Funeral Home Fans And Funeral Memorial Cards--Two Appalachian Traditions

 I recently posted a small post in Facebook about funeral home memorial cards which was my rapid response to a clue on "Jeopardy" the day before about the poem "Crossing The Bar" by Alfred Lord Tennyson which has been used on the back of funeral home memorial cards in Appalachia for many years.  That post was very actively and positively received by numerous people in Facebook groups devoted to Appalachia.  It had never occurred to me to write a post about these two topics despite the fact that I have been saving/collecting both items for quite a few years.  I have probably a couple hundred funeral memorial cards, all from funerals or visitations I have attended over the years.  I have also recently acquired a small collection of funeral home fans both from funeral homes where I have attended services and from a few small yard sales I have attended.  Both these items, especially the fans, are less often seen than in the past.  Funeral memorial cards were present at nearly every funeral I ever attended until about ten or twenty years ago.  Funeral home fans became less common when the small rural churches across Appalachia nearly all acquired air conditioning.  Nearly all Appalachian funeral homes for many years used the fans as advertising and always left a stack in every church where they held a funeral.  Many of the older Old Regular Baptist, United Baptist, Freewill Baptist, Holiness, and Pentecostal churches across the region still have some number of the fans which are frequently still used even if electricity and air conditioning are present.  But most funeral homes have stopped using them as a form of advertising.  Historically, the fans nearly always had a front side which was some generic religious themed reprodution of a religious painting or photograph in color, sometimes a photo of the funeral home building, but more often a painting of one of the more popular depictions of  Jesus Christ, either on the cross, the Last Supper, as the Good Shepherd, or arising from the tomb.  The reverse side was almost always plain white with the name, address, and telephone number of the funeral home involved.  The fans were usually a thin piece of somewhat stiff paper about 8" x 8" with a flat wooden handle stapled to the fan which was about 1" x 8".  It was also possible to see the same fans from the same printers being used by both local businesses and political candidates but they are less common.  I do have a few political fans in my collection.  

This first fan is from the funeral home with which I grew up as a child, The Hall Funeral Home of Martin, Kentucky, and shows Jesus Christ as The Good Shepherd on the front which is one of the most common scenes to be shown on funeral home fans.  

This next fan is from a funeral home, the Thornburg Funeral Home, and a community, Farmland, Indiana, in which I have never been.  I located the fan at a small yard sale in Stanton, Kentucky, where I also bought several other funeral home fans and a couple of antique books and a corn sheller.  It shows a typical Last Supper scene with a typical advertisement for the funeral home on the back. 

 

The funeral memorial card below is from the funeral of a neighbor, Flora Cook Isaac, and has a photo of the deceased on the front which is a common choice for funeral memorial cards.  

The interior of Flora Cook Isaac's memorial card is a typical two-sided print statement of birth and death dates, survivors, clergy, burial site, etc. and the left side of the print is the 23rd Psalm which is also a very common inclusion either on the inside left of the rear of these memorial cards. 

This next memorial card is from the funeral of my good friend and former auction ring man, Dewey Rogers.  The front is a depiction of the pick and shovel of a coal miner, which he had been in his younger days.

 

 

 

I will be adding several more photos to this blog post over the next few days due to a current problem with converting scans and photographs on the equipment I am using.  If you like what you have seen so far, please return in a couple of days and I will added to the contents of the photograph section. 

Surviving An Endarterectomy, Or A Little Knife Fight I Won!

 

About 4  years ago, I discovered that I had a blockage of about 70+ percent in my right carotid artery which I managed to handle with diet changes, exercise, and a little medication for something like 4 1/4 years.  But annual scans showed that the blockage was steadily increasing despite marked decreases in my serum cholesterol, blood pressure, weight, etc.  So a few months ago, I made the decision to have the blockage removed via the endarterectomy process which laymen sometimes describe as a "rotorooter" on the artery.  This involves making a fairly major incision through the skin and muscles of the neck to expose the artery, clamping the blood flow at both ends of the artery area to be cleared, and, as I understand it, literally scraping the accumulated cholesterol plaque out of the exposed inner surface of the artery.  This is not a surgery to be taken lightly.  But, due to the way I had generally behaved since the blockage was first diagnosed, my doctors conceded that I was in generally better physical condition than the great majority of patients who have such a surgery.  I also trusted my surgical team at the University of Kentucky Hospital absolutely and, if I had not, I would never have consented to allow them to play among my arteries.  

