Frank E. Campbell

The investment advice sounds solid. "People that don't buy our stock just don't like money. It's the greatest investment I've ever seen. People are always going to die."

Imbedded in a great two page spread in this NYT Sunday Styles Section is a story by Alex Vadukul about the Frank E. Campbell funeral home, that any New Yorker worth the value of a fully loaded Metro Card will tell you, is the preferred mortuary/funeral home for NYC's well-known, and sometimes not so well known.

The quote, albeit from 1993, comes from Robert L. Waltrip, founder of Service Corporation International, a Texas-based conglomerate that went public in 1969 and that now operates 1,900 cemeteries and funeral homes, including Frank E. Campbell, Riverside Memorial Chapel, and Walter B. Cooke, marquee names in providing funeral services in New York City.

I've been getting the Sunday Times home delivered now from my usual Monday-Saturday carrier gratis, for some reason. I was about to email the carrier and tell them not to bother, since I long ago gave up on the Sunday Times (They don't even have a separate sports section anymore.) I get advance Sunday sections with Saturday's delivery. I don't really need anymore.

But today's Sunday edition brought me this wonderful two, full-page story about the history of the Frank E. Campbell funeral home, introduced by an absolutely priceless nearly full page 1926 photo on the first page of the Sunday Styles section. Hold off on the email.

I delivered many a floral funeral piece to Campbell's in my prior life as a delivery boy for the family flower shop in the 1960s. You used the service entrance, of course, and there in a room populated with several people at desks was an entire staff just placing death notices with NYC newspapers.

None of the deceased I ever delivered flowers for were famous. Th most famous one I ever delivered an  arrangement for wasn't to Campbell's, but to an Episcopal Church in Riverdale, the Bronx, Christ Church.

The name was famous by being former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's sister,  Gemma Gluck. Despite Gemma's and Fiorello's mother being Jewish, the pair were raised as Episcopalians.

The delivery was sometime in the '60s and I only learned of the relationship to the famous mayor through a woman who was in the church by the bier who asked me if I knew who she was. I didn't. I don't know who sent the flowers, and it struck me that there was no one was in the church but this woman and the deceased, someone for whom I would have expected to be receiving a bigger send-off given the fact that she was the sister of perhaps the most famous mayor in the city's history.

But this was the mid-1960s and Fiorello had passed away in 1947. Given that, it started to be clearer why no one else was there. Fame is fleeting, and fame by association even more fleeting.

The lede to the story lists some of the many famous people for whom Frank Campbell's provided services. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's name leads the list. And while her burial arrangements were handled by Campbell's, she wasn't waked there.

Senator Ted Kennedy, Jackie's brother-in-law, made arrangements to have Jackie waked in her Fifth Avenue apartment so that swarms of mourners could be kept away. I remember the news stories of the time that portable embalming equipment was brought in, as well as a casket, all from Campbell's. The online version of the piece shows a photo of the casket being brought into the apartment building.  Privately invited mourners got to pay their respects by being allowed into the apartment. 

The front page of the Sunday Styles section is a treasure of a 1926 photo of what it looked like outside Campbell's when Rudolph Valentino was waked there.  Valentino was a silent screen heartthrob nicknamed The Sheik. His funeral brought out best in female fan hysteria.

In 1926 Campbell's was located on Broadway at West 66th Street. Look closely at the photo on the first page of the Sunday Styles section and you can see trolley tracks, streetcars and double decker buses. In the top left hand portion of the photo you can glimpse the 9th Avenue El, the first elevated line built in Manhattan. Eventually there was a 2nd Avenue, 3rd Avenue and 6th Avenue El. The 9th Avenue El was dismantled in 1940. 

The pictured El is at the intersection of 65th Street, 9th Avenue and Broadway, Broadway pretty much being  a north/south thoroughfare that cuts a swath through the length of Manhattan in what is the original cow path. It is a fantastic photo for any NYC nostalgic nut.

The only time I was ever in attendance at Campbell's for someone who had passed away was in 1968, when the father of two brothers I was very close to was waked at Campbell's in February. He was Jewish, and the services for him were held in a chapel at Campbell's.

One Thanksgiving I was over the brothers' apartment on West 55th Street for dinner when their mother quipped that when her two older gentlemen, her husband and his brother had drifted off to sleep after the meal, that she hoped she wasn't going to have to call Campbell's twice that evening. (She didn't have to.)

Given that the NYT has given what might be considered so much free advertising to Frank E. Campbell's, investment in the business of dying might be worth a look at.

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