Word: casket
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Boom! A cannon shot from the Society Jazz Band bass drum jolts the chattering crowd outside the Gertrude Geddes Willis Funeral Home into a brief silence. The casket is coming out. Boom! A second shot signals the stricken cadence of a dirge. The white gloves of the pallbearers flash in the morning sun as they float their burden to the silver-gray Cadillac hearse. The main party of mourners, a score or so, fit themselves into several cars waiting in line...
...deep church bell tolls. The casket passes into the decorous stillness of the vaulted interior, leaving the hundred or so second liners and the musicians outside. The organ plays hymns that would be favorites in any Baptist church: In the Garden, Just as I Am. A priest reads from Job and speaks of the "gift of music" that Albert Walters had. Funerals like Walters', as William J. Schafer fairly puts it in Brass Bands and New Orleans Jazz, are "public acts, theatrical displays designed not to hide burial as a fearful obscenity but to exhibit it as a community...
Boom! As soon as the casket emerges, a bass drum shot shatters the air. The dirge-playing band leads the way up the road toward the cemetery, then separates from the casket. At first it retraces its route by drumbeat alone. Then the trumpet screams forth, the drummers swing out, belted choruses of The Second Line assail the sky. The crowd, most of it, becomes a blur of fidgeting feet, twisting torsos, bobbing heads. A corpulent man in an orange shirt spins and dips. An elderly woman executes a scampering step with the help of her cane. An open-shirted...
...instant. The part of your story stating that everyone was ordered out of the room is incorrect. No one ever told me to leave, or had the authority to do so. After the mortician finished his work, we placed the President's body in the new casket that had been sent...
Upon completion of the procedures, I called Dave Powers, who advised Robert Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy that we were prepared to leave. The ambulance, carrying the casket, Mrs. Kennedy, the Attorney General and me, returned to the White House, where the coffin was placed in the East Room...