 

My decision was not taken lightly since my wife has been in a wheelchair for more than twenty years and, in the event I had any kind of major catastrophic outcome from the surgery, either my wife alone or both of us together would most likely spend the rest of our lives in a nursing home which is a fate to which no one I know aspires. This issue was further complicated by the fact that I would have to spend at least one night in the hospital if all went according to plan and would have about two weeks of limited physical activity which would make it impossible for me to provide my wife the care she must have on a daily basis.  But her sister, who lives in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, volunteered to come and stay with her/us for a little over two weeks if the surgery could be postponed until after her twelve year old son was out of school for the summer.  My doctor, David Minion, M. D., agreed to the plan and we scheduled my admission and surgery for June 14, 2022, which gave us a few days for my sister-in-law and her son to arrive here and for me to train her in the usage of a Hoyer Lift and the other issues of assisting my wife in and out of bed, shower, toilet, etc.  She adjusted smoothly to the task and I felt safe in leaving Candice at home alone.  

On June 14, 2022, I was admitted to UK Hospital at about 5:30am and the surgery was over by about noon, lasting roughly four hours in the operating room.  The next twenty four hours I had a lot of pain involved in my neck and throat but I was released from the hospital the afternoon of June 15.  I got home uneventfully with massive swelling in my incision area, went to bed as usual about 10pm but couldn't get to sleep.  About 11:30pm, I got up, looked in a mirror, and saw even more swelling in my neck, and came to the conclusion that I had a minor leak from the artery.  Since I couldn't drive at that point, it would have been necessary to have my sister-in-law drive me to the hospital I preferred in Morehead, Kentucky, thirty miles away.  Candice didn't feel safe being left at home in bed when it was impossible to get out and asked me to take an ambulance to the local ARH Hospital in West Liberty where I have not trusted the medical providers and management for several years now.  Against my better judgment, I agreed to go there by ambulance.  I called 911, an ambulance arrived, and I was transported to ARH-ER shortly before midnight June 15, 2022.  ARH has adopted a policy quite some time in the past to contract their ER doctors from some national medical service.  Additionally, about 3 years ago, they ran off the three best prescribing professionals working in that institution, closed the Home Care Store which my wife had used regularly for years, and replaced the medical providers with providers with less experience, credentials, and, in my opinion, at far less pay and benefits which I believe was the primary object of all these actions.  I was admitted, put on an ER bed, hooked to monitors, and left in the room for quite an extended period of time before I was even seen by a doctor.  That doctor finally came in, stood at the foot of my bed looking at me for about 15 seconds, stepped beside the bed and touched my neck, said "that's wonderful surgery", and walked out without saying another word or introducing himself.  Shortly after I arrived, my blood pressure began jumping up and down much like Roy Acuff's yoyo, and little to nothing was done about it.  Finally, after some extended period the doctor came into the room again, looked at me for a few seconds, and left without saying a word.  I was eventually seen by the nurse manager in the ER that night and the next day and she told me that they were seeking a bed for me at UK.  They gave me one or two injections of some short term blood pressure medication which only lowered my blood pressure briefly before it spiked again.  I spent the night in the ER in that cycle with my blood pressure sometimes reaching levels of 190/90 and going as low as 130/60.  Nothing ever came of the alleged referral to UK.  Finally about noon on June 16, I had an exchange with the nurse manager in which I told her I had no faith in the doctor of the upper level management of the hospital and I was considering leaving AMA, Against Medical Advice, since nothing seemed to be happening to improve my condition.  She and the doctor came in at some point for his third encounter with me and I confronted him in her presence about the fact that he had done little or nothing to help me which he denied, stated "you're not going to die", and claimed that the machines could do a far better job of watching my condition than people.  I made a phone call to the Nurse Manager of the vascular surgery team at UK to see if she could facilitate my transfer and she stated she could do nothing.  I then called the office of my primary care provider at Saint Claire Clinic in Sandy Hook, Kentucky, to ask if I could be seen there and she stated, through her nurse, that I should go to UK ER.  At that point, I made up my mind that I was leaving AMA and called my cousin Jack Terry in Louisa, Kentucky, to ask if he could transport me to UK which he agreed to do.  I got out of bed at about 3pm, disconnected my electrodes from my body, walked to the nurses station and asked to have my IV removed, and signed the AMA papers.  I walked out of the ARH-ER after 16 hours of absolutely useless time and traveled to Lexington to the UK ER.  

