Casket

For years, the 80,000-plus bodies lay buried in Odd Fellows Cemetery in the area of 23rd and Edgley streets. More than 40 years ago, their slumber was disturbed when many of the early Philadelphians were removed to make way for the Raymond Rosen housing project and its 1,122 low-income units. Well, not everyone was moved. Seems like whoever removed them forgot a few people. For the past four years - since the overhaul of the housing project began - workers have come into contact with those left behind.

Dozens of relatives and friends looked on in horror as the casket bearing the body of Erwin Duchovnay tilted on its faulty lowering device, popping the lid open during January funeral services, according to a civil suit filed this week in Chester County Court. The suit, filed by Minna C. Duchovnay of Devon, the widow, says that services were delayed about 50 minutes, which added to the confusion because several late-arriving mourners were unable to find the Duchovnay grave and ended up at the wrong services in another part of the cemetery in Trevose, Bucks County.

In a morning of broken clouds, Jannie Coverdale picked out a casket for her grandsons. The Coverdale family walked up a straight brick path and pulled open the heavy glass door of the Temple & Son Funeral Home yesterday. There was the scent of the yellow roses rising from a blue vase, and a stone carving of St. Francis of Assisi looked down, solemn in a dim light. In white letters against black felt, there were five other names, all victims twisted together in heartbreak with Aaron and Elijah Coverdale, who died in the American Kids Day Care center when a massive car bomb tore open the federal office building here while they were eating breakfast Wednesday morning.

If you ever saw that picture of Emmett Till, you never forgot it. Not the one that shows a handsome brown teen-ager, hat tipped up slightly off his forehead. Not, in other words, the before picture. No, I'm talking about the picture that was taken after. After he went down from Chicago to visit family in Mississippi in the late summer of 1955. After he accepted a schoolboy dare to flirt with a white woman working behind the counter of the general store. After he called her "baby," and allegedly gave a wolf whistle.

The mourners knew it wasn't Tex. Nearly everyone who passed the silver casket at Tindley Temple United Methodist Church yesterday morning whispered to each other. That's not Tex, they said. But the corpse was wearing his blue suit and black boots. The late Kenneth "Tex" Roberts, 80, who died Monday of a heart attack, was a jovial, mustached, retired tractor-trailer driver who loved to tell jokes, play cards and help people when they were down. On Monday night, Roberts' wife, Janie Holsey, and others went to check the body at James L. Hawkins Funeral Home, at 1640 Federal St., and told a female employee: "This is not my husband.

It was a white casket, heartbreakingly small, that held Nolan Robertson- Deal, the 2-year-old who slipped through an open manhole into a swirling sewer and away from his family forever. Behind that casket, hundreds of the people Nolan had touched filled the Janes United Methodist Church in Germantown yesterday and tried to gather comfort from the music and the words of the clergy. His mother, Margaret Robertson, sat calmly in the front row, facing a picture of her only child. "Death has no dominion over memories, and death has no dominion over the influence of good that Nolan had," said the Rev. Stephen J. Gibson during a noon ceremony full of memories of the boy. A member of the church choir sang a solemn version of "Jesus Loves Me," that simple statement of faith all Sunday-school-going children learn as soon as they can talk.

One of the nation's biggest coffin companies is buying industrial-equipment maker K-Tron International Inc. of Pitman for $435 million. The deal announced yesterday should give Hillenbrand Inc. of Indiana, whose products include Batesville-branded caskets, new life outside the flat-growth death-care industry. Hillenbrand will acquire K-Tron for $150 a share in cash. K-Tron's stock soared $34.77 to $148.29 on the news. Kenneth Camp, chief executive officer and president at Hillenbrand, said K-Tron was a "terrific company with a great record and was very well-managed.

The people of Ajenngano village weren't embarrassed by the unusual burial they planned for their recently departed chief. But some of the village elders, after thoughtful deliberation, decided that folks in the United States just wouldn't understand. So when an outsider asked for permission to attend and photograph the interment, authorities answered with a resounding "no. " It's not every day, after all, that a man is sent to his grave in a wooden coffin carved in the shape of a five-foot eagle.

Hoisted above the shoulders of the six pallbearers, the casket containing Moises DeJesus was borne out of Christ and St. Ambrose Episcopal Church and into the bright sunlight of Venango Street. Outside the old church in North Philadelphia, hundreds of people began filling the block yesterday morning, forming a procession behind the casket of DeJesus, 30, who relatives and neighbors say was beaten to death by police last week. The crowd swelled to as many as 500 as mourners marched down Venango and turned onto Sixth Street, then onto Tioga.

