We're celebrating love, huh? He always knew that the real traffic was between the living and the dead, and it is in managing that and emboldening the living to deal with their dead that you do them the most service. Simon Vanderhopper: Yes sir, I don't let the grass grow under my feet! His dramatic life story is so well-known that schoolchildren are taught to recite it for extra credit. I really think my people will know what to do when the time comes, and these are details I won't have to worry about. And there's somebody else arranging the flowers. When Riley learns that the couple is to spend their honeymoon in separate rooms, he becomes suspicious. The only place your son will get his picture is in the post office. Digger O-Dell And The Friendly Undertakers. But the strange case of Digby "Digger" O'Dell offers an elegant counterpoint. Digger: Every good undertaker has his ear to the ground - we pick up a lot of dirt that way. People will know that. For years, it was propped against a rugged concrete base, in a cluster of crepe myrtles on the southern edge of the park, close to the intersection of Poplar and Cooper. No word on whether anyone felt like carrying on the family tradition. I thought, this guy could play it. And does the rise in cremation in America parallel changes in demographics? Slap, slap, slap Rip, Rip, Rip it's over! Babs, however, has her heart set on Jeff and rejects Burt's advances. I'll treat her just like she wasn't my wife. And the components of a funeral sometimes change. When the film opened in New York at the Loew's Criterion theater in April 1949, Bosley Crowther, film critic for The New York Times turned his nose up at it writing, "As one whom domestic expediency occasionally compels to bear with the Friday night bull-bellowing of one Chester A. Riley on the radio, this reviewer can state with fair authority that no artistic advantage has been gained by making this same Mr. Riley and his family apparent on the screen." His real name, it seems, was Herbert O'Dell Smith. Chester A. Riley: "Babs Riley Featured in Annual School Follies". We'd be wise, as a culture, to examine some of these things. He didnt come close to breaking his record. For more than 30 years he also has been the director of the Lynch & Sons funeral home in the small town of Milford, Mich. I mean, if it was just a matter of forgetting, we would do that. So we learn to live with it. But I remember coming home after the mass and the burial and the luncheon, getting back to her house -- it was about 3:00-ish in the afternoon -- and thinking, "The trick-or-treaters are coming." Not sure where the voice actor was inspired from, but Mancubus sounds exactly like Digger O'Dell, the friendly undertaker from the old Life of Rile Press J to jump to the feed. Jim Gillis: Sure! [6][7], The NBC adaptation, also created by Irving Brecher, was a single-season Are social changes the reasons that we are more fearful and reluctant to deal with death in our everyday lives? Crowther concluded, "[W]e suppose there are millions who will like this sort of truck. He then is embarrassed in front of the Monahans when Junior appears with his full piggy bank, having been unable to open it, and during a struggle with the waiter, the bank falls to the ground and breaks. Once Riley declares to Stevenson that he does not want the promotion, Babs realizes she is free and runs into Jeff's waiting arms. The stock market is open. And we laugh sometimes at all those good memories and all those silly things the person said and all those wise things that that person said and all their foibles. There's this wonderful essay that was written -- I have it framed in the hallway there; the woman's name, I think, is Sullivan who wrote it. Chester A. Riley: Do I have a hole in my neck? Chester A. Riley: No. What we have missed, however, in cremation in this culture is all the powerful metaphoric values provided by fire, its elemental worth. Acti-Sol Hen Manure is one popular product that has been used with success by experienced, This website uses cookies for functionality, analytics and advertising purposes as described in our. I said NO! 1 Does it make it easier? The elements are the elements. We bid you welcome. Copyright 2022 Memphis Magazine. I have children at home; my wife had taken them home from the luncheon. And I've seen it work, I've seen it work. So we weep and we laugh, we laugh and we sing, and we try to work our way around this changed reality in much the same way a death in the family articulates this changed reality. It's ridiculous, it's mundane, it's stupid, but at the end of the day what we are trying to do is assemble all our metaphoric weapons to do battle with this hurt, this still thing. Riley, Riley, what a guy! Stevenson's ne'er-do-well son Burt, meanwhile, is cornered at the picnic by a thug named Norman, who demands that he repay a $25,000 gambling debt. I think they used to call that "social death"; that actual death happens like that. What a revoltin' development, indeed." Peg Riley: My father let me decide who I wanted to go around with. Junior Riley: Why don't you wet a piece of confetti and drown your brain? Another time, firefighters rescued him after he apparently suffered a heart attack underground. We're doing our best to make sure our content is useful, accurate and safe.If by any chance you spot an inappropriate comment while navigating through our website please use this form to let us know, and we'll take care of it shortly. It's amazing! But he said, "When a death occurs, people feel so helpless, it's good to have some of these things already invented." Digby 'Digger' O'Dell : Why, I was just taking