I signed in there at about 6pm, since it took Jack quite a while to arrive from his house.  The ER at UK is in a major expansion and part of the building is unfinished but in use with patient cubicles on the ground floor with blue tarpaulins for doors and exposed ceilings showing concrete beams, copper pipes, HVAC pipes, no cell phone service in that area, etc.  But the UK-ER team is doing a helluva job in rough circumstances and I respect them a great deal.  They retested every test which had ever been done on me, consulted with the vascular surgery team, and finally I was admitted to a room in the hospital about 4:30am after about 9 hours on site.  They immediately put me on IV antibiotics, and medication to lower my blood pressure.  The nursing staff, lab staff, food service staff, and the members of the vascular surgery team are all wonderful practitioners each of their own personal profession.  They took great care of me, got my blood pressure under control in just a few hours, kept me at least part of four days, and discharged me on June 19, 2022, to return to home.  During the time of my stay at UK, I was told by three different members of the vascular surgery team that I had "done the right thing" by leaving ARH against medical advise.  That is a rare occurrence in health care today to ever hear any member of a medical profession state that other members of their profession have delivered less than exemplary care to a patient.  I really do believe I would have been likely to die if I had remained at ARH and unless I have absolutely no choice, I will never darken their doors again.  What is really sad about this whole situation is that a few years ago, I would have just as strongly defended ARH and their practitioners against all criticism.  But those practitioners are no longer there and most of them left against their will leaving hundreds, probably a few thousand, patients without the quality of medical care they had been receiving from those providers.  I do still have several providers in that hospital in other departments whose work I respect.  But, I have little doubt that they also are on thin ice if they are being paid what they are worth.

This entire episode is an example of how healthcare has often failed in Appalachia.  In this region, we often are served by providers who do not understand our culture, our people, how we think, believe, and live our lives.  Many small regional hospitals in our area are understaffed, underfunded, under governed, and unsafe.  In many ways, large numbers of these hospitals are similar to what was once said by Ralph Nader about the Chevrolet Corvair.  They are "unsafe at any speed".  It is also sad that in the early history of what later became the ARH hospital chain, they were actually owned and operated by the United Mine Workers of America and were shining examples of how health care should be delivered to a depressed area. In explanation of my willingness to openly criticize so large and powerful a corporation, I would point my readers to these two articles on the website of the American Counseling Association which I co-authored with Dr. Heather Ambrose, Ph. D., both of which are rooted primarily in my own work in graduate school.  One of  these articles we delivered at the 2005 National Conference of The American Counseling Association and it is included as a chapter in a book from the ACA on cutting edge advances in counseling.  The other is about culturally appropriate supervision of counselors in Appalachia and is on the ACA permanent website for professionals.  Both articles are frequently cited and quoted in professional articles, books, and graduate school dissertations.  I know whereof I speak both from a personal and a professional viewpoint when I discuss healthcare in Appalachia. 

Take A Real Vacation--Go Somewhere You've Never Been

The photo above is a little bar on US 2 in Northern Wisconsin where we had a spontaneous lunch.

At about this time of year in the area of Eastern Kentucky in which I live, I see or hear people I know who are extremely excited because they are going on vacation to some spot they have been going for the last many years.  Generally, these people have never been on a real vacation to any other spot in the country.  Once in a while they say they "went somewhere else and I didn't like it" or "I went somewhere else and I had to drive all the way to get there" or "I went somewhere else and it was too expensive".  For me, the only one of those statements that has any validity whatever is "...it was too expensive".  But there are dozens of great spots to take a vacation within a reasonable distance at a reasonable price near just about anywhere anybody in America lives.  I love to see places I've never seen, meet people I've never met, do things I've never done, and have new experiences of almost any kind.  Why does anybody want to go to the very same place for a "vacation" year after year, frequently staying in the same hotel or bed and breakfast, eating meals in the same restaurants which are often other locations of the same chains they eat in at home, and often seeing the same attractions year after year?

This photo is on a tour boat in Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Wisconsin. 

