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The most complete, in-depth book on hearses and funeral cars ever! Beginning with horse drawn, highly ornate hearses up to today's motorized vehicles, this book takes you through the complete history of 20th Century hearses. Follow the overall style development from the early carved-panel columned and draped designs, through the limousine-styled Funeral Coach and side-loaders, through the sleek designs that have led to today's hearses.Photos and History on Henney, Eureka, A.J. Miller, Superior, and history of other large and small hearse-builders like Barnette, Economy, Memphian, etc., and the growth and decline of many of these companies. Over 300 high quality photos combined with in-depth text present the most complete history and evolution of motorized hearses ever. A must have book for all automotive enthusiasts.Includes an index of all the important past and present hearse and conversion builders in North America.
Two books for the price of one! Covering the early and classic time period of ambulances and funeral vehicles, two out-of-print yet in demand Iconografix books have now been combined into one book and restored for your enjoyment. Classic American Ambulances 1900-1979 Photo Archive is a photographic history of the evolution and sudden demise of the passenger car-based emergency ambulance while Classic American Funeral Vehicles 1900-1980 Photo Archive shows hearses, flower cars and funeral service cars. Anyone involved in the funeral or ambulance industry will enjoy seeing these classic luxury cars, as will any car enthusiast, restorer, modeler, and historian.
Beginning as station wagons from the likes of Ford, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, and the car of choice, Cadillac, and converted into emergency and professional service vehicles, professional cars have become recognized as visual icons. Having only commercial chassis and the front and rear clips in common, each is unique with ornately carved pillars, body length windows, and custom mobile casket tables. &break;&break;Author Greg Merksamer, prolific automotive journalist, compiles this photographic history of hearses, flower cars, service cars, ambulances, and hearse-ambulances. More than 500 clear, large format photographs, combined with technical specifications, pay tribute to the cars used in professional service and the coachbuilders who made them.
Bloomberg • Best Nonfiction Books of 2020: "[A] tour de force." The basis of a major PBS documentary by Ric Burns, this “excellent history” (The New Yorker) reveals how the automobile fundamentally changed African American life. Driving While Black demonstrates that the car—the ultimate symbol of independence and possibility—has always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Melding new archival research with her family’s story, Gretchen Sorin recovers a lost history, demonstrating how, when combined with black travel guides—including the famous Green Book—the automobile encouraged a new way of resisting oppression.
In 1933 the Sayers & Scovill Co. of Cincinnati, Ohio and The Eureka Co. of Rock Falls, Illinois, introduced a daring new departure in funeral car design. This stunning, semi-streamlined new hearse design featured richly-carved imitation drapery panels—complete with folds, fringes, tassels and tieback cords—on the sides and rear of the car.
This illuminating book examines how the public funerals of major figures from the Civil War era shaped public memories of the war and allowed a diverse set of people to contribute to changing American national identities. These funerals featured lengthy processions that sometimes crossed multiple state lines, burial ceremonies open to the public, and other cultural productions of commemoration such as oration and song. As Sarah J. Purcell reveals, Americans' participation in these funeral rites led to contemplation and contestation over the political and social meanings of the war and the roles played by the honored dead. Public mourning for military heroes, reformers, and politicians distilled political and social anxieties as the country coped with the aftermath of mass death and casualties. Purcell shows how large-scale funerals for figures such as Henry Clay and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson set patterns for mourning culture and Civil War commemoration; after 1865, public funerals for figures such as Robert E. Lee, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, and Winnie Davis elaborated on these patterns and fostered public debate about the meanings of the war, Reconstruction, race, and gender.
From the late 1930s through the mid-1980s, it was truly the Cadillac of Cadillacs—the car of choice for the titans of American business, government and the entertainment industry. The stately long-wheelbase Cadillac Fleetwood Seventy-Five Eight-Passenger Sedan and Imperial Limousine occupied an exalted niche at the very pinnacle of the automotive pecking order in the U.S. and abroad. Whatever the destination—embassy, corporate head office, hotel, airport or Hollywood red carpet—when one arrived in a Cadillac Fleetwood Seventy-Five, one had truly arrived! Introduced in 1937, Cadillac’s new Series 75 included 11 Fleetwood body styles ranging from coupes and convertibles to a seven-passenger touring sedan. In 1938, the restyled Series 75 got what was destined to become its signature body style —a severely formal long-wheelbase sedan and companion limousine. Cadillac Fleetwood Seventy-Five business sedans and limousines quickly won favor with commercial livery operators and funeral directors, challenging rival Packard’s long domination of this small but prestigious market. By 1941 the Fleetwood Seventy-Five name was reserved exclusively for General Motors Corporation’s flagship car—the long-wheelbase formal sedan and companion limousine with glass division.