Louise Purdy thought she was praying over the body of her son, a victim of AIDS, during a closed-casket service in November 1988 at Price Funeral Home in West Philadelphia. That casket turned out to be empty. Calvin Purdy's body was in a hearse outside, because funeral director John M. Price did not want the body of an AIDS victim inside his facility. Yesterday, a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court jury awarded Louise Purdy $75,000, for the pain and suffering caused by that switch, plus $100,000 in punitive damages.

SOLEMNLY THE LINE of mourners approached the casket, one by one, tears in their eyes. The deceased was only in his 50s, his fun-filled life cut short by cancer. One by one, they leaned forward, reached into the casket and ... honked the horn in the hand of the deceased, who was dressed in a clown suit, complete with giant shoes, a multicolored wig and a red foam nose that was sitting like a cherry atop the vanilla of a face grease-painted white. Mourners shedding tears - of laughter - tickled funeral director Joe Lombardo, who had filled the request of the deceased, a self-described "jokester" who wanted to give his loved ones a last laugh, a pratfall of finality.

When Jay Schwartz picked up a reel of film in a Lambertville flea market 20 years ago, he had no idea he was holding the only known visual record of an exhumation spurred by a 20-year court dispute. And fittingly enough, Schwartz will have a public showing of the bizarre movie on Friday, July 13, at Laurel Hill Cemetery, where it was made. Schwartz screened the footage alongside other found home movies a few times over the years, but he never realized what it was depicting.

When Bob Hanks died unexpectedly in August 2009 at 56, his wife, Rita, wanted to celebrate his life.   He had lived fully, and loved to have a good time, said Rita of her husband, who suffered organ failure after getting dehydrated. What else could she do to honor this free spirit than give him a Jimmy Buffett-themed funeral? So the Willingboro man's obituary invited guests to, as Buffett might say, "Come as you are. " "People came in Hawaiian shirts and one girl even came in a bikini," recalled Rita.

Hundreds of firefighters gathered Friday at a funeral home in Northeast Philadelphia to say goodbye to Lt. Robert Neary, one of two firefighters who died Monday battling a five-alarm blaze in the city's Kensington section. While the public viewing for Neary was under way Friday evening, another one for Firefighter Daniel Sweeney began at St. Cecilia Roman Catholic Church in Fox Chase, where his funeral will be held Saturday morning. Neary, 59, and Sweeney, 25, were killed when a wall and roof collapsed.

NEWARK, N.J. - After all the testimonials from relatives and friends, the songs from legends and pop stars, the preaching and even laughter, the raw emotion of Whitney Houston's funeral came down to just one moment: The sound of her own voice. As the strains of her biggest record, "I Will Always Love You," filled the New Hope Baptist Church at the end of the nearly four-hour service Saturday and her silver-and-gold casket was lifted into the air, the weight of the moment was too much for her mother, gospel singer Cissy Houston, to bear.

Longtime friends, weeping family members, and ordinary Catholics with fond memories of their late archbishop said their farewells Monday to Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua, who died last week at age 88. After a private viewing at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood, Bevilacqua's body was brought shortly before dusk to the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, where it lay in repose after a brief prayer service. "To me, there wasn't a bad bone in his body," said Lois Skalamera, 27, who recalled meeting Bevilacqua for the first time at St. Augustine's Parish in Old City when she was 7. Two years later, she said, he saw her again at the basilica, remembered her, and gave her a religious medal, which she still treasures.

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - They came by the thousands - in Nittany blue sweatshirts and jeans, and in dark suits stretched taut over athletic frames. They came in snow boots to ward off a tolerable winter chill and, in a style nod to the man they came to mourn, in loafers with stark white socks. They came in wheelchairs, in strollers, one even on crutches, all to pay their final respects to a coach who left an indelible mark on their university and, for many, their lives. More than 10,000 Pennsylvania State University students, alumni, former players, townspeople, and sports-world luminaries queued up Tuesday in lines that stretched longer than a football field for the chance to shuffle, one by one, past the casket of record-setting football coach Joe Paterno.

STATE COLLEGE - The body of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno arrived back at campus this morning for a public viewing set for this afternoon. Accompanied by Paterno's sons Scott and Jay, the football legend's casket was brought to the rear of the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center about 8:30 a.m. in blue hearse. The center will open at 1 p.m. for a 10-hour viewing for students, alumni and well wishers. The family has arranged for one current and one former member of the team to stand on each side the casket on a rotating basis throughout the day. A second viewing is scheduled for 8 a.m. to noon Wednesday before a private family funeral in the afternoon.