My father was a child of the Depression. His name was John Wallace Moss, but he hated “John.” He always went by Wally or JW. Even my sister and I called him JW.
In high school in Oakland, Calif., he was a good student and the catcher on the baseball team. He got a job at a local grocery store, but he didn’t get paid. Instead, he was allowed to take home any bruised fruits and vegetables, plus butcher trimmings. His mother used this food to make stews and pies. After high school, he couldn’t afford to go to a university, so he went to the local junior college. He especially liked the sciences — chemistry, biology, anatomy.
JW went to the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science and became a mortician. A funeral director. An embalmer. There were always jobs in the death business.
When WWII came along, he was drafted into the Navy. Because of his education in the body sciences, he was sent to military medic/corpsman school in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. He was deployed to the Pacific and went into Okinawa with the Marines. He never — ever — talked about what he did on Okinawa other than to say all he did was hand out aspirin. Right.
What JW did do was play cribbage and pinochle — for money. He was good, too. He sent home enough to buy our first house.
My father did have a fantastic ability to tell a joke. He taught himself to play golf. The mortuary he worked for paid his dues at a local country club. He also joined the Kiwanis Club where he was president in 1952 (His slogan: “The will to do in ’52.”) He also joined the Elks Club and became the exalted ruler. We got to go to Elks’ conventions in Chicago, Dallas and Miami. We would never have gone to these big cities otherwise.
JW knew he probably should have taken advantage of the GI Bill to finish his degree and go to medical school. But like so many other men of the so-called greatest generation, he not only didn’t want to talk about the war, he just wanted to get on with life: come home, get a job, get married to the girl he left behind, have some children, play some golf, mow the lawn.
So my sister Cathy and I grew up in fairly typical 1950s style, except when someone asked us what our father did. When we told them, the response was usually something like “ew,” “gross” or “yuck.”
But to us he was our father, JW, who told jokes, loved our mother and made a great martini.
The Kiwanis, Elks and country clubs were outlets for his gregarious nature. He certainly couldn’t be that way in a funeral home. We were always included in all the social activities of his extracurricular life. When he came home from work, he didn’t talk about the cases he dealt with that day. He told a joke or talked about baseball and the news.
Cathy and I never thought of death as a bad thing. In those days, when people died, they were usually buried in a cemetery. Cremation was not common. When we went on vacation, we would go by the mortuaries and cemeteries of towns we drove through. My parents almost bought a mortuary in a small town in Northern California, but we would have had to leave the Bay Area, sourdough bread and the 49ers, so we stayed.
One of the tasks my father had to do from time to time was deliver a deceased person in a hearse for burial in a cemetery in another town. Some of these towns were a few hours away. Sometimes my father would take my sister or me out of school for the day to go with him.
We would ride up front in the hearse with a body in a casket in back. As mortician and representative of the mortuary, our father would have to stand at the graveside until the funeral was over. I remember waiting in the hearse and reading the green sheet, as the sports section of The San Francisco Chronicle was known. On the way home, we would stop to get something to eat.
I don’t remember how people’s faces looked when my father in his funeral-director suit got out of the hearse with a kid, but I suspect they were somewhat surprised. All we knew was that we were hungry, and our father was taking us to lunch.
What my father taught us is that death is part of life. We never thought otherwise. Still don’t.
Of course, we were sad if someone we knew died and we grieved like everyone else. But life goes on. Soon, there will be some people to drink and eat with, something to laugh about, and some new places to go. Carpe diem, eh?
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