>Of Cremains and Cocktail Parties

>As some of you may know, the veracity of my new cocktail party story has been called into question. Apparently, Snopes claims it is false. But I know it’s true. Of course it’s true! I mean, why would my stepdaughter’s friend’s friend’s father lie?

However, writing that tale reminded me that I don’t even need to tell cocktail party stories about other people, not when I have more than a few good ones that happened to me. I mean, if I got anything out of being a television reporter, it was cocktail party stories. So pretend we just met and I’m trying to liven up a party. Okay, ready?

Did you know that I can examine a bag of cremated remains and determine whether or not they’re human? Oh yes I can!

(At this point, half of the people listening to my cocktail party story turn away in search of someone else to chat with.)

What? You’re still here? Okay, I’ll keep going!

One day several years ago, I was sitting at my desk in the newsroom, when I got an e-mail from a funeral home director.

It was about a big national news story that had taken place in Georgia. You probably remember it. Some guy was running a crematory in a rural area, a crematory that serviced funeral homes in a few different states. Apparently, at some point his oven “had issues,” so he just started piling bodies anywhere he could find a decent hiding spot and sending concrete dust in bags back to the funeral homes. He managed to pile up several hundred bodies over a long period of time before anyone discovered what was going on.

Eeeeeeyuck.

Anyway, the guy who sent me the e-mail (we’ll call him Kenny), had just bought his funeral home from a man who had used the questionable crematory in the past. As a result, Kenny wrote that all kinds of people were showing up at his door with their urns, wanting him to tell them whether they had grandma on their mantel or concrete dust. Kenny himself had never used that crematory. Essentially, he inherited the problem from his funeral home’s former owner. It was, as you can imagine, a nightmare.

And with that, a huge national story became local… and no one in town knew about it but me. I called Kenny on the phone, spoke with him for a few minutes, grabbed a photographer and headed for the funeral home, which was about an hour and a half away.

When we got there, we met Kenny and his family. Kenny had to have been the nicest funeral home director in the whole world. He was a young dad with a sweet wife and small children (they lived on the property, so I got to meet everyone), and they had put everything they had into buying the business. While we were chatting in his office, several more people stopped by with their urns. Kenny couldn’t have been kinder or more concerned, carefully examining each set of remains to make sure they were human, and taking everyone’s information so that he could let them know of any developments.

I couldn’t get over the openness of the people in Kenny’s small town. Pretty much everyone who came to the funeral home was more than willing to talk to me on camera about their plight.

“I just can’t believe that this might not be Aunt Sue/Cousin Bill/Great Grandma Woogie at all,” they’d say, balancing urns on their hip or holding them awkwardly out in front of them while the camera rolled.

Kenny also was very helpful.

“Here,” he said at one point, handing me a heavy, clear plastic bag filled with ash. “You can tell this ash is human because of the bits of bone in there. Do you see them? And you can tell by the color of the ash, and the weight. See all those colors? The concrete dust ones are just gray, and weigh practically nothing.”

Teaching a reporter to identify human cremains? That is called going the extra mile, people!

At the end of the day, I did a live shot from Kenny’s town for the six-o-clock news. I had the exclusive on local victims in the story that had topped network news that night. Local! Victims! I could almost hear the gnashing of teeth at the competing television stations in Nashville.

As my photographer and I headed back to Nashville that night, we got a phone call from Kenny’s wife.

“All kinds of reporters are calling here now, wanting interviews,” she said. “I don’t know that I feel comfortable with that.”

“That’s got to be annoying,” I said sympathetically. “They don’t know anything about y’all.” Generally, I wasn’t one of those reporters who tried to keep my “sources” from talking to other stations. But in this case, I had spent my entire day with Kenny and his family. We had established a bond and I was feeling protective. No one could possibly do this story justice but me. So when Kenny’s wife sounded like they wanted to limit their media interviews to me and me alone?

Um. Yeah!

“Look,” she said, after we talked for a few minutes. “We’re not going to answer the phone for the rest of the night. Tomorrow morning, Kenny will leave here for Georgia at 7:30. Can you be here by then?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

And that’s how Hide the Kenny began.

To be continued….