By Mansfield Frazier
Funeral homes are for burying people… they’re not supposed to get buried. Nonetheless, that’s what recently happened as the final shovel of dirt was tossed onto the stinking corpse of the House of Wills, the funeral home that was one of the oldest and most venerated businesses in Cleveland’s black community back in the day.
The three-story hulking edifice that sat just south of Short Scovill on East 55th Street (directly across from the old East Tech High School where thousands of young people graduated from — myself included — before it was torn down and a new building erected back in the ‘70s) was iconic, and held a somewhat special meaning for me since my parents for years lived on the side street directly behind Wills.
This original location of the House of Wills has been shuttered for close to two decades, and the Harvard and East 147th Street location that has recently come under scrutiny from the Ohio Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors has also been closed for a number of years … which begs the question, how the hell does a funeral home go out of business? Did they run out of customers? Have black folks suddenly stopped dying?
What caused state authorities to accuse the heirs of the late J. Walter Wills (who founded the business over 100 years ago) of misappropriating more than $35,000 from customers, calling the once proud establishment of being “a danger of immediate and serious harm to the public”?
Rumor has it that this is another death that can be chalked up to heroin. Very reliable sources over the years have stated that Wills’ progeny, when they were not busy planting people in the ground, were slamming heroin “like mad Russians.” But, unlike the millions of working addicts who self-medicate each and every day of their lives and never run afoul of the law or overdose, the offspring of one of Cleveland’s premier businessmen couldn’t manage to hold it together, in spite of the fact they had access to a very substantial regular income. People were dropping like flies, and these clowns were trying to see how close they could come to killing themselves … without actually doing so.
To be sure the House of Wills isn’t the only funeral home that’s run into trouble in recent years; the once sleepy Ohio Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors has finally, in recent years, begun clamping down on funeral directors across the state who take money from folks to prepay funerals (so as not to be a burden on their families upon their deaths) and fail to do what the law mandates — which is to place the funds in a trust, annuity or an insurance policy within 30 days of receipt. Obviously some of these creepy characters have acquired expensive tastes and lifestyles.
But actually, it’s not all that difficult to understand how funeral directors come to see individuals and families as little more than victims asking to be fleeced, given Jessica Mitford’s blockbuster 1963 exposé The American Way of Death.
The masterwork exposed the abuses in the funeral home industry in the United States and was subjected to one of the first full-scale, brutal media counterattacks in American history. Mitford, “feeling that death had become much too sentimentalized, highly commercialized, and, above all, excessively expensive, published her research, which, she argues, documents the ways in which funeral directors take advantage of the shock and grief of friends and relatives of loved ones to convince them to pay far more than necessary for the funeral and other services, such as availability of so-called ‘grief counselors,’ a title she claims is unmerited.”
Cloaking itself in hidebound tradition, the funeral home industry fought back furiously (and successfully I might add), calling Mitford’s posits, among other things, un-American. There’s nothing like wrapping your wrongdoing under Old Glory to escape scrutiny.
To be fair the vast majority of funeral directors operate legitimate, ethical businesses, even if they are servicing families that elect to bury five grand in a cemetery somewhere. As for me, I’ve instructed my wife to send me on to my great reward (the direction I take upon my departure from this world, up or down, is still in dispute) as inexpensively as possible and donate the money to help some living people in need instead.
While it’s true that all I’ve been attempting to do with the remainder of my life is to make amends for all of those decades I spent as a wastrel and libertine, it’s also true that I’m trying to assure that I have a big funeral; I just don’t want it to be an expensive one.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.