The Roswell Report: Case Closed

or dress inspection where the doctors came in and examined the body to make sure everything was right. You had another inspection to make sure their dog tags, make sure all the medals and everything...

They always had two crews of inspectors. The doctors were only involved in the cause of death or the autopsies or identification process, dental charts and all that. After they did their work, then a doctor would always come in and make sure the body was embalmed because [they] know more about it than the other people. But they were involved before. You know.

Q: The reason they contacted you was because Burt Ballard's funeral home up here had a contract with the base, right?

A: Yeah.

Q: You worked for Burt for a lot of years, didn't you?

A: Yeah, a long time.

Q: When did you first go to work for him?

A: I went to work for him, I was hanging around the funeral home when I was like a freshman in high school. I'd want to make some extra money. "I'll give you 50 cents to wash the hearse." I knew his daughter real well. We were all in school together. That's where I really got involved in the funeral home. I just kind of worked my way in it.

Q: He basically taught you the trade and all that.

A: Oh, yeah. My folks weren't in the funeral business.

Q: The reason I was curious about it was because when I went back... I'm one of these guys that goes to Washington and then gets fed up and leaves and swears I'm never going to go back, and then I go back anyway. But the last time I went back and did that, I shared a townhouse with a guy for awhile who was a mortician from Michigan. But he had to go through all this formal training and all this rigmarole...

A: No. That started in (inaudible). Maybe you don't want to hear this, but I was in the 9th grade, and this teacher was going around and wanted us to write a composition on what we wanted to be when we graduated from school. What were our future plans. I was kind of a wise guy, I guess I must have been, but I said undertaker, and I don't even know why. All the girls squealed, so I got a little attention. Then she said okay, if that's what you want to do then you've got a week, you bring me your composition. I want to know why you want to be an undertaker.

So I went to the funeral home. They didn't have any books in those days or anything, but that's where I went. That's why I got involved in it, started.

Q: How long were you in that business before you... I know you ran the Wortley Hotel up in Lincoln [N.M.].

A: Oh, that was after I retired.