painted bronze green and the running gear carmine. The interior is finished in solid mahogany with an elevated cot on rollers. The vehicle is fitted with the best rubber tires and in winter will be heated with carbon stoves.”   That elevated cot, of course, could accommodate a patient on the way to the hospital or a body going to the graveyard. 

The hearse/ambulance automobile hybrid lasted some 70 years.  Until as late as 1979 hearses in the U.S. could be combination coaches that also served as ambulances.  In the late 1970s, however, stricter Federal standards were decreed for ambulances.  The hybrids were unable to meet them and manufacturing was discontinued.  In many smaller communities even today ambulances in vehicles distinct from hearses continue to be the business of the local undertaker.

Note: My first article on this subject, “Where to Buddy?  Hospital or Graveyard?” was posted during July 2009. It presented six paperweights and two pocket mirrors.  A second, called  “Chasing the Ambulance:  But Wait…Is It a Hearse?” followed in May 2013.  That one displayed ten weights.    

The Coffin on the Desktop Was a Grave Reminder

Perhaps the most unusual industry to favor paperweights as a method of advertising their wares was the casket-makers.  While the idea of contemplating a sarcophagus as one goes about the desk work of the day may strike a millennial as very odd, at the turn of the last century it was not an uncommon sight for a clerk to hold his papers down with a miniature coffin. 

One company, Crane & Breed, principally may have been responsible for this phenomenon, creating a whole spectrum of paperweights to bring attention to its caskets.  The history of Crane & Breed can be traced to a New York inventor named Almond Dunbar Fisk who designed and patented a coffin that resembled an Egyptian sarcophagus with sculpted arms and a glass window for viewing the face of the deceased — and allowing the corpse to look out.

Holding the rights to the Fisk burial case, Martin Hale Crane joined with Abel Denison Breed to manufacture this beauty from their Cincinnati coffin works.  An early Crane & Breed paperweight replicated in miniature Fisk’s design.  A subsequent company weight, while keeping the Egyptian motif, eliminated the face cavity.

Crane & Breed Casket Co. went out of business in 1973, but, as one historian has put it:  “They’re mainly remembered for their bronze novelty paperweights which were produced as a side-line during the late 19th and early 20th Century.”   That may be because those weights are the company’s only products not currently below ground and out of sight.  Some C&B artifacts were in shapes other than coffins.   Among them were a camel, the “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” monkeys, and other animals.  All had the company brand on the base.

This aggressive advertising by Crane & Breed appears tohave spurred many other coffin makers into a similar merchandising strategy.  The Orange Star Casket Company seems to have faded into the mists of history except for its paperweight.  Dating from the early 20th Century, its weight is a heavy metal lion that comes up or sale from time to time on auction sites.

By contrast, the Elgin Metal Casket Company, represented here by a coffin paperweight, was the resting place for many well known Americans.   Former President Calvin Coolidge was interred in one in Plymouth Notch Cemetery in North Hampton, Massachusetts.   The body of John F. Kennedy was transported from Dallas to Washington in an Elgin casket after his assassination in 1963. That firm, one that began as a division of the Elgin (Illinois) Silver Plate Company in 1892 is now owned by Gulf & Western and operates from a plant in Indiana.

Today the Boyertown Burial Casket Company is reputed as the second largest casket company in the world.   It was formed in the late 1800s after undertakers in the Pennsylvania city were having trouble getting caskets for burials.  Bodies were piling up without a decent place to lay them.  Boyertown businessmen joined together to establish the firm.   The Boyertown paperweight shown above doubles as a repository for business cards.  I for one would be somewhat disconcerted if a executive reached into a coffin to give me his card — maybe expecting a pirate “black spot” to come out of it.

Isaac A. Baum, the founder of the Ideal Couch & Casket Company of Rochester, New York, worked in a variety of occupations until in 1883 he found his true calling was manufacturing caskets.  Over time, he created and sold the National Casket Company and the National Couch & Casket Company before buying a major share of the Ideal Couch & Casket Company.   That firm created a fancy glass paperweight illustrating a couch upon which the embalmed could be laid as if on a bed.  Underneath was the coffin itself, providing an appropriate stand.  The reference of the weight to “Lautner” is to William Lautner who had patented both the cover for a casket and the box itself.

The Nunda Casket Company took an entirely different marketing strategy.  Instead of reminding its customers of their ultimate need for such a box, it emphasized the positive in providing customers with a real four leaf clover and the admonition, “Good Luck.”  The base of this object carries a note about what it terms a “Lucky Clover Executive Paperweight.”   It explains that the clover was grown in Balboa Heights, Panama Canal Zone by one C. T. Daniels.  Daniels, it claimed, “has solved Mother Nature’s secret of productivity, an achievement unparalleled in the history of horticulture.”  Just to grow four-leaf clovers?

Our last example is from the Gate City Coffin Company with a strange message.  It shows a bulldog standing on two coffins behind a display of what may be embalming fluid.  The slogan — and the reason for the presence of a canine — is “A ‘Dog-On’ Good Line.”  The origins and history of this firm also has been obscured over time.  Like Crane & Breed that opened his post, we must rely on the artifacts to remind us of the manufacturers who gave us such products.

There they are, ten examples of how the casket makers hoped to keep the attention of the public by gracing an office desk with a replica of a final resting place.  In the words of the poet Thomas Grey, these paperweights remind us that: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”