Fahrenheit 1600 (Victor Kozol) (3 page)

Chapter 3

The Family Business

Victor’s father Albert was sitting on his back
porch admiring the wonderful summer scenes and taking in the fresh air all
around him. But his thoughts were elsewhere; he was thinking back eighty years
when his grandfather, Stanislas Kozlowski came to America to work in the then
booming coal mines in northeast Pennsylvania. His son Stanley, who liked to be
called Stash, shortened the family name to Kozol and began working for an
undertaker (as funeral directors were called back then). He found life in the
sunlight infinitely better than the dangerous and unhealthy working conditions
of the mines. In the winter, the only time miners saw daylight was on Sunday;
it was dark when they left for the mines and dark when they came home.
Now
that’s depressing,
thought Albert.

Stash was married but with his wife working, he was
able to save enough for the tuition to attend an eight week course in
Philadelphia at the Eckles College of Mortuary Science. After that he
officially registered as an apprentice to the undertaker he was working with
for two years. Finally, he took the test and was awarded a license to practice
undertaking in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. When his mentor, Stanley
Sipkovich, retired in 1932 Stash put out his own shingle and became the
official Polish undertaker for Duryea.

Even though it was the middle of The Great
Depression, Stash had supported his family of four children quite well; they
were raised in middle class surroundings. He had the added benefit of being
looked up to as a needed professional in his town. Stash sent two of his sons
to four-year colleges, his daughter married, and his third son, Albert,
followed his father into Eckles Mortuary Science School in Philadelphia to
become what is now called a funeral director. It was Albert who was to first
help in and finally take over the family business. The Kozols, in 1939, moved
into a retired doctor’s mansion and remodeled the first floor into what was now
a funeral home. The upstairs was the apartment for the family.

This expansion was necessary as people no longer
held open casket viewings of their deceased relatives in their living rooms,
but rather at the local funeral home. After serving three years in the U.S.
Army during World War II, Albert returned home to partner with his father in
the business.

Albert was a smoother, more polished version of his
father since he had a high school education and one-year at Eckles. He was an
active member of Holy Rosary Polish Catholic Church, and also donated to the
neighboring Polish National Church and other churches. Albert was in The
Knights of Columbus, Kiwanis, Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, and
served on the library board. Funeral directors were known to be great
‘joiners’. So, when it was time for his father to retire, Albert was more than
ready to seamlessly continue the decades old family business. By doing so
Albert was able to hold on to his core business and add some new families.

However, since Duryea during this period went from
10,000 to 6,000, the business was now doing sixty funerals per year down from a
high of seventy in Stash’s heyday. But, Kozol’s was still the largest funeral
home in town, since the other two directors had also lost business due to
population declines.

Albert ran the funeral home from the mid-fifties
until the eighties when it was time to begin thinking of the transition of
ownership to a new generation. He now had to think of what was to become of his
only son after the debacle at Wilkes. Albert decided to give an ultimatum to
Vic meeting the problem head-on.

“Vic, you either go downstate to mortuary school in
Bethlehem and get a funeral director’s license, or I am going to sell the
business, retire, and you can ‘paddle your own canoe’ from there.”

Joining the family business was not a prospect that
thrilled Vic, but he was astute enough to know that his options could be worse.
To refuse his father’s offer would put him on the street looking for work with
no marketable skills. This usually meant minimum wage type employment. A job so
tiring and boring, you won’t want to party after your shift is over. Imagine,
standing at the local hot dog joint window with your white hat asking people
all day, “Do you want yours plain or with mustard?” This was a real bummer to
contemplate. Victor was trapped, he needed money and his father was no longer
going to just give it to him.

Vic had two cousins downstate. One was a
cardiologist practicing in a large hospital in Philadelphia, and the other was
an orthopedic specialist practicing with a group in Allentown. This was no longer
possible for Vic, no matter how much he yearned for the more exciting greener
pastures down state, he had screwed up and he knew it.

Chapter 4

A New Beginning

Vic had to get busy if he hoped to not lose any
more time getting into his new career. While the Northampton County Area
Community College Funeral Service program was not attended by rocket
scientists, it was a heavily science oriented curriculum. Vic didn’t have any
science courses of C or better to transfer. None of his D’s or F’s were
acceptable, so he had to take a full load of science courses at summer school
at the Luzerne County Community College in Nanticoke. He still wouldn’t be able
to graduate in one year. It would take eighteen months for Vic to get the
ordinary twelve month diploma, because the other students already had an
education of mostly science courses in their first two years of college. Three
years of education was the Pennsylvania requirement. This inability to transfer
many of his college credits was the cause for much distress for Vic.

