Read Online Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking by Jessica Mitford - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jessica Mitford
Tags: Literary, Biography & Autobiography, Language Arts & Disciplines, Essay/s, Literary Collections, Journalism
Ads: Link
the Association runs between $100 and $200—for service which would cost non-members $450 to $1,000. “We don’t operate as a bargain basement or a discount house,” a board member emphasized. “We are able to reduce the cost to our members through the simple method of collective bargaining—but the funerals we arrange are in every way identical to those which would normally cost four times the amount.”
For the average, rational person who even in these days of “do it yourself” would balk at setting up a Monsieur Verdoux home crematorium in the backyard, and who would like to avoid such refinements as a quick-frozen trip to outer space, it would seem that the co-op funeral movement offers a most reasonable solution to the final return of dust to dust.
COMMENT
The title comes from a popular song of the 1950s: “Sixteen tons and what do you get?/Another day older and deeper in debt./St. Peter, don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go/I owe my soul to the company store.” The idea for the piece came from my husband, Bob Treuhaft. Among the clients of his law office were a number of trade unions, and from time to time it fell to him to deal with the estates of union members who had died. He began to notice, to his great irritation, that whenever the breadwinner of a family died, the hard-fought-for union death benefit, intended for the widow, would mysteriously end up in the pocket of an undertaker: whether the benefit was $1,000, or $1,200, or $1,500, that would be the exact sum charged for the funeral. This prompted him to suggest to the directors of the Berkeley Cooperative Society that they organize a funeral cooperative, patterned after one in Seattle which had flourished since the 1930s.
Bob became absolutely immersed in this curious project; as president of the newly formed Bay Area Memorial Association, he devoted his every waking hour to thinking up ways of spreading the message and expanding the membership. He pursued the few writers of our acquaintance, local journalists and English teachers, and tried to persuade them to do a magazine piece on the funeral industry and the emergent funeral cooperatives; nobody was interested. I was still mired in my book Daughters and Rebels , for which there was no publisher in sight. Why don’t you do the article? he urged. It would provide me with some comic relief and a needed break from the book, and could be useful to the funeral societies as part of their information kit. Reluctantly at first, but with growing enthusiasm as I began to see the fascination of the subject, I set to work.
By now I had an agent who was assiduously, though unsuccessfully, trying to place Daughters and Rebels . He offered “St. Peter” to half a dozen nationally known magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post, Coronet , the Atlantic , the Nation , all of which turned it down on the ground that the subject matter was too gruesome. It finally found a home in Frontier , a Los Angeles-based liberal Democratic monthly with a circulation of two thousand, for a fee of forty dollars.
Rereading this, my second published piece, together with the earlier “Trial by Headline,” I detect some improvement: it seems to flow along better, and the paragraphing makes more sense. But this piece, too, could have been vastly improved by interviews with some of the principals: undertakers, vault men, funeral society leaders. However, the quotations from the funeral press and the testimony of W. W. Chambers brighten it up somewhat.
When three years later I started writing The American Way of Death , “St. Peter” proved to be virtually an outline for the book; in fact, I recycled some of the material in the piece for use in the book, a form of self-plagiarism that I recommend, as one does not want to waste one’s better bits on the readership of one magazine, especially if that readership is as tiny as Frontier ’s. Ironically, to my extreme pleasure after the book was published the same
For the average, rational person who even in these days of “do it yourself” would balk at setting up a Monsieur Verdoux home crematorium in the backyard, and who would like to avoid such refinements as a quick-frozen trip to outer space, it would seem that the co-op funeral movement offers a most reasonable solution to the final return of dust to dust.
COMMENT
The title comes from a popular song of the 1950s: “Sixteen tons and what do you get?/Another day older and deeper in debt./St. Peter, don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go/I owe my soul to the company store.” The idea for the piece came from my husband, Bob Treuhaft. Among the clients of his law office were a number of trade unions, and from time to time it fell to him to deal with the estates of union members who had died. He began to notice, to his great irritation, that whenever the breadwinner of a family died, the hard-fought-for union death benefit, intended for the widow, would mysteriously end up in the pocket of an undertaker: whether the benefit was $1,000, or $1,200, or $1,500, that would be the exact sum charged for the funeral. This prompted him to suggest to the directors of the Berkeley Cooperative Society that they organize a funeral cooperative, patterned after one in Seattle which had flourished since the 1930s.
Bob became absolutely immersed in this curious project; as president of the newly formed Bay Area Memorial Association, he devoted his every waking hour to thinking up ways of spreading the message and expanding the membership. He pursued the few writers of our acquaintance, local journalists and English teachers, and tried to persuade them to do a magazine piece on the funeral industry and the emergent funeral cooperatives; nobody was interested. I was still mired in my book Daughters and Rebels , for which there was no publisher in sight. Why don’t you do the article? he urged. It would provide me with some comic relief and a needed break from the book, and could be useful to the funeral societies as part of their information kit. Reluctantly at first, but with growing enthusiasm as I began to see the fascination of the subject, I set to work.
By now I had an agent who was assiduously, though unsuccessfully, trying to place Daughters and Rebels . He offered “St. Peter” to half a dozen nationally known magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post, Coronet , the Atlantic , the Nation , all of which turned it down on the ground that the subject matter was too gruesome. It finally found a home in Frontier , a Los Angeles-based liberal Democratic monthly with a circulation of two thousand, for a fee of forty dollars.
Rereading this, my second published piece, together with the earlier “Trial by Headline,” I detect some improvement: it seems to flow along better, and the paragraphing makes more sense. But this piece, too, could have been vastly improved by interviews with some of the principals: undertakers, vault men, funeral society leaders. However, the quotations from the funeral press and the testimony of W. W. Chambers brighten it up somewhat.
When three years later I started writing The American Way of Death , “St. Peter” proved to be virtually an outline for the book; in fact, I recycled some of the material in the piece for use in the book, a form of self-plagiarism that I recommend, as one does not want to waste one’s better bits on the readership of one magazine, especially if that readership is as tiny as Frontier ’s. Ironically, to my extreme pleasure after the book was published the same
Similar Books
