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High School student Todd Van Beck, right, poses with his award-winning science fair project, which explained embalming. In this photo, Van Beck said, "I'm desperately trying to look like a funeral director, mature and trustworthy and scholarly and wise."
Getting a Job at a Funeral Home
So I go into Omaha to see Bigsby, who was very nice, but he didn't have anything. So he said, "I'll call Lloyd Jutte down at Crosby's; maybe he needs something." So I got down to Crosby's and Jutte said, "No, we don't need anything, so let's call Dick Denton at NP Swanson." So I walk over to NP Swanson and he doesn't need help. Dick says, "Let me call George Billerbeck out at Gentlemen's." And George, like all the others, became a good friend, but George didn't need any help either.
I walk out; I've just about done the whole circuit. I walk down the road and here's this huge red brick mansion with ivy hanging on it and it's old -- old. It looked like Dracula's castle. The place was just spectacular on the inside, but it looked like crap on the outside. And it said "Heafey & Heafey" in big neon pink letters.
I had seen their ad in the Yellow Pages. My dad had been in the veteran's hospital in Omaha for six months, and while visiting I had looked at the Omaha Yellow Pages, because everywhere I would go I would look at the funeral home ads. I learned a lot about who were the gameplayers in funeral service. Even to this day, I can tell you who are the main funeral homes in any big city, because I still look at the Yellow Pages.
I'd seen this ad, Heafey & Heafey, with woodcuts of the two funeral homes, Farnam Street and South Omaha. The Farnam Street woodcut looked like this place was in the middle of a forest, with a big house with a tower on it and in the back there was this other building which turned out to be the carriage house. But it was kind of a spooky, old, medieval kind of castle-looking thing.
I ring the doorbell and out comes this little man with a little mustache who looks like the banker on the Monopoly board. I walk into the funeral home and it's right out of the 1930s: mahogany paneling, maroon carpet, maroon drapes, maroon sofas. The guy I was talking to was Con P. Heafey. His real name was Cornelius, but they called him Con. He was a fascinating human being; he helped Father Flanagan with Boys Town.
I worked there for quite a while, and my main memory of him is that I was afraid of him. But he gave me a chance, and for that I respect his memory. He was probably one of the most unlikely people to take a chance on a kid, because by the time I met him he was 74 years old. I was a reckless, immature 16-year-old who thought he knew everything.
I threw myself into that job in a frenzy. I never took a day off; I was at the mortuary 24 hours, seven days a week. I didn't want to miss a call.
ICFM: You were there 24 hours a day?
VAN BECK: I lived there, in the funeral home. I refused to take a day off because I didn't want to miss anything. I was able to embrace funeral service finally, and I loved every minute of it. I found that I never folded up, no matter the type of call we got. It was never, "Oh, my, this is a 2-month-old. Oh, I can't do this."
ICFM: But what sorts of things were you doing as a 16-year-old?
VAN BECK: I was washing a lot of cars. I was doing a lot of mowing, trimming roses. I was putting on my suit, standing at the front door and answering the door. And they'd take me out on funerals, they'd let me haul flowers -- and they let me go into the embalming room.
I was there maybe a week when we had a call and I could hear the guy downstairs putting instruments out on the table -- the embalming room was right below the office gathering area. But I thought, "Jeez, I can't go down there."
Mr. Heafey walked by and said, "What the hell are you doing?"
And I said, "Well, I'm just, uh ... "
And he said, "Go downstairs and learn something about embalming!" And that's how he was, like the guy who would teach you to swim by throwing you in the deep end of the pool.
The first night I was there, in the room where I lived, the phone was on a table across the room from the bed, and I thought, "I'll never hear the phone." The phone cord was long enough so that I could take it across the room about three-fourths of the way, so I set it on a chair as close to my bed as I could.
And sure enough, that first night, maybe 10 after 4 in the morning, I heard the phone ringing. I was lying there in bed and finally realized. "Oh, my god; it's a death call." I jumped up, and I'd forgotten I'd moved the phone across the room. I ran across the room, tripped on the phone cord, pulled the phone off the chair and the phone hit the floor. I picked up the phone and said, "Heafeys."
There was a long pause. It was Mr. Heafey, and this was the No. 1 question he asked me through all the years I worked for him: "What the hell are you doing?"
"I knocked the phone off the thing."
"OK. We have a call."
He was the one who took me from the child's fantasy world of funeral service and baptized me in the adult's "this is hardball" version: This is no longer the funeral home in the barn, and this is no longer sending out for catalogues from chemical companies. You're on the floor of an actual, functioning mortuary, and these people walking in the front door are not your playmates. These are people who are being knocked on their ass because somebody died.
