Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood by Allan Abbott & Greg Abbott

Author:Allan Abbott & Greg Abbott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw
Publisher: Linden Publishing
Published: 2015-06-14T14:00:00+00:00

Abbott & Hast’s Ford truck, used for transporting veterans to VA cemeteries.

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Expanding Our Business

We rented hearses every year for Halloween parties, birthdays, and weddings. Our most unusual hearse rental was to a group of guys who wanted our driver to take them to a hospital to pick up their friend as a joke. He had jumped off the roof of his friend’s house trying to land in the swimming pool but was about two feet short. The man didn’t quite appreciate the humorous side of the gesture, especially when our driver took a detour through a cemetery, as requested.

In the ’70s, the California Department of Transportation created a dedicated carpool lane on the Santa Monica Freeway. Intended to promote ride sharing, this “diamond lane” was only for vehicles carrying multiple passengers. Many people viewed it as discriminatory, so they formed a group of volunteers to drive in the diamond lane with only one occupant per car, in violation of the law. They hired me to drive a hearse leading the procession, with my stipulation that one of their volunteers ride in the hearse with me. The rest of them received citations, and they didn’t achieve their objective of changing the law.

That same year, a funeral director went to court to explain that he had been given an erroneous ticket for using the diamond lane. He pointed out that there was nothing in the law that said his passenger had to be alive, so he was found not guilty. His argument worked, but it didn’t work so well for several pregnant women who claimed they had passengers as well.

While movie rentals were a nice supplement, the core of our business was still accommodations. A mortuary has a variety of ways to advertise its business, but a funeral car livery service doesn’t. We were well known in our local industry, but we needed to get more statewide exposure. A trade journal published in LA called Mortuary Management had subscribers all over the United States, especially on the West Coast. Many industry suppliers, like casket manufacturers, funeral car builders, and embalming fluid chemical companies, ran half- or full-page ads in this magazine.

We weren’t sure how effective a half-page display ad would be, and we couldn’t afford one anyway, so Ron got the publisher, William Berg, to let us run a series of business-card-size ads. This provided us with great exposure because every third or fourth page had our small ad on it, featuring headshots of Ron and me with the captions: “Call Abbott & Hast for hearse service,” “Call Abbott & Hast for limousine service,” and so on. This was at a time when magazines set up their pages with a cut-and-paste format, so it worked out well for their art director, since many page layouts contained gaps that could be filled with a repetition of our many small ads.

Each year at the state conventions we attended, funeral directors would approach us asking if we owned the magazine because of our numerous ads. In spite of our assurance that we didn’t, it was assumed by many that we did.

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