'Any day above ground is a good one'
My interview with freelance embalmer and "mortician for the mob" Joe Vitacco
Inspiration is one of those things you can’t force … but you can certainly provoke it.
I can often find it reading a passage from a favorite book or short story (“The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy” is a great one), or watching a clip from an old movie (Charlie Chaplin’s speech in “The Great Dictator,” for instance), or listening to a good song (anything by Tyler Childers will do). But I can also elicit inspiration by going back to some of my own writings.
Reading over old stories of mine — those that I feel proud of — reminds me not only of why I do what I do, but of my own sometimes forgotten and neglected abilities as a writer and storyteller. Of both the internal struggle to adequately capture another person’s often very personal story as well as the deep sense of satisfaction that comes from having done so.
This reminder is often just enough to reignite that flame, motivating me to put pen to paper once again.
I recently re-read one such piece from my master’s class “The Literature of Fact.” The assignment: to interview and write about someone as they went about their job (a police officer, chef, teacher, you name it). I decided to do one better and accompany a mortician on the job. The idea made me uncomfortable, so I knew I had to do it.
Fortunately, my subject, Joe Vitacco, had a great sense of humor and innumerable stories to tell, and while this article was written nearly 15 years ago and I haven’t spoken with him since (I’m not even sure he’s still around), it still has a power to it. It speaks to the writer I was and the writer I still want (and hope) to be. And it’s the type of story I aspire to write more of for Spirit & Sword.
I hope you enjoy reading Joe’s story as much as I enjoyed writing it 15 years ago — and that you find some inspiration in it as well.
ANY GOOD MORTICIAN knows that the mouth is the focal point of the body. When people kneel at the casket, they’re looking directly at the mouth, so it has to look good.
This is one of the things Joe Vitacco has learned over the years, among others. He now knows the difference between loose and pressed makeup and the fact that Europeans wear wedding rings on the opposite hand. He’s discovered the many uses of super glue, as well as how to work in the dark.
Joe is a freelance embalmer. At 71-years-old he’s been in the business for 49 years and made a killing. However, what was once a lucrative trade is now a dying one. “Cremation is at 34 percent in Chicago; it’s really cutting in on us (embalmers),” Joe says. Despite business slowing down—he used to average 1,000 bodies per year, three to four per day—he still averages one body per day. As he proudly tells me, he once held backdoor keys to almost every funeral home in Chicago. But Joe isn’t just a mortician; he’s a teacher, a storyteller.
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“COME HERE AND take a look at this, Alex,” he says to me, making no attempts to mask his enthusiasm. Joe is leaning over the body of 86-year-old Ernest Rydell, his latest client. Before today Ernest would have towered over Joe. Now his body lay barely able to fit on the table, his purple feet hanging off the end—an indicator of diabetes, Joe tells me.
A black rubber apron extends almost to Joe’s ankles, giving an inkling as to his height. He’s 5’5,” a characteristic he blames on the Cubs. “I should really be 6’4”, but the Cubs stunted my growth,” he says. An avid fan his whole life, he’d go to games as a kid, eat two hot dogs and drink a Pepsi. They’d lose. “I’d go home and not eat dinner because I was so depressed, then I’d wake up and not eat breakfast because I was so depressed,” he says.
Joe’s personality and energy put a 24-year-old like myself to shame. The best, if not the only, indicator of Joe’s age is his hair—a stark white mingled with a few grays. He speaks with an accent. It’s almost indistinguishable—not quite Italian, not quite Jersey, not quite New York; but it sounds like a little of each. “Are you Italian?” I ask—his name not enough of an indicator for me. “Mediterranean Irish,” he says. He has to explain it to me. A joke.
“ONCE YOU STAND up, you won’t sit back down,” he says. I reluctantly get up from my chair and walk around the table. “See here, I cut the right common carotid artery. This is where I inject the fluid.” I sit back down on the wooden, white cushioned chair by the door, next to the hanging rosaries.
