For Reagan mortician, the 'honor of a lifetime'

[Khephra]

Simi Valley , Ventura County -- He was the last person to lay eyes on Ronald Reagan.

On Saturday night, hours after the former president was transported to a Santa Monica funeral home, Bob Boetticher went to work. He had trained for this day all his life, since deciding as a teenager that he would be a funeral director. With Secret Service agents outside the door, he began to care for a man he respected in life and was now responsible for in death.

Boetticher, stout and watchful, would do far more than prepare the president's body for burial: He organized the paperwork, helped the family select an appropriate casket, worked with a dozen security agencies, drove the hearse in a miles-long procession, even pressed the American flag that drapes the coffin.

This ordinary citizen was called on to manage an extraordinary event that will culminate Friday with the sunset burial in Simi Valley of the nation's 40th president. In interviews at the funeral home and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library earlier this week, Boetticher, 59, had tears in his eyes as he talked about "the honor of a lifetime."

more............................

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/06/09/MNGFT72OVO89.DTL

[Cronus Protagonist]

1. I wonder if he ever moved Reagan's jaw up and down

And pretended he was Reagan.... "Give me one for the Gipper", "I don't recall"... using Reagan's body as a puppet.

Click here for "BLAME BUSH FIRST", and other fair and balanced yet stunning buttons, magnets and stickers

[niceypoo]

21. I would have wiped a booger on him

and drew a word balloon on his ass that said "Fart!"

[Judi Lynn]

2. Apparently it doesn't take much to make this man happy. n/t

[AdrianInOcala]

3. Huh?

Secret service agents outside the door.....Guys, what are you trying to protect him from now? A worse hairdo and makeup job than he had as president?

[Lithos]

5. Probably someone taking pictures of the body

is their biggest fear as I suspect 10 years of Alzheimers plus general old age have left the body in very poor shape.

L-

[wicket]

12. Sick

People are so sick to want to take a picture of that, but I'm sure the tabloids would pay big $$ for the shot. *puke*

[noonwitch]

15. It's a tradition in some places to take a picture of the dead person

Lying in his or her casket after the undertaker has finished preparing the body. I think it's kind of a southern thing-I've seen family albums with those kind of pictures in them in homes of people who are from the south, white and black. And, the owners of the pictures will say to you, "This is great aunt Minnie and didn't she look pretty in that dress when we buried her?".

Nobody where I grew up in Grand Rapids did this. I never saw it until I moved to Detroit. I was shocked the first time someone showed me a picture like that.

It is really ghoulish when the media/tabloids publish pictures like that. It's one thing for a family to keep a picture, but we all don't need to see it.

[BiggJawn]

16. Freaked me out the first time I saw that...

I was a young man of 20, working on an assembly line, and one of my co-workers was passing around snaps of a family gathering back "home"....

"And here's my cousin..."

"Whoa! what's she doing in a COFFIN???"

"Why, she DIED, silly! I was there for her funeral..."

[trotsky]

20. It definitely seems to be a southern thing.

My wife is from NC and shortly after she moved up here she was showing me family pictures. Her dad died in 1986, and she pulls out these pictures of his gravesite, and then there's some from the wake, showing his body right there in the coffin!

Yeah, I am not usually freaked out by things like that but it just really took me by surprise. I had never seen or heard of anyone doing that here in MN either.

[Lars39]

27. The practice used to be popular in the Old West days, too...

dead guys propped up in caskets, baby's in christening gowns, etc. Still kinda creepy, though.

[othermeans]

48. It was called Memorial Photography. A good book on the subject is:

Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America

[TahitiNut]

30. Like this?

[TahitiNut]

32. Or this?

[nonbelief]

31. Well...my family....

When my father was dying in hospital, his Sicilian relatives, who had flown to Australia, came and took "before" and "after" pics with a disposable camera they bought in the lobby gift shop, including some of him a few seconds after his death...All I could think was ..."gross!"

[ronnykmarshall]

35. My step mom is like that.

She has so many pictures of my dad when he died. She helped dress him and basically ran the funeral.

She's a real pistol.

When I kick that bucket, shove my ol' carcas in oven and throw the ashes in the sea.

None of that casket stuff for my old bones.

[Throckmorton]

49. Sadly, my 7 year old was fairly upset when she was told there,

where no pictures of her mother in her casket. She then proceeded to draw a few for her memory book. In retrospect, I wonder if a picture should have been taken, and then stored away for the distant past.

[LTR]

17. Keep an eye on Rotten.com

Lots of celebrity morgue shots show up there.

[Lithos]

22. They exist

Even more morbid is that someone would want to kidnap the body.

L-

[m-jean03]

33. Woo hoo!

Can you say "Weekend at Ronnie's" ?? :P

[Scurrilous]

25. The tabloids refer to that...

...as the 'box shot.' I believe the biggest selling Enquirer issue of all time was the one with the cover picture of Elvis in his casket.

[Baltimoreboy]

14. Or theft

For anti-Reagan or anti-U.S. elements it would be one hell of a victory.

I think once you become a candidate and win, the Secret Service protects you until you are in the ground.