And he was marvelous; he taught me, even through the fear I had of him. When we would do a funeral, he was able to orchestrate things so that nothing went wrong. He was like Toscanini conducting a fine piece of music. He would move people around with hand signs and nods of his head -- he hardly ever said a word. You weren't allowed to run, you couldn't even walk quickly during a funeral, because he knew that would disturb the family, they would think something was not going right. You couldn't slam a car door, because that was too abrupt. Everybody was called "Mr." at his funerals. He was devoutly old school and I learned to respect him.
ICFM: You were in still high school at this point. What were things like for you back home?
VAN BECK: When I was in high school, every report I ever wrote was on funerals.
ICFM: What did your teachers think of that?
VAN BECK: I'll say this with all candor and honesty, and you can print this: I think my teachers were totally disinterested in me, and not without due cause. There were two, though, who helped me greatly. Margaret Russell taught me how to write -- which I do a lot of today -- and Aletha LeRette taught me how to read. Nobody taught me mathematics' I'm terrible in math; algebra is beyond me. How I got through chemistry -- well, I'll tell you that story later.
But the majority of the teachers I think looked at me as difficult, as a loser. Not because of the funeral stuff -- that contributed to it, I'm sure -- but because I was a ne'er do well. I was 6 foot 4 in the sixth grade, weighed 180 pounds. I was nothing to look at; I was awkward. I tried too hard to be part of the group.
I detested sports. I was very interested in church work though. I went to church all the time, not because I was a Bible banger -- I just liked the people, and it was like a funeral home. It was reverential. It was quiet and it was dignified. I loved the church so much, when I was in school, I mowed the yard and scooped the snow for the church for free; that was my contribution.
So I was weird; I've always been different. And ultimately, in a high school where your class has 72 students in it, the pets will always be the pets, and the average will always be the average, and the losers are always going to be the losers. They just got into the habit of treating me like a loser, and I understand that today.
In my junior year, though, I met a girl from Omaha who came out for our bicentennial. I was a bigwig in the bicentennial, involved in doing stuff for the town. She and I became an item, had this hot, torrid romance. I was the envy of the whole school, because I got to go to Omaha for dates. I wasn't stuck out in Iowa stealing watermelons and going to the drive-in movie. I got to go into the city with a city chick and go to a movie at the Cinerama at Indian Hills.
And I didn't give a damn what my teachers thought anyway, because I wasn't in need of their opinion -- at all. I was interested in funerals. I didn't care what those people thought about me, because they didn't know piddly-squat about what I was interested in. I was 16 years old, and I had a job in Omaha -- "I'm not in this podunk town anymore, I'm in Omaha working for Heafey & Heafey." The funeral home was my escape from feeling like a loser.
I still battle with those feelings today. Truthfully, I still can't believe I get invited to do these conventions. I give these talks and I've got people laughing and crying, and I'm giving them ideas and I'm thinking, "ME? I'm the kid from Iowa. Come on, you could have Earl Grollman, you could have Wolfelt. You've got Van Beck up here?"
You know what though? I've seen speakers who walk in and think they're the cock of the walk, and many of them go down in flames. I'd rather have the Will Rogers approach, this sense of "Aw, shucks."
ICFM: Back to high school. You told me once that you embalmed a pig.
VAN BECK: That was when I went to the science fair. I decided people didn't understand embalming. I was always good with my hands, with creative things, and I could build stuff. This sounds arrogant, and I don't mean it that way at all, but I just knew if I did a science fair entry on embalming, I would take the first prize. Because people may go, "eww, eww," but they are fascinated by it.
So I decided I was going to embalm this pig, and I didn't have to wait too long for a pig to die in Iowa. Red Peterson called me; a sow had rolled over and killed 12 of her litter -- happens all the time. We eviscerated the pig and went down to the drugstore and bought straight formalin. We just saturated this pig.
I made this big chart and an embalming machine -- which I didn't use to embalm the pig, but I didn't tell the judges that. In the picture of me with the machine, I'm desperately trying to look like a funeral director, mature and trustworthy and scholarly and wise. And I look like a freakin' geek, an 18-year-old kid. But I walked away with the science fair prize, and I got written up in the Iowa Funeral Directors' newsletter.
ICFM: Tell us about your college years.
VAN BECK: I went to college, but again, I did that backwards. I was a terrible student. When I graduated from high school there were 72 in my graduating class, and I graduated 71st. And the guy who graduated beneath me was put in an institution the next year, so that's the company that I was academically keeping.
You know, the school used to have meetings about me where they told my parents: "Not only is your son inordinately interested in this bizarre line of work, but he's not going to make it through mortuary college! There's no way. Your son will never get through chemistry. He can't get through general math in our high school. Microbiology? He can't get through biology in high school. Anatomy? Physiology? Pathology? Embalming? Restorative art? My god!"
