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17 Bedlam at the Funeral Home

Coutts and Son Funeral Directors in Galt used to be owned and operated by Harold Gray, and during the 1930s and 1940s it was the prestigious way out. Mr. Gray made every effort to sustain the tone of his service — dignified, elegant, and serene, goals he met until he brought his son, Bud, into the business.

Bud, like his father, was rotund and tall, an imposing figure. Bursting with youth, he had the self-discipline of a circus bear cub. He had a friend just as large and even more uncontrollable, who he talked his father into hiring as an assistant. The friend’s name was Willis Toles, an accomplished jazz trombone player who could double ably on bass, piano, and guitar; was a veteran cab driver; and was a crack shot with a revolver and consistently beat out the local policemen in marksman competitions.

Business was good, so Mr. Gray had no need for a revolver marksman, but Toles’s experience as a cab driver made him a natural to drive the ambulance, a service then in the hands of funeral directors. Bud was assigned to drive the hearse. It wasn’t surprising to see the hearse clear St. Andrews Street at sixty miles per hour chased by the ambulance with the siren on. Occasionally, the two would run out for coffee in the ambulance with the siren on. It must have occurred to Mr. Gray that his funeral parlour had been taken over by the Marx Brothers.

When the solemnity of a service was rent by shouting in the yard and hoots of laughter coming from the ambulance garage, Mr. Gray would run out of the chapel, wave his arms wildly, pretend to strangle himself, and run back inside. One day, after Bud banged up a front fender on the hearse, Harold sent Toles down to Bennett City Garage Body Shop to pick it up. He wouldn’t trust Bud. Toles brought it back intact, but while nursing it into the garage scraped it from end to end.

Mr. Gray, when he wasn’t pretending to strangle himself, was noted for his composure. He finally lost it at a funeral in Sheffield. The service was in an old country church, and Mr. Gray sent Bud and Toles into the basement to keep out of trouble. However, Toles found a piano in the Sunday school room and began to pound out “C Jam Blues.” Bud joined in by pounding jam tins with chair rungs. Mourners seated upstairs weren’t amused. Neither was Mr. Gray who, really strangling himself, raced downstairs. He couldn’t fire his own son, but Toles had to go.

Toles went to work for the opposition, Jimmy Little, when his funeral home was on Grand Avenue. Because Toles lived in a double house on Barrie Street, he wasn’t allowed to practise his trombone or bass fiddle at home, so he rehearsed in the embalming room at Little’s. On his way to his band job at Leisure Lodge, he would drop into Little’s and pick up his bass. One time a passerby, seeing Toles carrying out the casket-size instrument in the dark, thought it was someone stealing bodies and called the police. The officers searched high and low until Jimmy Little assured them the body count was okay.