[devinsgram]

23. He is probably not recognizable anymore.

[arwalden]

4. Reagan Worshipping Gets Creepy And Ghoulish.

[SoDesuKa]

6. Hard Up for News?

The week-long Festival of Mourning has its low moments. The press is running out of stories. Say! Let's interview the mortician.

[RummyTheDummy]

45. Nah. That's not what was going on.

When Kennedy died, Jimmy Breslin interviewed the guy who dug his grave and wrote about it. Breslin's piece is often used in journalism schools as an example of innovative reporting.

What I suspect is the author was trying to copy the concept, poorly I might add.

[Darth_Kitten]

7. It doesn't take much...........

:puke: Honestly, how ghoulish and sick.

[dusty64]

8. Ick, this is ghoulishly

disgusting.

[Don_G]

9. It Would Be An Honor For Me Too

"Trust, but verify."

[TheWatcher]

10. We have become a Nation of Ghouls

Is there any doubt that this country is free-wheeling towards an utter collapse with sentiment such as this?

Where does this end?

Should we all don Togas now and simply act and behave as those we seem to so grossly wish to emulate, that other Ghoulish like bunch from so many centuries ago?

ARE WE NOT ENTERTAINED?

[llmart]

26. I've been thinking about this alot lately, too.

Our country is forever flying the flag at half staff for everything, building memorials to everybody and their brothers, 24/7 news coverage of death/destruction etc. Is this the direction we want our society to go? I personally don't take part in it, but I think it'll have a backlash, if it hasn't already.

[LittleApple81]

11. I didn't know that Dr. Frits had volunteered to further service Reagan

and his country...oops, another mortician got the contract? He must be feeling snubbed.

[Judi Lynn]

13. If he found this one funeral fulfilling, he would have loved this event

One of Reagan's favorite right-wing dictators, Efraín Rios Montt:

Massacre at Río Negro
The Annihalation of a Village Along the Black River on March 13, 1982


According to testimony, in the early part of 1982 over 70 men, accused of guerilla activities, from Río Negro were murdered. They perished in the hands of the Civil Patrols (PAC - "Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil" - paramilitary organizations that are subordinate to the army) from the neighboring village of Xococ. Due to this incident the rest of the men fled the village in fear that something similar would happen to them. They left their women and children behind, assuming nothing would happen to them.
The Civil Patrols are an institution which was installed by the military in the early 1980's in order to maintain control over the rural areas as an counter-insurgency measure. Civilians "voluntarily" have to spend several days a month patrolling their village. Their arms are supplied by the military and usually consist of old WWII US M-1 Carbines.

On March 13, 1982 some 80 women and 100 children were
led by the military and Civil Patrollers to the top of the
mountain, where they were brutally assassinated. Their bodies
were thrown into a ravine, which drains the rain water during
the rainy season (from May to August).

During the investigation conducted in the lab from December
1993 to April 1994, the lab analysis resulted demonstrating
that the victims were exclusively women and children. Most
of the skeletal remains were found disarticulated due to years
of erosion and scavenging. Therefore, the calculation of the
minimum number of individuals, which is 143, differs from the
numbers obtained from testimony, which lay above 180 people.
Especially difficult turned out to be the analysis of the many
child and infant remains.

The most frequent causes of death were the following: blows to
the neck, blows to the cranium, gunshot wounds and stab wounds from knives and machetes.
(snip/...)http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~sss4407/RioNeg.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I think silence always contributes to genocide everywhere in the world. It happened in Rwanda, it happened in Bosnia until the international community decided to respond. In Guatemala, the international community responded really too late. We began going to the U.N. General Assembly in 1982, exactly in the first year of the Rios Montt regime. That was the first General Assembly where different Guatemalans living in exile brought the case. There was a good response. There was interest in it. There was sort of a lukewarm resolution, but there was no clear condemnation of what was happening. The Reagan government in Washington was saying that the press in Guatemala and the international press were giving Rios Montt a "bum rap" — literally, that was his phrase — and it was unfair because Rios Montt was doing whatever he could to establish law and order... by killing everyone.

In the case of the U.S. government, it's interesting that the Carter Administration had actually canceled military assistance to Guatemala. And it was Carter's policies, as much as they were criticized later, that saved the U.S. from a direct participation in this effort of genocide. One of the reasons why the Guatemalan military was so violent and so bloody was because they had very little resources. They couldn't fight from Monday through Friday and then fly back home for the weekend, like they could in El Salvador. And so the army in Guatemala decided to compensate with violence for what they didn't have in resources — especially air resources, helicopters and planes. This is why the campaign was a campaign of terror, of organized terror from the state. You have to terrify the population into absolute fear so they respond to what you want.

And I would say the U.S. did not participate directly, to the extent that the Carter policies had canceled the aid. But the U.S., in the Reagan years, would be responsible for the cover-up, with Reagan himself trying to defend Rios Montt, folks at the State Department during those first years trying to deny what was happening in Guatemala. Twenty years later you have the U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission saying there was genocide in Guatemala between 1981 and 1983. So now it's an unchallengeable truth.
(snip/...)

http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2003/discoveringdominga/special_witnessfl.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Reagan supported the brutal, genocidal Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt. It was during the same time period that Saddam Hussein was killing Shiites.