a stroll around the pond. Whats more, said one newspaper, in his heyday, he could knock down $15,000 for a 60-day burial. At the mobile home park, the only money he brought home came from contributions. But you've seen people come in that are agnostics or --. And they take a very sharp instrument. I know it won't matter, it will be others, but do you see yourself as the fire or the earth, or --? This character was extremelly successfull, with many puns based on his profession. I found an old newspaper article that said he was born in 1915 and called him a professional endurance man. Among other things, back in the flagpole-sitting days, he stayed aloft 109 days. Why would he leave his wife? Chester A. Riley: Yeah! Mrs. Abigail Uppington, the wimpy Wallace Wimple and the "friendly undertaker," Digger O'Dell. (CONTINUES HUMMING IN BG) ANNOUNCER: But don't go there searching for a tombstone marked Digger O'Dell. It is a sadness and a shame that cremation, the fire in this context, is seen as an industrial process instead of an elemental one, in the way that earth is elemental. For 28 years, the CHFB has been the essential site for classic horror news, research and enthusiasm. Sign Up now to stay up to date with all of the latest news from TCM. Here in Milford we're around 40 percent, and there are places where it's 60 percent and places where it's 16 percent. j.b., memphis. Chester A. Riley: Okay, maybe he ain't no Gregory Peck, but my boy's got it up here [points to head] . It follows the changes in our species, certainly in our culture. See production, box office & company info, Universal Studios - 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, California, USA. And is that the purposefulness in the ebb and flow of a wake and a funeral? When Burt finally tells Babs about his financial predicament and suggests that they marry quickly so that Riley can keep his job and he can save his life, Babs reluctantly agrees. So it's interesting times we live in that way. And something is. It gives us a way to get some little mastery over these uncontrollable things by giving it a narrative thread. By Lorraine LoBianco. The program even utilized a stable of so-called "silent" characters, individuals referred to often but never actually heard. [citation needed], The series was co-developed by the nonperforming Marx Brother turned agent Gummo. Chester A. Riley is back, with long-suffering wife Peg, trouble-prone kids Junior and Babs, moochy pal Gillis, and Digger O'Dell, The Friendly Undertaker in sixteen hilarious half-hour episodes. It is the ridiculous and the sublime. For more and more people it's a trip to the crematory and some variation on the wake where people pay different types of witness. What is it, a boy or a girl? main photograph corbis, all rights reserved Maybe bigger. So yeah, I do find that people who have dealt with their dying -- whether it was taking them to their chemotherapy or sitting those weeks through hospice care, or checking in those weeks through hospice care, because we can't always be physically present -- those people who were thoroughly engaged with this are thoroughly engaged with the rest of it. He noted that "the grave that he can't escape from" is located in Sawnee View Memorial Gardens, just outside of Cummings, Georgia. I needed to read that piece because I'm disinclined -- when someone's sick, when someone's out of sorts, when someone's dead -- I'm disinclined to be around that. And the things we have to do in that period of two days or three days, that's also largely what you do for us, is that right? Except I want to send out those circulars, so bring me some round paper. Even a criminal gets time off for good behavior. It's not that you don't want to see them dressed up or laid out or with glasses on, or too much makeup or their hair done in a clumsy way. The CBS program starred Lionel Stander as J. Riley Farnsworth and had no real connection with the more famous series that followed a few years later. Aware that he can use his grandfather's trust money if he marries with the approval of his father, Burt decides to pursue the wholesome Babs. John Brown returned as the morbid, counseling undertaker Digby (Digger) O'Dell. Still, as every grieving person knows, we have to reinvent the wheel in which we are now orphaned. While readying for Monahan, Riley's daughter Babs, a serious-minded college student, catches the eye of Miss Bogle's handsome young nephew, Jeff Taylor. We are more mobile, more portable, more scattered. He calculated that he had been "buried alive" 94 times, and some of these almost ended his life. Give me a sense of the changes in attitudes toward death in America. Do they get through it better? And I'm, along with the next guy, as interested in those cartoons as everyone else is. You'd better stop talking that way. She has her picture on the front page. The supporting cast featured Paula Winslowe as Riley's wife, Peg, and as Riley's mother-in law; Brown as O'Dell and as Riley's co-worker Jim Gillis; Francis "Dink" Trout as Waldo Binney; Tommy Cook, Bobby Ellis and Scotty Beckett as Junior at various times during the show's run; Barbara Eiler as Riley's daughter, Babs; Shirley Mitchell as Honeybee Gillis; Hans Conried as Uncle Baxter; and Alan Reed as multiple characters, including Riley's boss (Mr. Stevenson) and Peg's father. How different is confronting death without faith? We make appointments for cremations because we have to go and watch the placement of the body in the retort and the beginning of the process, the identification process that's part of that, and we retrieve the ashes. 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