We are in the backroom of Adolf Funeral Home in Berwyn—one of Joe’s three remaining accounts, which include the two Adolf’s and Coletta. Adolf is surrounded by the many bungalow-style homes Berwyn is known for, as well as fast food joints and old savings and loan buildings that now house a variety of businesses. The room’s walls are covered in sea-foam green porcelain tile, reminiscent of a 1960s bathroom. The floor is concrete. Tall army-green and fading tan cabinets line parts of three of the walls.
I remember Joe’s white 2002 Camaro, which seemed out of place as I passed it on my way in the back door. “Nice car,” I say. “Oh, it’s not a car. It’s a chick magnet,” he says.
JOE SPRAYS DISINFECTANT on the body. It smells like Clorox and…slightly like a nursing home. He continues talking—describing every step of the embalming process. It’s obvious he loves what he does.
“I don’t know if you want to include this, but I’ve returned two bodies over the years that weren’t dead,” he says. “One came back the next day. I never saw the other one again.”
Dead bodies don’t bleed, Joe tells me. When blood shoots out it’s a clear indicator the person isn’t dead. I’m thankful that isn’t the case today.
Joe places the head on a head block, elevating it to avoid what he calls “stargazing”—when the head is tilted too far back. Don’t forget the dentures. He produces them from his grip, roughly placing them in Ernest’s mouth. Cotton for under the bottom lip. He stops, takes a pair of pliers from his grip and pulls a tooth. Next he pulls out a Double S-curve autopsy needle (the largest there is) and begins sewing the mouth shut. “Some guys use the smallest needle,” he says. “But geez, this isn’t the Olympics.”
JOE WAS BORN in 1940. His father was a Cook County doctor and eventually medical director for the Chicago Board of Education. His mother was a homemaker, raising their five kids. Joe was the oldest of the five, which included a brother and three sisters. His younger years were spent in the west side of Chicago. When he was 12 his family moved to River Forest, where he lives with his wife Janet to this day.
After completing grade school at Willard Elementary, he went away to St. John’s Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin, and then went on to get his B.S. in Biology from Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois.
Once back from college, Joe began hanging around a funeral home in Oak Park, where the career as an embalmer fell into his lap. “We’d party, and then we wouldn’t go home because we were having too much fun,” he says. He attributes his decision to go to mortuary school to two things: “having it too good at home” and a lack of a desire to go to medical school. Whatever the reason, he graduated from Worsham College of Mortuary Science in 1963 and went on to do a two-year apprenticeship.
THE PHONE, ATTACHED to the wall behind my head, keeps ringing. “It’s not too good when that phone keeps ringing,” Joe says.
He rapidly moves around the room, knocking the large roll of cotton on the floor, dropping a pair of scissors. He may seem a bit clumsy at times, or a little unfocused, but he knows what he’s doing. He bends the hands and arms to break rigamortis. Turns on a pump to counteract Berwyn’s weak water pressure. Clips what little hair Ernest has. Shoves cotton up his nose, causing a crunching sound. I cringe.
From behind Joe’s large, silver-framed glasses he occasionally glances at the body, while paying more attention to our conversation—really leading it. From time to time I’m able to slip in a word or two.
“I make it look easy,” he says. “I can do a lot of things at one time. You see, I’m not even looking at the body. You’d think I was at the mesquite rodeo or something.”
Joe basically has free range when it comes to the bodies. Funeral directors trust him and don't feel the need to check in on him. It’s a good thing he takes pride in a job done well…and easily. “Pa could come out looking like Ma. They don’t know. They don’t come down here,” he says as he takes a bottle of embalming fluid from one of the cabinets. “There were two times I didn’t know if it was a man or a woman. I was too shit-faced.”
DESPITE JOE’S OBVIOUS lack of height, he’s still not what I’d expect for someone who proudly claims the title “mortician for the mob,” specifically the Italian mob.