Critically acclaimed author Robert Klara's The Devil's Mercedes chases down one of the most improbable stories of the postwar era: the national drama that erupted when Hitler’s armored limousine surfaced in the US. In 1938, Mercedes-Benz began production of the largest, most luxurious limousine in the world. A machine of frightening power and sinister beauty, the Grosser 770K Model 150 Offener Tourenwagen was 20 feet long, seven feet wide, and tipped the scales at 5 tons. Its supercharged, 230-horsepower engine propelled the beast to speeds over 100 m.p.h. while its occupants reclined on glove-leather seats stuffed with goose down. Armor plated and equipped with hidden compartments for Luger pistols, the 770K was a sumptuous monster with a monstrous patron: Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party. Deployed mainly for propaganda purposes before the war, the hand-built limousines—in which Hitler rode standing in the front seat—motored through elaborate rallies and appeared in countless newsreels, swiftly becoming the Nazi party’s most durable symbol of wealth and power. Had Hitler not so thoroughly dominated the scene with his own megalomania, his opulent limousine could easily have eclipsed him. Most of the 770Ks didn’t make it out of the rubble of World War II. But several of them did. And two of them found their way, secretly and separately, to the United States. In The Devil’s Mercedes, author Robert Klara uncovers the forgotten story of how Americans responded to these rolling relics of fascism on their soil. The limousines made headlines, drew crowds, made fortunes and ruined lives. What never became public was how both of the cars would ultimately become tangled in a web of confusion, mania, and opportunism, fully entwined in a story of mistaken identity. Nobody knew that the limousine touted as Hitler’s had in fact never belonged to him, while the Mercedes shrugged off as an ordinary staff car—one later abandoned in a warehouse and sold off as government surplus—turned out to be none other than Hitler’s personal automobile. It would take 40 years, a cast of carnies and millionaires, the United States Army, and the sleuthing efforts of an obscure Canadian librarian to bring the entire truth to light. As he recounts this remarkable drama, Klara probes the meaning of these haunting hulks and their power to attract, excite and disgust. The limousines’ appearance collided with an American populous celebrating a victory even as it sought to stay a step ahead of the war’s ghosts. Ultimately, The Devil’s Mercedes isn’t only the story of a rare and notorious car, but what that car taught postwar America about itself.
Josh Slocum and Lisa Carlson are the two most prominent advocates of consumer rights in dealing with the death industry. Here they combine efforts to inform consumers of their rights and propose long-needed reforms. Slocum is executive director of Funeral Consumers Alliance, a national nonprofit with over 90 local affiliates nationwide. Carlson is executive director of Funeral Ethics Organization, which works with the industry to try to improve ethical standards. In addition to nationwide issues, the book covers state-by-state information needed by anybody who wishes to take charge of funeral arrangements for a loved one, with or without the help of a funeral director. More information about the book and related issues can be found at www.finalrights.org .
The April 1945 journey of FDR's funeral train became a thousand-mile odyssey, fraught with heartbreak and scandal. As it passed through the night, few of the grieving onlookers gave thought to what might be happening behind the Pullman shades, where women whispered and men tossed back highballs. Inside was a Soviet spy, a newly widowed Eleanor Roosevelt, who had just discovered that her husband's mistress was in the room with him when he died, all the Supreme Court justices, and incoming president Harry S. Truman who was scrambling to learn secrets FDR had never shared with him. Weaving together information from long-forgotten diaries and declassified Secret Service documents, journalist and historian Robert Klara enters the private world on board that famous train. He chronicles the three days during which the country grieved and despaired as never before, and a new president hammered out the policies that would galvanize a country in mourning and win the Second World War.