Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Why is that business named the Neptune Cremation Service?





















In the mail I recently received an ad for the Neptune Cremation Service here in Boise. How did they come up with that business name? In Roman religion Neptune is the god of the sea and of fresh water, while Vulcan is the god of fire and thus he is more logically connected with cremation. It is not explained on their web site, but it actually does make some sense.

I found a book  from 2001 by Stephen Prothero titled Purified by Fire – A History of Cremation in America. He explains that what originally was called the Neptune Society (since they would scatter the ashes at sea) began in San Francisco, back in the 1970s. The founder was Charles Denning - a chiropractor with a goatee who was known (in parody of the fried chicken guy) as ‘Colonel Cinders.’ For an extra charge you even could go on Denning’s hundred-foot yacht for a scattering party. Funeral homes derisively referred to his cremation operation as a ‘bake and shake.’ But by 1980 he handled more ‘customers’ than anyone else in California except Glendale’s massive Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

According to the Wikipedia article on the Neptune Society, as of June 2011, Neptune was 70% owned by the very generically named Service Corporation International.

An image for a statue of Neptune came from Wikimedia Commons while an image for a statue of Vulcan came from the Library of Congress.

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