In seminars, I tell people this, because I don't want people respecting me for something I'm not. I want people to respect me for who I am, and who I am is the sum total of my experiences. I say, "But losers are in disguise a lot of times. And 30 years later, I'm the president of the mortuary college they said I couldn't get through."
ICFM: But you didn't go straight to mortuary school?
VAN BECK: I went from high school to a junior college out in western Nebraska and got a job at a funeral home. In school, I just wasted time. I passed maybe four courses in a year. All I was interested in was running the ambulance and doing the funerals.
And then I moved back to Omaha. I don't think they kicked me out, I think I just left. I applied to the University of Nebraska and didn't tell them that I'd actually gone to another school, so they just took me as a freshman. So I spent a year there and I blew that off, too.
I was in a foiled romance. I was in love with this Jewish girl in Omaha whose father was a physician. He never met me, hated my guts just because I was a gentile. Then, when he found out I was studying to be a funeral director -- oh, my god!
Then I went to Lincoln, Nebraska, to work for the summer, and I applied to the New England Institute in Boston. I applied because I saw the catalogue and was very impressed that they did their anatomical dissection at the Harvard Medical School. I remember thinking, "Hmmm, I could tell people I'm going to Harvard."
So I went to Boston for two years, and that was where I emerged. I began to lay aside childish, adolescent things. I was still obsessed with funerals, but now also academically performing, because I knew that if I didn't pull this off, I wasn't in.
CFM: Why hadn't you gone directly to a mortuary school?
VAN BECK: In the state where I was living, you had to have two years of college before you went to mortuary school. So I went to two years of college -- I just couldn't use any of the credits! I mean, I was there. But NEI didn't give a damn -- they took me anyway.
And this is important: I met a man by the name of Dr. Edgar N. Jackson, who was on the staff of the mortuary school. He wrote books called "Understanding Grief," "You and Your Grief," "For the Living," "Coping with the Crises in your Life," "Telling a Child About Death." Edgar Jackson was truly a pioneer. He predated Elizabeth Kubler-Ross by 12 years, and anybody who is anybody in the area of thanotology and grief work, if they're truthful, will acknowledge the debt we all owe to this man.
I had seen his name, but little did I know that his tutelage of me would be life-affirming, life-changing. He was able to look at me and say, "You're not a loser." He didn't use those words, but that was the message. I was not the same person when I graduated from mortuary school in '73. He was the one who first planted the idea that I had gifts I wasn't even aware of -- that I could write, that I had a gift of speaking and could persuade people of the value of funerals, of ritualization.
Dr. Jackson lived in Corinth, Vermont. In the 1940s, his 18-month-old son had tipped over a canning pot his wife was boiling peaches in and scalded himself to death. It was the most hideous death, because he didn't die right away. And Dr. Jackson, who was a Methodist minister, told me he had to write the book "Understanding Grief," which to me is a classic.
He was a healer. He was a lovely man. He would invite me out for the weekend when I wasn't working at the funeral home. We used to go to farm auctions in Vermont. And I'm telling you, we would hit these damn auctions at six o'clock in the bloody morning on a Saturday and we would stay there all day long, and he wouldn't bid on a thing.
At the end of the day, the auctioneer's got a great big wooden box with everything he hasn't been able to sell. It's called the treasure box, and you bid on the whole box, and that's what Jackson would bid on. He might get that box for 25 cents. We'd get in the car and drive home with this crap.
One time, I'd just had it, and I said, "I don't get this at all, Dr. Jackson." I still hadn't figured him out. He was a born teacher, very insightful. He gets a big smile on his face and says, "Why, this is what life's like. I bought this for nothing -- look at all this junk. But you know what? If I'm patient, and if I weigh through each piece and discard what I don't want, there always is a treasure in there somewhere."
Just before he died in '94, I went to see him. He'd had a stroke and was in bad shape, but there were angels flying all over that room. He was a very fascinating man. Meeting him was a turning point.
I did very well in mortuary school; I graduated with high honors. In the meantime, I'd met a girl from Winthrop, east of Boston. We fell in love, or what a 22-year-old would think love is, and got married. I'd met a funeral director at the National Funeral Directors Convention in Boston who offered me a job for $19,000 a year, so in 1973, we moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Todd W. Van Beck is president of the Commonwealth Institute of Funeral Service in Houston, Texas. He is a licensed funeral director and embalmer and is dean of two colleges of ICFA University, the Funeral and Commemorative Services College and the new College of Embalming and Restorative Arts.. He can be reached at (281) 873-0262 and at tvanbeck@yahoo.com.
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