Back in 2005, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson starred in the buddy comedy Wedding Crashers, a movie about two goofballs who would sneak into wedding receptions for free food and access to single women. As is typical of Hollywood buddy movies, Vaughn and Wilson’s characters having a falling out over a woman two-thirds of the way through, which leaves Wilson visiting Vaughn’s former mentor, Chazz Reinhold, played by Will Ferrell. It turns out Reinhold’s wedding crashing prowess has declined in the intervening years and he is now resigned to crashing funerals to meet single women. Disgusted by his behavior, the two buddies reconcile, and everyone lives happily ever after. The screenwriters obviously assumed crashing funerals would be so absurd that it would work well as a comedy device.
The screenwriters clearly have never been to St. Louis. While searching for an article on an unrelated subject, I stumbled upon a headline that stopped me cold. An exposé, “It’s Fun to Go to Funerals on Week Days; As Any St. Louis ‘Regular’ Will Tell You” appeared in the morning May 24, 1908 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, complete with illustrations of the various activities of this 1,000-member strong subset of the Gateway City’s population. Before discussing this intriguing group of people, the article first interviews the beer garden proprietors that once lined roads such as Gravois in between the cemeteries and the city.
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“You would be surprised at the number of persons who go to funerals whom they have never seen or heard of,” the Post quotes William Ziegenhein, a South St. Louis undertaker, as saying. The John L. Ziegenhein & Sons funeral homes remain a St. Louis institution, with one on Lemay Ferry and one on Gravois, near several cemeteries. (One of them, Old St. Marcus, was converted into a park after being abandoned for decades.) Just north on Gravois from Old St. Marcus was a beer garden, and since alcohol was not allowed in cemeteries, it did a booming trade as carriages stopped on their back to the central city. In fact, due to Blue Laws that forbade drinking alcohol on Sundays, beer garden owner Adolph Welz informed the Post reporter that hearse drivers were encouraging funerals to be scheduled during the week, so more business could be drummed up after the burials. Sunday funerals were smaller since the beer gardens were closed, and as Mr. Welz remarked, “everybody likes to have a big funeral, you know.”
Property records reveal that Adolph Welz’s beer garden building most likely still stands at 6432 Gravois. One of Welz’s colleagues mentioned in the article, Thomas Schuetz, owned a tavern at 6801 Gravois, which was at the corner of Gravois and Kingshighway, making it a convenient place to stop for mourners and funeral crashers returning from one of multiple Lutheran cemeteries that straddled the city-county line. Unfortunately, the site of Schuetz’s Exchange Saloon is now a parking lot. Two photographs in the collection of the Missouri History Museum show his tavern with employees and customers. William Schoenlau, who also owned one of these establishments, defended his trade thus: “People need something to cheer them up after [the funeral] is all over. Besides, if it wasn’t for these gardens, what would the regulars do?”
Those “regulars” would sit along the major roads out of St. Louis, where major cemeteries still lie. One man the reporter interviewed was a salesman who took time out from his busy schedule to wait along the side of the road for several hours, hoping for a funeral cortege to appear. Loneliness and a sense of “belonging” by joining into the procession were cited as major motives, and the salesman goes on to explain a game he enjoys playing: “You wonder who is dead and what caused it. That gives you a chance at speculation.”
The funeral crashers often didn’t make it all the way to the cemetery but instead, turned off at the beer gardens. There they would meet up with other regulars and begin drinking, waiting for the actual mourners to show up later. One estimated that three out of five carriages would stop after the funeral. There would be “a regular garden party, not hilariously jolly, perhaps, but good to sit and look at.” Men were not the only people who engaged in this peculiar pastime; women would scan the obituaries instead of sitting out along the road waiting for funeral processions to pass, as one presumes would have been considered unladylike. However, if a funeral leaving from their neighborhood popped up in the newspaper, they would join their male counterparts on the drive to the festivities.
In the end, the salesman quoted in the Post best summarized the motivation behind this morbid pastime:
“You pull in behind the line of mourners and you say to yourself: ‘All the rest of ‘em are sad, but I’m not. This isn’t my funeral.’ And you jog along in the sunshine, feeling mighty glad that you are at the rear end of the procession instead of the front.”