Rios Montt killed many more "of his own people" than Saddam did.

A UN-sponsored Truth Commission held the Guatemalan army responsible for 85 percent of all violations in the 30 year war, which ended in l996. Some 200,000 died, more than 80 percent of them unarmed Maya, including women and children.

". . .after meeting Rios Montt in Honduras later that month, President Reagan insisted that the regime was ‘getting a bad deal’ from the accusations of massacres and deserved renewed military aid from the United States (which he granted the following month). Had not the White House received a flood of letters calling for renewed arms sales to Guatemala after Pat Robertson appealed to his 700 Culb television show for prayers and money for the regime?
- Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, HarperCollins Publisher, 1995, p. 818-19
(snip/...)

http://www.angelfire.com/co/COMMONSENSE/reagan.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From a new D.U. poster:

According to Amnesty International, in just four months there were more than 2,000 fully documented extrajudicial killings by the Guatemalan army: 'People of all ages were not only shot, they were burned alive, hacked to death, disembowelled, drowned, beheaded. Small children were smashed against rocks or bayoneted to death.' The Catholic bishops said: 'Never in our national history has it come to such extremes.' US President Ronald Reagan, visiting Guatemala on a swing through Latin America, hailed Rios Montt as 'totally dedicated to democracy'.
(snip/...)

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zeroes/Efrain_Rios_Montt.html

[BiggJawn]

18. Did he get the DNA stuff Peggy Noonan wanted?

We'll know if she turns up pregnant in a few months...

[Judi Lynn]

43. If ANYONE in the world would do that, she's the one! Ha. n/t

[Coventina]

19. One word: Yikes

[kskiska]

24. I've heard strange but true stories about morticians

He couldn't have known, though, how it would feel to be in a room alone with a man he had revered…

Hmmmmmmmm.

[DS1]

28. Do they make bulletproof caskets?

/wondering

[republicansareevil]

29. But this is what funeral directors/morticians do.

I imagine many people go into that profession not because of some ghoulish fascination with death, but because they want to help families through a difficult time, and to see that people are laid to rest with dignity. The fact that this man revered Reagan - well, I don't see that as making him an evil person.

[riverwalker]

34. I still wonder about the closed casket

I did hear one reporter say the family "chose not to treat his pneumonia", which is why he died at home and not a hospital. If he was only given supportive hospice home care, they may have removed his feeding tube as well and he probably lost much weight and looked awful when he died. I think Saint Nancy didn't want these details known.

[ronnykmarshall]

36. and why should these details be known?

[bluedog]

37. just maybe the details

should have been known...think for a minute.....heres this man who was tall and pretty well fit.thats the pictures they are showing...how about the honest picture of what he became.what this disease does to people......think people who oppose this stem cell want to see the way their idol ended up?? This could have benefited the rally to increase this research!!
Sorry.....just my opinion!

[kskiska]

38. Nancy kept him hidden away for 10 years

Maybe it would have been better for her cause if she'd let it be known just what Alzheimer's does to a person.

[mockmonkey]

39. I want to know

how the mortician is keeping the Teflon President from sliding around inside his box.

[tom_paine]

40. Like the Lenin Embalmer

"And they shall be made to worship the First Beast who death stroke was healed."
--The Book of Revelations

[dsc]

41. He has every right to be immensly proud

If there is a bigger honor for a mortician than handling the body of a dead President, I can't phathom what that would be. I must say I would be swelled with pride if I were considered a good enough teacher to teach the children or grandchildren of a President, even if I didn't like or out right hated the President.

[Paragon]

42. Wonkette: "It's about as close as you can get to necrophilia..."

"...without actually fucking the corpse." :7

http://www.wonkette.com/archives/gipperporn-that-rope-line-is-there-for-a-reason-015923.php

[saracat]

44. Housten Based Service International?

And he works for the military? And he has known for years that he would do this? And he was flown from Texas?And he is a Republican who specializes in political funerals? Sound like there is a story here and its not the one that is posted. This sounds government controlled and by someone who can be trusted to keep his mouth shut.

[Buns_of_Fire]

46. It somehow reads like "The Godfather"

You know, when Don Vito calls in the mortician to perform that "one small service" on behalf of Sonny (who'd just been killed on the causeway). Use all your powers, as you love me.

Ghoulish. But then, all other news stopped the day... the Gipper... died...

And we were singing
Bye, bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry...

[GaryL]

47. I say stuff him and add animatronics!

He can still do his stuff (no pun intended) at Disney. BTW, only a freakin' mortician would view that as an honor (and yes, I've had a number of morticians as friends an they're all weird).

[bitchkitty]

50. Kind of a cool job, although it has a certain ick factor.

I would put blue eyeshadow on Ronald and spike his hair. Liven him up a bit for the media.

[Ezlivin]

51. New Episode of "Six Feet Under"

Perhaps Reagan is a part of the new season?