Quiet! Morticians in training here

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Quiet! Morticians in training here

Sunday, May 23, 1999

By Gary Rotstein, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

At 8 a.m, the second-floor classroom in the Baum Boulevard building is filled with more than 50 students, hardly any of them late, asleep, yawning or wearing the tuned-out expression often associated with collegians. The men's haircuts are close-cropped, above the ear, with any facial hair trimmed. The women are in skirts and slack suits. There are no blue jeans anywhere -- they're not permitted. No tattoos or body piercings are evident.

Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science student Chad Poitras works in clay over a plastic skull in the Restorative Art Laboratory at the school. The laboratory class prepares aspiring morticians for the need someday to restore human features lost through trauma or disease before the deceased has a public viewing. (Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette)

And everyone's taking notes intently as a broad-shouldered lawyer in suspenders discusses the intricacies of check ownership. Through an open doorway, the words "shoulder blades" are heard from an adjacent anatomy class, punctuating the lawyer's own comments about "it's the last endorsement that controls."

The alert, clean-cut students of varying ages in the business law lecture represent the September 1999 graduating class of the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science -- known informally as PIMS, rhyming with "whims." Its program in East Liberty provides a training ground for future funeral directors from a radius of well more than 100 miles.

The 60-year-old school is one of just 10 institutions in the country dedicated solely to training morticians. Another 40 or so community colleges and four-year schools offer degrees in mortuary science as part of a broader curriculum.

Students spend $8,100 at PIMS for a one-year grind of heavy course loads. Before becoming licensed as funeral directors in Pennsylvania, they must also have two years of general undergraduate course work elsewhere, perform a year's apprenticeship in a funeral home and pass state and national exams.

Mortuary students say the difference from their regular college classes goes beyond an older average age and a dress code designed to orient them to the conservative image of funeral directing.

Pam Baumgardner-Toth, 29, from Kinsman, Ohio, said that unlike her undergraduate experience at Youngstown State University, there's nothing at PIMS she can breeze through and omit from her four-hour-a-day studying grind. The fall semester consisted of eight courses simultaneously: accounting, anatomy, business law, embalming chemistry, embalming orientation, psychology, microbiology and the history of funeral directing.

"The adjustment is difficult for a lot of students who don't have the discipline to do the studying," Baumgardner-Toth said, thinking of the two dozen classmates who dropped out since entering last September. "These are things we're going to be taking state boards on [to be licensed] and relying on our knowledge of for the rest of our lives, so there's urgency to the classes."

Student William Nicholas carries embalming fluid before joining his team of four students and an instructor in a clinical embalming laboratory at the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science. Students wear shields and coverings to protect them from contracting disease from a corpse. (Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette)

She's among the 20 percent of the student body from funeral home families. The number of such students has dropped drastically from decades ago, when relatives of funeral directors made up a large majority of enrollees.

She's also among the nearly 40 percent of students who are female. The gender ratio has gradually become more balanced among students in an occupation long dominated by males.

PIMS has about 130 students overall, from three classes going through simultaneously at different paces. That's twice as many as before the school moved from Oakland nine years ago.

There are about 3,200 mortuary students nationally, with enrollment growing during the 1980s and 1990s, perhaps from a sense that death care is largely a recession-proof industry for future employment, said Gordon Bigelow, executive director of the American Board of Funeral Service Education.

The shared experiences of 50 students taking all of the same classes simultaneously at PIMS provides a casual familiarity and bantering tone with one another and instructors, who are usually funeral directors addressed on a first-name basis.

It's different, however, when students take their turns on teams performing one essential training exercise -- the embalmings provided for free for families that cannot afford to pay their funeral director for the service.

"People try to keep it light at the school, but everything [in the embalming room] is very professional -- no joking," stressed Lewis Altman, 32, an Army veteran from Elco, Washington County.