"In keeping with our high standard of living," said San Francisco Undertaker Warren J. Ringen last week, "there should be an equally high standard of dying. The cost of a funeral varies according to individual taste and the niceties of living the family has been accustomed to." The niceties in coffins range from the show models for $2,000-and-up funerals, displayed on what the trade calls "aisles of resistance," to such novelties as the $785 Eternalite ("manufactured by experts in the field of space-age materials") to inexpensive "flat tops," the trade's contemptuous euphemism for an unadorned pine box.* What with...
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