In the area in which I live, there are about a half dozen locations I see people visiting year after year and most of them are not places I would ever want to visit twice.  Those areas include Gatlinburg, TN;  Virginia Beach, VA;  Myrtle Beach, NC;  and Cherokee, NC.  These people come back saying how much fun they had going to Dollywood or swimming at the beach where they have been on numerous occasions.  I do not understand that kind of thinking.  Yes, I have been to Dollywood, Gatlinburg, Cherokee, and Virginia Beach, most of them one time each.  I have been to one of two of them twice.  But I have also been in thirty-one of the 50 US states and can't wait to get to the other 19.  I have been from New York state to Arizona, from South Florida to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, to Nogales, Mexico, and I loved nearly every minute of all those trips.  I despise going to some place I've seen a dozen times before, staying the same, now deteriorating hotel, eating in the same restaurants, and often seeing the same dull people who are stranded in the same low paying jobs.  I even see a lot of these people I am referring to who could easily afford to take a vacation anywhere they wanted to.  

This photo is at the Alamo in Texas.
 

For me, the ultimate vacation is to get in a good vehicle with my wife, and point it in a direction toward some destination I have never been.  We do usually book a place to stay every night along the route because my wife has been in a wheelchair for over 20 years and has trouble sleeping in ordinary hotel beds.  But we also often schedule little of what we are going to do on these vacations and let the route dictate what happens.  Twice on our way to visit her family in Wisconsin we have taken spontaneous, totally unplanned trips which turned out to be two of the best trips we were ever on.  Once we suddenly decided to go visit the University of Wisconsin-Platteville where she went to college which is in the northwest corner of Wisconsin.  Her family have always lived about an hour north of Milwaukee in the southeast portion of the state.  We hung a left in southern Indiana and crossed into Iowa at Clinton, Iowa, and then hung a right and drove up the old US highway along the Mississippi River to Dubuque, Iowa, and into southwest Wisconsin to Platteville.  It was a great trip up the Big Muddy.  We stayed in a little motel in Clinton, Iowa, and had a great pizza for supper from a little pizzeria in that town where, most likely, many of the locals eat every day.  On the other trip to visit her father, after her mother had died, she suddenly said, somewhere in Indiana, "I've never been in Michigan.  Let's go up through Michigan, across the Upper Peninsula and south his house."  That's exactly what we did.  We drove up the western edge of Wisconsin, stopped in Grand Rapids, spent a night in Saint Ignace, Michigan, spent half a day on Mackinac Island, drove across the Upper Peninsula, bought dried fish in a little store with antique coolers just like the ones in my parents' store when I was a boy, and drove down the eastern edge of Wisconsin to her father's house.  We ate fresh cherries from a roadside stand, saw the National Park on Mackinac Island, shot some photos of some Lake Michigan lighthouses, and had a ball.  

This is with friends in Nogales, Mexico. 
 

Once in South Louisiana, when we were staying in an AirBNB in Jeffersonville, LA, we took a day and drove down an old two lane highway to the Gulf of Mexico stopping at a few little restaurants which caught our eyes along the way.  We got the best pork roast I ever ate in a little restaurant stuck between a bayou and the highway, and some of the best fried shrimp and crawfish etouffee I have ever had in another little place with gingham curtains sitting beside the highway in a little town most people never go to if they visit New Orleans or Baton Rouge.  On that same trip, we also toured the LA state capitol, saw the spot where Senator Huey Long was assassinated, and had a fine experience with the security people at the capitol which you could have only had in a southern state before gun violence and bun related domestic terrorism became rampant in America.  We had parked in a free lot on the banks of the Mississippi and walked to the capitol a block away.  I never thought a thing about having my pocket knife in my pocket and when I got to the metal detector I remembered the knife, showed it to the security people, and asked "don't you just put things like this in a box or envelope and hold them till people leave" to which they said "no, we can't do that.  But do you see those bushes at the bottom of the steps.  Just take it out there, pick out a bush, and hide it under the bush till you get done" which is what I did.  You can't have that kind of experience in Gatlinburg or Myrtle Beach.  

The photo above is sitting in the porch swing on the porch of the boyhood home of President Lyndon B. Johnson in Johnson City, TX. 
 

And the beautiful sign below was on a carpet store marquee sign in El Paso, Texas, in October 2017.  I went inside to meet the owner and thank him for speaking out and defending America.