His relationship with the Mob goes way back. He shared the same neighborhood with Mobsters growing up, many of whom were patients of his father. River Forest, with its sprawling front lawns and lavish houses, was and still is where they call home. Joe knew mobster Tony Accardo, also known as “Joe Batters” or “Big Tuna,” a mob boss who was said to have participated in the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Joe went to school with Accardo’s daughters and could often be found hanging around with them. Joe’s nickname “Pins” was even given to him by Accardo after a bowling excursion with the family.
In more recent years, Joe’s even done several bus tours of River Forest, called Drag the River Tour, to showcase mobster’s homes.
EFFICIENT IS A possible word to describe Joe. The shortest amount of time it took him to embalm a body, from embalming, clothing and getting it in the casket—35 minutes. He had Sinatra tickets. It took that same amount of time for another mortician he knows to pluck the nose hairs from a body. A fact that is preposterous to Joe. “Thirty-five minutes!” he shrieks as he lights a match from a small matchbook and holds it to Ernest’s nostrils.
Joe knows how to keep himself entertained. He’s performed what he calls an air raid embalming; he did an embalming with the lights off. “The funeral director comes back and asks what I’m doing. I tell him I’m practicing for an air raid,” he tells me. “He says to me, ‘If there’s an air raid fuck the body and save yourself.’”
Joe’s just a good guy. He did work for the Second Life Pacemaker Foundation; he would collect used, but undamaged, pacemakers from bodies he worked on and donate them to people in developing countries. That is until manufacturers and reps got together and shut down the program.
ERNEST’S SKIN AGAIN has the normal pink-fleshy color to it, as if he’s come back to life. His veins are popping up as the blood is drained from his body—the dark red liquid flowing rapidly from the open artery. I worry he may stand up suddenly.
According to Joe, Ernest probably died from pneumonia based on the amount of red fluid coming from his lungs. Joe is sucking it out with a device called a trocar—also used for liposuction—as I divert my eyes. This body is far tamer than some of the other cases he’s had over the years, which include everything from the grotesque to the thrilling, from a man with seven bullet holes in his hand (“He thought he was gonna stop the bullet,” Joe says) to the queen of Ghana. The most money he’s ever found on a body: “Forty-four one hundred dollar bills,” he tells me.
Joe grabs two plastic grocery bags from the table and begins to place them over the feet. “Not many people like to touch the feet, so I put these on them.”
Joe Adolf, son of the funeral director, peeks his head in and is quickly persuaded by the other Joe to help him cloth the body. Pulling on the pants they find a funeral card in the dead man’s pocket. They return it to its place and begin pulling on the shoes, a task they struggle with.
“I’ve seen it all,” Joe tells me. “How you’ve killed yourself. How someone’s killed you.”
I manage to slip in a question I’ve been rather curious about—does his occupation make him think about his own mortality much? He gives me the short answer. “It’s gonna happen,” he says.
TODAY HE SQUIRTS Lip Stay on the lips and eyes to keep them closed; if he were in a hurry he’d trade it for Super Glue. He’ll be back tomorrow to apply make up and put him in the casket. Another job well done. But another body has just come in. Today’s a busy day.
While most days aren’t as booked as this one, Joe doesn’t seem to mind. At 71, I can’t help but wonder if he has plans to retire any time soon. Not officially. “I enjoy life now,” he says. “I have no schedule. It’s like I’m retired now because I don’t have too much work anymore.”
Nowadays he has more time to do the other things he enjoys, like spending time with his two kids and three grandchildren, walking at the track and watching more sports.
ALMOST THREE HOURS have passed. It’s time for me to leave, and Joe walks me to the back door. We bump elbows—what Joe calls the mortician’s handshake—to avoid me having to touch the yellow rubber gloves he’s been wearing all afternoon. “Remember, any day above ground is a good one,” he says as I step out into the February cold, a chill shooting up my spine.
Damn right.