Word: boydstun
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...citizens-a lot of Comanches included-have never heard of Comanche, Okla. (pop. 1,500), a comatose little cotton town on U.S. Highway 81, half an hour's drive from the Texas border. But a fortnight ago, Comanche's undertaker, a chubby, balding go-getter named Glen Boydstun, decided to put the town on the map. His inspiration: a news item announcing that droop-eyed Bill Cook, cold-blooded killer of six, was to be executed (TIME, Dec. 22) in the gas chamber at California's San Quentin prison...
...Boydstun got in touch with the killer's father, W. E. Cook of Joplin, Mo., and asked for permission to claim the body-a wealthy Comanche man, he explained blithely, wanted to pay for the funeral as a memorial for a wayward son. Cook agreed. Then Undertaker Boydstun told the local newspapers to stand by, took off for California in his hearse, claimed Billy, performed a quick embalming job, brought the body back to Comanche, dressed it in a neat blue pinstripe suit with black necktie, and put it on display...
Billy was a sensation in Comanche. Boydstun, however, was disappointed by the steady trickle of viewers who walked through his orchid-carpeted funeral home. Apparently in the hope of bigger headlines and bigger crowds, he announced that 12,000 people had crowded past the open coffin in the first two days, including seven busloads of schoolchildren from Byers, Texas-statements which were angrily denied by 1) watchful Comanche citizens, and 2) Byers school authorities. There was no denying, however, that 5,000 people had come to town to look at Billy, and that many of them brought their children along...
...Boydstun ordered loudspeakers rigged outside the funeral home, engaged the Rev. David Soper of the Assembly of God ("If we aren't careful, we could have a cannibalistic attitude in America . . ." said the reverend of Cook's career) and prepared for a big funeral. The coffin, Boydstun assured the public, would be reopened before burial to allow all a good, last look. But that was as far as the undertaker got with his plans...
Horrified and dismayed by the notoriety that clung to Billy even in death, members of his family hired a lawyer, threatened the undertaker with legal action, and demanded that he deliver the body to them in Galena, Kans. Boydstun, who had begun getting black looks from people in Comanche, hastened to oblige. He laid three dozen celluloid roses on Billy's chest, put a plastic boutonniere in his lapel, loaded the coffin into his hearse and took it to them. That night a handful of Billy's kin took him quietly to a rural cemetery at Lone...