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.” But few heeded that warning.Those who did usually associated cremation with memorial societiesand direct disposal.Cremation was “burn and scatter” on the cheap,and they would have nothing to do with it.When customers came tofuneral homes insisting on cremation, they were often politely turnedaway.Not all funeral directors, however, were so gracious.Somepulled out pictures of cremations in progress.“Are you sure you wantto burn your mother?” they would ask.“If you love her, you wouldn’tdare.” Throughout the seventies and into the eighties, funeral directorstried to put direct cremation providers out of business.They lobbiedfor restrictive regulations and took direct cremation outfits to court.The tactic was to stomp out the problem—“Ostrich” had given way to“Big-Foot.”10In 1981 Mortuary Management was still reporting that “most fu-neral directors become choleric when [cremation] is even mentioned.”But that same year the National Funeral Directors Association finallyweighed in against denial and resistance.In a report entitled “Traditionin Transition,” the NFDA wrote, “Many funeral directors have devel-oped a psyche that cremation is synonymous with memorial (bodiless)services and direct disposition, when the consumer may mean it only asan alternative to earth burial or entombment of the body.” The reportconcluded with this advice: “Funeral service in the 1980s and 1990smust not be against cremation as a procedure or process in final dis-position.Rather, those in funeral service should be for post-death ritesand ceremonies which have meaning and value to the survivors, nomatter what the form of final disposition is.”11In the late 1980s the strategies of denial and resistance began to giveway to a more accommodative approach.The cremation rate was mov-ing up rapidly, and the incinerations of American icons such as WoodyGuthrie, Walt Disney, Janis Joplin, Steve McQueen, Joan Crawford,Groucho Marx, and John Lennon further legitimized the practice.Atti-tudes of funeral directors changed fastest where cremation was gainingthe most ground.In California, where the cremation rate topped 36 per-cent in 1985, funeral directors were the first to take notice.As CANAdata on regional and national cremation rates circulated in the lateContemporary Ways of Cremation1931980s, death care providers from burial strongholds began to take heedtoo.While many still refused to dirty their hands, others began compet-ing with low-cost cremation providers with inexpensive packages oftheir own.In the eighties, the most common site for crematory installa-tions shifted from the cemetery to the funeral home.More than half acentury after cemetery superintendents had made peace with cremation,funeral directors finally joined the competition for the cremation dollar.At the turn of the millennium many funeral directors continued to in-sist on the value of the “traditional American funeral” and the embalm-and-bury regime.Some saw cremation as a passing fad.Others, con-vinced the practice was an anomaly that would never invade theirhometowns, remained oblivious to its nationwide advance.“There aremany funeral directors who today have two or three dusty urns in acabinet,” Ron Hast, publisher of Mortuary Management and the Fu-neral Monitor, said in 1997, “because they see [cremation] as a cheapalternative to what they want to sell,” namely, embalming and a casket.Even the NFDA, according to Hast, was “consistently five or moreyears behind the times.” But gradually American funeral directorsbegan to heed the advice of Hast’s Funeral Monitor, which argued in1996 that “it is going to be—or already is—a matter of adapting to cre-mation or finding a new line of work.” The “if you can’t beat ’em, join’em” philosophy was catching on.12The New Cremation MarketingBack in 1874 writers at the New York Daily Graphic had predictedAmerican businessmen would find a way to profit from cremation:The undertakers to a manShould favor the cremation plan,Because the more they have to burn,’Tis evident, the more they’ll urn.13For modern cremation’s first U.S.century, however, few funeral directorstook that advice.From the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era, funeral di-rectors had alternately ignored and resisted cremation.In the late twen-ties and early thirties, a few tried to sell it.But not until the nineties didfuneral directors truly embrace cremation marketing.In the 1990s ads inthe Director blared, “Make money the modern way.Urn it!”The biggest booster of this new approach was Michael Kubasak, theowner of the Valley Funeral Home in trend-setting Burbank, California,194Boom, 1963–Presentand later a vice president at Service Corporation International (SCI).The author of Cremation and the Funeral Director (1990), the best-selling funeral service book of the 1990s and the Bible of the new cre-mation marketing, Kubasak was the Norman Vincent Peale of the deathcare industry.“Cremation is not the problem,” he wrote
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