Tickets to Heaven

Average daily U. S. death rate is 3,800 persons. Many die far from home, have to be shipped back, which on railroads costs two first-class tickets per corpse. Last week many a Midwestern undertaker, just back from a convention at Springfield, Ill., was pondering this transport problem, wondering if he could turn it to his advantage. The convention had discussed using airplanes instead.

Undertaker Harry H. Shaw of Columbus, Ohio, chairman of the air rates committee of the National Funeral Directors Association, revealed that he had been dickering for years for special rates with airlines. But Undertaker Howard Rowland of St. Louis was the convention sensation, bringing a cadaver for autopsy in his own Stinson monoplane, which he uses several times a month to carry dead or dying persons home. Undertaker Rowland scoffs at the convention suggestion that aerial funerals may become a fad as rising land values force cemeteries farther away from cities. According to him, the only aerial funerals the U. S. will ever see are those of the occasional eccentrics who order their ashes scattered high in the heavens.

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