dover: Forget the nondescript landscapes and soothing religious imagery you expect to find on the walls of the typical funeral home.
Toland-Herzig’s walls display a poster from Michael Jackson’s memorial service, a handwritten list of invitees to Marilyn Monroe’s funeral and the bill from the 1958 burial of Elvis Presley’s mother. ($19,637.86, to be exact.)
Toland-Herzig Funeral Home is no ordinary mortuary. It’s the home of the Famous Endings Museum, a collection of memorabilia from the funerals of celebrities and everyday heroes.
If you think that sounds morbid, you’re dead wrong.
The museum occupies its own section of the funeral home, but the mementos spill out into the rest of the building. Even the restroom hallway has a display on Lee Harvey Oswald’s funeral.
It is, in its unconventional way, a celebration of life.
Walk into the museum, and you’re struck by the larger-than-life images of notable people covering the walls. They serve as a backdrop for display cases holding funeral programs and other mementos of individuals who in one way or another made an impact on the world.
There’s a scrap of Mother Teresa’s sari. There’s a guitar that belonged to singer George Jones. There’s a flashlight inscribed “Beam me up, Scotty,” given out at the funeral of Star Trek actor James Doohan.
But there is also information about what all these people accomplished while they were alive, what made them worth remembering. Many are celebrities, but some touched our lives more obscurely — people like Wilson Greatbatch, who developed the first implantable cardiac pacemaker, and Henry Coover, the inventor of Super Glue.
Famous Endings is the passion of John Herzig, a funeral director with a cheerful disposition and an occupational interest in funeral memorabilia. Over the last 20 years, he has amassed more than 2,000 items, more than he can display at any one time.
It all started in 1996. He was collecting autographs back then, and when he bought an autographed photo of boxer Joe Louis, it came packaged with Louis’ funeral program.
Herzig was intrigued. He has always been interested in people’s stories, he said, and funeral memorabilia is a reflection of personal histories. He started looking for more programs and mementos from other celebrities’ funerals.
For a long time, his collection just went into a box. Then someone suggested displaying it.
“I said, ‘Who’s going to be interested in this stuff besides me?’ ” he recalled.
Apparently, a lot of people. After he had a case built for his memorabilia, he noticed that people who came to the funeral home for calling hours and services would often wander back to the room where it was displayed.
“Pretty soon,” he said, “it was a constant stream of traffic.”
The collection expanded to more cases and wall-hung displays. He gave the museum its own space last year, converting what used to be a room for displaying caskets and cremation urns.
The displays are wide-ranging. Herzig has a simple program covered in red card stock from one of three Masses celebrated simultaneously for Lucille Ball — one in New York, one in Chicago and the other in Santa Monica, Calif. He has the funeral register and flower cards from legendary Yankees manager Casey Stengel’s funeral, one of them signed “Mickey, Whitey, Yogi and Billy.” (That’s Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra and Billy Martin, for nonfans.)
He has a rubbing from Jimi Hendrix’s gravestone, the original marker from Humphrey Bogart’s crypt, a love letter from 20-year-old Bobby Darin to fellow singer Connie Francis and a program from Bob Hope’s funeral, signed by comedian Phyllis Diller.
His favorites are his memorabilia from Abraham Lincoln’s funeral, including a lantern from the horse-drawn hearse used when Lincoln’s funeral train stopped in Albany, N.Y. He also displays framed pages from the New York Herald reporting Lincoln’s death, which were previously owned by Lucille Ball’s first husband and I Love Lucy co-star, Desi Arnaz.
It helps that Herzig has acquaintances in the business to keep him supplied. Bob Boetticher, a funeral director from Houston who handles a lot of high-profile funerals, is a frequent contributor. “He and I are on the phone about one or two times a week,” Herzig said.
Some items are purchased online. Some are gathered by a network of contacts who seek out funeral memorabilia for him. And some take a bit of detective work.
Herzig had long admired Paul Newman for his generosity, so when the actor died in 2008, he knew he had to have a keepsake. He contacted the funeral home but was told the actor had arranged a private service. He called the manager of a restaurant Newman co-owned in Newport, Conn., because he heard the family might have a gathering there. He learned it would just be a small group, with nothing produced in print.
Then one day, a card arrived in the mail inviting him to a fundraising celebration in New York honoring Newman’s legacy. He had made a contribution earlier to Newman’s Association of Hole in the Wall Camps, and that gave him the privilege of buying tickets to the Lincoln Center gala.
He and his wife, Joyce, traveled to New York for the 2009 event, where they met Newman’s widow, Joanne Woodward, and rubbed elbows with the likes of James Taylor, Art Garfunkel, Jerry Seinfeld and President Bill Clinton. And, of course, they gathered mementos to add to Herzig’s collection.
He’s constantly amassing new additions — most recently, for Harlem Globetrotter Meadowlark Lemon and singer Natalie Cole. And he’s still searching for funeral programs for Ed Sullivan, Gilda Radner and Cleveland TV legend Dorothy Fuldheim.
The quest for famous endings never ends.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MBBreckABJ, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.