Whether, he was getting older or was just tired from
all of the partying in Wilkes-Barre, Vic was a quieter, more sober student in
Bethlehem; not that he didn’t drink on weekends. He no longer hosted parties.
If anything, Vic went from motivated to do the wrong things, to just plain
apathetic about himself and his future. He was able to keep average grades in
school this time, realizing he really wanted to get all of this behind him and
start making money.

Finally, in January the day arrived for Vic’s
mid-year graduation from mortuary school. His parents sat proudly in the front
row as their son strode across the stage with cameras clicking and people
applauding. Pennsylvania, like most States require an internship working with a
funeral director for an additional year after graduation before taking the
State Board Exams and being awarded a license.

Technically, Vic’s father could have been the
‘preceptor’ for Vic, but Albert chose to call his good friend Charley Rokowski
in Scranton to take his son on. Charley did twice the business that Vic’s
father did in Duryea. There, he would get his much needed experience. Earning
$200.00 per week, Vic spent the year helping direct funerals and embalm bodies
in Scranton.

Finally, Vic had free time to hit the bars once
again. He would get mildly buzzed and go back to his room over the funeral home
garage in downtown Scranton.

With the year finally over, Vic made the trek to
Philadelphia and took his state boards. In another month he was notified by
registered letter that he has passed all requirements and was officially a
licensed funeral director in the great state of Pennsylvania.

It had been six years since Vic first entered Wilkes
University, and he finally had something to show for all of this time. (Not to
mention tens of thousands of his father’s money.) Vic was not ecstatic; this
was not his chosen field, but rather a fallback or default career. He didn’t
relish working for his father, but as he reasoned earlier, doing unskilled
labor would be far worse.

Chapter 5

Funeral Directing in a Small Town

Vic wasn’t excited to return to Duryea to live
full-time after having been away for six years. Most of Vic’s high school
friends who remained behind  married early and were settled into the
service industry jobs that still existed. Vic feared he would appear like an
alien to his old friends after being away so long.

He now lived five miles from the spot near Pittston,
where in 1957 the Susquehanna River broke through into a mine tunnel located
too close to the river. Most of the miners miraculously escaped with their
lives, but the gaping hole poured millions of gallons of water into the mine.
Since the mines were all interconnected, all of the deep mines in Luzerne
County were permanently flooded. This disaster ended the last of the deep
mining of anthracite in the area. Strip mining continued on a smaller scale,
but the markets for this form of energy were not to return.

The federal, state, and local governments poured
millions of dollars into the area to try and diversify the industrial base. At
first this seemed to help, but then low-wage states down south and cheap
overseas labor closed many of these new factories. To keep coal alive, Congress
was induced to pass legislation that named anthracite coal as the primary
heating fuel for military and other governmental buildings. However, nothing
could ever replace the thousands of miners’ jobs now long gone in northeast
Pennsylvania. Some businesses found niches and prospered, and the colleges,
hospitals, governmental facilities and other institutions in the area did go on
and provide a steady source of employment for a smaller labor force. Vic knew
that there would not be growth in his area and he couldn’t, in his lifetime,
remember when the area was humming with tens of thousands employed by the
mines.

Victor’s parents bought a modest ranch home three
miles out of town in Pittston Township, and moved out of the apartment on top
of the funeral home. With some leftover furniture from his grandmother, Vic
moved into the family manor where he grew up. Working with his father every day
was actually easy, because Albert made all of the decisions and Vic was the
schlepper. He removed and embalmed bodies, took folding chairs to the widow’s
houses, washed cars, hosed off the porches, ran the vacuum, and in short did
all of the trivial, and some of the important details, needed to keep the
funeral home running smoothly.

To successfully operate a sixty call a year business
in a small town, you might spend two weeks with no funerals and then have three
deaths in two days, requiring you to put in an eighty hour week to get it all
done. This is where the expression ‘feast or famine’ came from.

As to the public relations part of the business; Vic
was weak in that department. He was seen in church only when doing funerals.
Rarely did he attend the other important events like suppers, carnivals,
socials, and oh yes, the annual bowling banquets. Then came the block parties,
4
^th
of July parades, and all sorts of local events the funeral
director was expected to either attend or help run. All of this mingling was
with people who were twice to three times his age. Not to mention the
expectations that you not be a womanizer or ever appear drunk in public.

These were the things Albert could do seamlessly and
even seemed to enjoy; but to Vic, this stuff was torture and a waste of time.
Albert got tired of cajoling Vic into talking his place in the town and its
activities. He knew this was a weakness with his son, but just as in college,
he seemed to have no control over Victor when it came to changing behavior. So,
a standoff ensued. Albert was satisfied to have Vic did the physical work
around the funeral home, while he would remain the public relations person.
This agreement worked well while Albert stayed active in the business, but was
to have disastrous consequences down the road. For the time being, Victor was
making $20,000 a year, had a car to use, and a place to stay. Maybe not Vic’s
idea of a road to greatness, but he wasn’t wanting for anything.