TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/021389/02138900.047

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 8KB | 136 lines

AMERICAN SCENE, Page 16

Pinellas Park, Florida

Freeze-Dried Memories

A service for pet owners means never having to say goodbye

By Pat Jordan


    Jeff Weber, beaming, holds up a calico cat in the palm of his
hand. "It's almost done," he says. He hefts the cat a few times to
show how light it is. The cat lies curled in a circle in Weber's
hand, the way cats do when lounging. Its unblinking yellow eyes are
fixed for eternity on its tail. Weber gestures with the cat toward
a circular cat bed, hollowed out in the center like a large
doughnut. "The owner wanted it the way he always remembered it,"
Weber says. He lowers the cat to its bed. "See!" he says, still
beaming. "A perfect fit! It's something else, isn't it? Have I got
an idea or what?"

    Jeff Weber, 35, an ex-furniture salesman, ex-convenience store
clerk, ex-satellite dish salesman, has spent his life chasing his
dream: "An oddball business that will make me money, so I won't
ever have to work for anyone," he says. The pursuit of that dream
has often put Weber in conflict with his wife Mary, a barber at an
old-fashioned men's barbershop.

    "I haven't been fond of some of Jeff's ideas," she says. "But
I kinda like this one. My customers don't, though. They think it's
yucky. They think they'll have to keep their pets in the freezer."

    "Only when they first die," Jeff says. "They keep 'em in the
fridge until they ship 'em to me. Then I freeze-dry 'em before they
thaw out." Jeff gazes proudly at his model 48104 freeze-dry chamber
that he purchased for $30,000 from a company in Minnesota. The
cylindrical chamber, 4 ft. by 9 ft., is the sole possession of
Jeff's Preservation Specialties, Inc., the company he operates out
of a bare room in an industrial mall in Pinellas Park, Fla. The
hulking chamber, with a glass window at one end, resembles those
gadgets in science fiction movies that hold spacemen in a state of
suspended animation while they hurtle toward distant galaxies
light-years from earth. The chamber doesn't work that way, however.
What it does is draw the moisture from dead organisms until they
are mummified in a perfectly preserved state.

    Jeff will freeze-dry just about anything. But most of his
business is in freeze-drying the deceased pets of distraught
owners. Cats. Dogs. Birds. Snakes. Lizards. Hamsters. Even
alligators. Presently, he has about 30 such pets in his chamber,
undergoing a freeze-dry process that will take from three to six
months, depending on the size of the pet. Jeff charges about $400
to freeze-dry small pets and about $1,800 for large pets like the
two Doberman pinschers sitting perfectly still in the softly
humming chamber. The dogs are bathed in a mysterious yellow light
and surrounded by a Noah's ark menagerie of other perfectly
serene-looking pets, all of which would probably be at one
another's throats if still alive. A chipmunk, its tiny paws held
out as if to receive a nut, is standing in front of a cat, which
in turn is crouched beside one of the Dobermans. Farther back in
the chamber the second Doberman is surrounded by some small dogs
and dozens of cats, cockatiels, cockatoos, snakes and lizards. In
their freeze-dried state, all the animals look eerily alive in
their natural poses, except that they are stock-still and their
wide eyes are unblinking.

    "When the pets are done," Jeff says, "they'll outlast the life
of their owner. They retain natural characteristics no taxidermist
could ever duplicate. That's why owners bring them to me. I can
mold their pets into positions the owners remember from life. One
owner wanted his cat lying so he could put it on his VCR, where the
cat always lay. He moves the cat around the house throughout the
day, just like when it was alive. Another puts out water for her
freeze-dried dog. One guy had his Husky freeze-dried in a sitting
position so he could put him beside the easy chair and pet his head
while he watched television, just like he used to."

    Jeff is an ordinary-looking man with blow-dried hair, a trim
mustache, and thick-lensed eyeglasses that make his eyes look
constantly startled, like those of the pets he freeze-dries. Most
of Jeff's customers are serious about their pets. They have trouble
accepting the death of their loved ones -- Jeff calls it "denying
the grieving process" -- so they bring them to him.

    "I started my business in Florida," he says, "because I thought
I'd make a lot of money from old people who were attached to their
pets. But they're mostly into cremation and burial. They're afraid
of new ideas. Most of my customers are younger, in their 20s, with
no kids, from the Midwest."

    Old people have an adverse reaction to Jeff's bizarre service
for a number of other reasons too. They prefer to bury or cremate
their pets, he thinks, because they don't want to be reminded that
their own deaths are looming closer. Jeff's natural customers seem
to be yuppie types who not only prefer to deny death, but would
also like to deny all that is unpleasant in life. Most of those
people have heard about Jeff's service through stories done on him
in newspapers from as far away as Britain, and on television and
radio shows.

    "Still, business hasn't been that good," Jeff says. "I've only
done about 200 freeze-dryings in two years. If business doesn't
pick up, I might have to sell my machine to a funeral parlor. I've
been negotiating with one that's thinking of using my machines in
the human sector. It has this idea for `perpetual viewing chapels.'
"

    Perpetual viewing chapels would contain row after row of
glass-fronted coffins, either filed away in drawers like precious
jewelry, waiting only to pulled out and viewed; or propped up on
end side by side, behind one vast glass partition, like a gigantic
human butterfly collection. Each corpse would be freeze-dried
exactly as the deceased would like to be remembered by its living
loved ones.

    Freeze-drying human bodies, however, would be an expensive
proposition -- about $15,000 to $18,000 apiece. Since there is no
law in Florida against freeze-drying humans, however, all it would
take for such a perpetual viewing chapel to take root, so to speak,
would be a mortuary license, a corpse, someone living willing to
shell out $15,000 to $18,000, and, of course, one of the machines.

    Strangely enough, those people who have called Jeff to inquire
about freeze-drying a human being have been asking not about a
beloved, deceased relative but about themselves. They are people
who are less interested in avoiding conventional burial and
cremation than they are in striving for immortality.

    Jeff says he would never be freeze-dried himself, or buried
conventionally, when he dies. He prefers cremation. "I couldn't
bear to be buried in that little bitty box in the ground," he says.
Until such a distant time, however, he will continue to pursue his
dream: a money-making gimmick no one has ever thought of before.
He's already latched on to one in the far reaches of his
imagination.

    "Drug-sniffing dogs for the private sector," he says, beaming.
"Parents could rent 'em to sniff out their kids' rooms to see if
they're hiding drugs. Big businesses could use them to sniff out
the desks of employees they suspect are using drugs. That would
avoid all those constitutional questions about urine testing and
lie detector tests." Jeff's eyes open wide and unblinking behind
his thick-lensed glasses. "Whaddaya think?"