Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 75, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 March 1913 — MAKE PREY OF POOR [ARTICLE]

MAKE PREY OF POOR

EXTRAVAGANT FUNERALS EHCOURAGED BY UNDERTAKER. , j . • v ~-"7 " _r Afflicted Relatives, In the First Throe? of Distress, Induced to Assume Pecuniary Burdens That Later Are Severely Felt. One cannot go among the 'poor very much without hearing more or less circumstantial stories of how the unscrupulous undertaker fleeces them, writes Arthur B. Reeves in Harper’s Weekly. In fact, nothing less than ghoulish are some of the stories that are related to show how pressure Is brought to bear on distracted people to cause them excessive expense in burying, their dead. A dying husband begged his wife that she give him only a plain funeral. She promised, but when the undertaker came the relatives were present. As soon a* she said she wanted only a modest funeral the undertaker sneered. "Is that all you thought of your husband to bury him like that?” She was shamed into spending not only more than she had promised, but more than the insurance he had asked her to save. “This is the last thing you can do tor your wife,” one undertaker urged a poor porter, “and you don’t want to be haunted by the thought that yon were mean.” Then the crafty trade* man in death pointed to the children and cruelly wrung the man’s heart by adding: “If you don’t do the right thing by their mother they will curse you to your dying day.” It is hardly necessary to say that this distracted man demonstrated his love for the dead wife and mother by having a funeral which condemned the children to actual hunger and want Another undertaker refused to go to Bellevue for the body of a child until the mother gave him a golden crucifix, an heirloom, as Security. Sadr cases could be multiplied if it were of any use, for cates of this kind are so common among the very poor as to be almost proverbial. That is not to say that all undertakers, or even a majority of them, are rogues. They are precisely like every other body of men—some honest some unscrupulous, charging “all that the traffic will bear.” Once having been accepted, the vulture undertaker has the family at his mercy. For instance, In one case a chattel mortgage on an the household furniture was demanded. The family refused indignantly. But when they approached a second undertaker they found he would not take the c?se hocause the code of ethics forbade bim. They either bad to tale the original undertaker on his own terms or submit to having a pauper buriaL |