Funeral Science 101 : Careers: At Cypress College, students learn to embalm bodies, comfort the bereaved and sell caskets. They know that dying is part of living and that they’ll always have a job.

Before the school year ends, Bob Ingouf will have embalmed 25 to 30 bodies. He will have learned how to market caskets, comfort the bereaved and restore damaged faces using wax, makeup and old photographs.

Ingouf is learning the funeral business at Cypress College, the only California public school that trains morticians.

“I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d be doing something like this,” he says. “People ask you, ‘How can you do that?’ ”

The former cop and driver for the county coroner answers that death is not new to him: “It got in my blood, I guess.”

Ingouf has spent 3 1/2 years as an apprentice embalmer and now commutes from Fullerton to Cypress, where he and 86 others are studying for their mortuary science certificates.

He says one thing that did attract him to mortuary work was “seeing all the aspects of what you can do with a body. Someone tells you, ‘Dad looks better now than he did 20 years ago.’ That feels good.”

Victor Mesce, 34, of Laguna Beach, who “used to do hair and makeup on live people,” has a similar motive, although his interest in becoming a mortician started earlier:

“I always wanted to get into this business since I was 13, when my grandfather passed away. I went to the funeral home. He’d suffered, but when I saw him laid out, he looked so good. Not good, but at peace. It mesmerized me.”

But David Ortiz, 23, from Las Cruces, N.M., has a different agenda. “I’m most concerned with getting a good living and supporting my family,” he says. “This job will always be around.”

He has a point. Even in a recession, the students are assured of jobs when they complete their courses. Starting pay averages about $25,000 a year--less in rural areas, more in the cities. Six-figure incomes await those who can build a string of successful mortuaries.

“Nationally, there are more openings than graduates,” says Gordon S. Bigelow, executive director of the American Board of Funeral Service Education, the organization that accredits the nation’s 40 mortuary schools--most located east of the Mississippi.

“I don’t want to be crass about it, but in a recession, people don’t stop dying. The funeral industry is known as a depression-proof industry. Nationally, we’re graduating 1,600 a year, and that’s only marginally adequate for the demand.”

Mortuary students arrive at 8 or 9 a.m. at the tiny department rooms in a corner of the health sciences building and attend classes through midafternoon. They take no classes outside the department.

Forty-five students enter the program every January and August. They complete the equivalent of three semesters in one year, attending classes during the Christmas break and summer. Their average age is 26, but some are as young as 17 or as old as 63. About 40% are women.

“A lot are in their 40s and 50s--second-career people,” says Douglas G. Metz, director of the mortuary science department. Many are burned-out teachers trying something new. “Next semester, we’re getting a priest.”

Metz concedes he can only guess what attracts students to the profession. But a University of Minnesota survey found a common thread among its mortuary students, says Bigelow. While few had worked in the funeral business before enrolling, more than 95% had had significant personal contact with a funeral director.

“It could be anything from mowing his lawn to knowing him in church,” Bigelow says. “It appears that recruiting for the industry is a grass-roots phenomenon.

“It seems obvious that until people talk about the funeral business with someone in the business, they retain the myths about it. All they focus on is dead bodies; it’s all they think about. Yet over 95% of a funeral director’s effort is spent with the living.”

About half of Cypress College’s mortuary students come from outside California, attracted by the Southern California environment, the school’s reputation and the fact that California’s community colleges, unlike those in other states, have open enrollment. No entrance exams are required.

Out-of-state students must pay $104 per unit, but California residents pay $50 tuition per semester. The only other mortuary school in California, the privately owned San Francisco College of Mortuary Science, charges $6,300 for a year’s tuition.

The Cypress College program was once privately owned as the Los Angeles College of Anatomy, Embalming and Sanitation, founded shortly after the turn of the century. Just before World War II, it was sold to one of its instructors, the late Melvin D. Hilgenfeld, son of an Anaheim mortician.

Almost immediately, operating the school became a struggle.

Hilgenfeld’s widow, Alma-Ruth, says she and her husband taught classes, then swept floors at night: “We got our loans paid back, but there was only a little while when there was any profit at all. We could not pay the price for teachers we needed to have, and we couldn’t raise tuition to raise more money.”

In 1966 when his father died, Melvin Hilgenfeld shifted his attention to the family mortuary and began thinking of disposing of the school. He had been elected a trustee of the North Orange County Community College District when it was created in 1964 and remained on the board for 10 years. Why not donate the school to the district’s new campus, Cypress College?

In 1977, the new Mortuary Sciences Department opened at Cypress College, using equipment and some instructors from Hilgenfeld’s school.

The ties to the old school remain strong. Hanging in the department’s lobby are portraits of Hilgenfeld and Elizabeth (Ma) Green, one of the school’s earliest teachers in Los Angeles. Nearby plaques list winners of the Hilgenfeld Award (for top student in funeral directing) and the Ma Green Award (for best in restorative art). The Hilgenfeld Foundation provides the school with grants for outside speakers, seminars and special equipment.

Enrollment has been relatively constant in recent years, with the numbers of applicants matching the openings available, Metz says. But there are changes afoot in the California funeral industry that could affect the school’s future.

Most states require funeral directors and embalmers to have much more education than does California. Ohio demands four years of college, but in California, “if you want to be a funeral director, you don’t need anything. And to buy a mortuary, if you’re 18 and can read, you got it,” says Robert T. Boettger, a Cypress professor. “The building is licensed, the business is licensed, but not the individual.”

Only Colorado has lower standards: It has no funeral regulations.

Under California state law, funeral directors are not licensed, and embalmers need only a high school education and two years of apprenticeship. The California Funeral Directors Assn., reacting to pressure from Bigelow’s national organization, has lobbied two bills that would bring California standards closer to the national norm.

One Senate bill would require embalmers to have a two-year associate’s degree and continue their education after graduation.

An Assembly bill would require “arrangement counselors”--the person dealing directly with survivors--to be 18 years old, have a high-school education and pass a test on funeral law, grief-related psychology and funeral customs. A spokesman for the funeral association likened the test to a driver’s-license exam; the state would publish a booklet containing all information necessary to pass.

“The whole idea of licensing this group is that right now if they do anything wrong, there’s nothing you can do. You can fire them, but they just go somewhere else. With licensing, the state has the authority to discipline them,” says George Prather, a Sacramento mortician leading the lobbying effort.

Both bills have passed through initial committee hearings; neither has provoked overt opposition.

Prather concedes that some in the industry fear higher educational standards will shrink the labor pool. “But we’ve found out that sometimes it increases it,” he says. In Maryland, for example, tougher educational requirements were passed in 1988, and mortuary school enrollment immediately fell 27%. But the number of graduates increased 25%.

“The dropout rate fell,” he says. “Potential dropouts just weren’t bothering to enroll. You wound up with more serious people.”

Enrollment is likely to increase in any case, says Metz. The baby-boom generation, which has bloated every aspect of society through which it has passed, now is pushing 50 years of age. After the turn of the century, the least healthy will start dying, signaling a funeral industry boom.

“We’re needing people in the field,” Metz says. “The unique thing about this industry is we can gloat a little that it’s the oldest--or one of the oldest--professions in the world. Since prehistoric man, we’ve been taking care of our dead.

“You may not make $100,000 a year, but there will always be work.”