O.C. Crematory, Formerly a Lonely Place, Now Draws Crowds : Customs: A worker there, once solitary, is now joined by Buddhist monks and mourners who gather to see loved ones depart for the next life.

For 34 years, Al Ramos has fired up the jet engine roar of Fairhaven Memorial Park’s basement crematory.

Most of that time, it was a hot, lonely job.

These days, however, when Ramos strains his 5 feet, 4 inches to heft a casket into the crematory and punches the buttons that reduce a body to an urn full of ashes, he often has an audience any preacher would pray for.

Ten, 20, sometimes 60--and once 200--Southeast Asian Buddhists crowd in shifts into his 14-by-20-foot crematory, eager to watch a loved one leave for another life.

“The first time, I didn’t like it,” said Ramos, whose shyness quickly gives way to a torrent of talk. “I’m so nervous with somebody watching because I’m afraid I’ll do something wrong.”

Over the past five years, the wiry Mexican native has become accustomed to hearing the chanting as processions of mourners and monks in yellow robes begin carrying a casket from the funeral home half a mile away to the mausoleum. He has even gotten used to having his every movement scrutinized.

But he has had to draw more than one line with the mourners jockeying for space.

No more sneaking plates, glasses and cutlery of the deceased into the coffins.

“When they open the casket, everybody crowds around and puts stuff in there--flowers, pictures of people, money, jewelry--and I can’t see anything,” said Ramos, who came to California in 1943. “Sometimes you don’t know what goes in there until you try to clean the furnace and you find the muck.”

Despite the prohibition, one man recently brought in his dead relative’s entire place setting to be used in the next life, Ramos said.

“I said, ‘Hey, never do that.’ But he’s waiting over there, and all the relatives are waiting over there, so I just had to put it in.”

With a frustrated sigh, Ramos opened the steel crematory doors and leaned into the hot darkness to show where tiny pieces of glass remain embedded in the furnace’s floor.

Ramos no longer welcomes help loading the coffin.

One eager mourner crashed a casket into the crematory’s clay wall, creating a divot in the $60,000 furnace.

And no more pacemakers.

“It’s like a bomb in there. First time I hear one go off, it’s like BOOM!” Ramos said. The explosion left a spider web of cracks in the crematory wall.

And, if Ramos had his way--which he doesn’t because this is business--there would be no one but him pushing the buttons that fire up the crematory.

Lately, relatives of the deceased, or sometimes the Buddhist monk presiding over the service, have wanted to control the cremation itself, Ramos said.

“I used to get so mad with the morticians over there. This is mine. This is my job,” Ramos said. “According to the mortician, I have to do what people want, harrumph.”

So, Ramos leads mourners back into his previously private domain to push the blower button, which begins to heat the crematory with a sound akin to a jumbo jet, then the afterburner button and then, when the gauge reaches 800 degrees, the main burner button.

The crematory will remain on for three hours, about the time it takes to reduce the body to ash and bits of bone, which are later ground up with the ash and placed in an urn. Ramos takes pride in never having mingled an ash or shipped remains to the wrong family.

“A lot of people say ashes to ashes, dust to dust. That’s not true. You have to grind the bones,” he said.

Ramos took over running the 58-year-old crematory--the first in Orange County--at his boss’s request just after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He lasted a year at the job before the never-ending march of bodies from the Vietnam War caused him to quit.

“I started losing weight,” Ramos said. “At that time the bodies came just in parts . . . just wrapped in sheets. I told my boss, ‘I need to work outside for a while.’ ”

But Ramos was soon back. “I don’t know, for me it’s like a magnet. I like to be lonesome. No one bothers me here.”

In 1969, Ramos got another job, working at a pharmaceutical company from 5 a.m. to 2 p.m. each day, before heading to Fairhaven to work from 3 p.m. to midnight. For 22 years, Ramos said, he never told his daytime co-workers how he moonlighted, afraid they would think he was contaminated. He retired from his daytime job three years ago.

“Friends say I’m really crazy. ‘You mean you work nights over there?’ I say, what’s wrong with that? I don’t believe in spooks,” he said. “I believe when a person dies he goes to heaven, or he goes to hell. How can he come back? He has no blood, no bones, no circulation.”

Once, about 15 years ago, Ramos tried to retire but his boss begged him to come back.

“He can’t find nobody to do the job like me,” he said. Ramos said there has been one constant in the three decades he has manned the crematory. Each day on his arrival home, his wife has greeted him with the same refrain: “Take a shower. Leave your clothes in the garage.”