Category Archives: Cryonics History

“One day the phone rang, and there was this woman on the other end of line and she said, ‘I want you to freezer my father.’ Calls like this would happen, maybe every couple of weeks. Invariably they amounted to nothing. But Beverly Greenberg was different. She was going to freeze her father and that was all there was to it. He had been embalmed and dead for a couple of weeks. We had to dig up Herman Greenberg. Fred Horn and I went to the cemetery where he was buried in Philadelphia and supervised his disinterment. We took him back to Long Island in Fred’s station wagon and put him on dry ice. His wife Doris didn’t mind helping us; she was having a good time, getting her picture taken by Beverly.” Continue reading →

“Late in 1967 these two young hippies showed up, Paul Segall and Harry (Frosty) Waitz. Paul was a biology student at Stony Brook and he was hell bent on making aging research and cryonics into big time scientific undertakings. It was a crazy time, the 60’s, the Vietnam War, the protests. Paul and Harry would go handing out cryonics literature at funerals, wearing their long hair and beads. This didn’t go over too well with the cemetery management at Washington Memorial Park. Cryonics was a constant media attraction; camera crews and journalist were always coming round and reporters would enquire about cryonics at the cemetery offices. It was a terrible hassle for them. Campbell, the cemetery director had left, and another person came in. They wanted more rent, but basically they wanted us out of there. We were a lot of trouble for them and the constant media presence wasn’t conducive to the nice, quiet, ‘final resting place’ they were selling to the dearly beloved. And we weren’t happy there, because we were keeping bodies in the garage, and the people who worked on the grounds were always joking about the frozen bodies and leaving their lunch on the dry-ice boxes.”

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“Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, he led the attack at Pearl Harbor. That was a great attack. That shook ‘em, didn’t it? He showed them. It was a wonderful attack. See, I was brought up to believe that the Japanese were particularly loathsome fascists. But somewhere along the line I read a book called The Brave Little Match Man, and it was about a magic tree that was cut down and made into matches. The spirit of the tree was in the matches. The Japanese soldiers in China took the matches with them, this precious light to bring civilization to China, all the good things – railroads, drugs… Anyway, at the end of the story the brave little match man sets himself off to blow up the dam to save the Japanese army and all the rest of this stuff. So it showed me that fascists could be heroes.” Continue reading →

“At that time, the media were looking at cryonics from the point of view of sensationalism. They wanted to see someone get out of a coffin, you know? Saul and I went on across the country, and we found nothing genuine till we got to Ed Hope’s place in Phoenix, Arizona. That was another whole kettle of fish. He was actually building tanks. And he had two engineers working with him, he called his company Cryo-Care, and he had a woman in one of his tanks. Hope may be still alive, I haven’t heard from him in a long time. He’d married a wife from Germany, and he was doing well, importing wigs. He had two wig shops in Phoenix. Ed Hope wore a wig. It used to blow off at bad times. Ed Hope was the kind of guy who’d be pinching waitresses, chatting to airline stewardesses.” Continue reading →

“The first meeting of Ev Cooper’s that we went to, he held in Washington, D.C., at a restaurant at eight o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Day. And of course, this was my first lesson in fanaticism because Saul Kent, Karl Werner and I showed up at it. Karl was skinny, average height; he was a photographer and a student of industrial engineering at the Pratt Institute who was also very interested in cryonics. Karl began to attend the meetings at the bar.” Continue reading →

For almost thirty years now, Curtis Henderson has been trying to cheat death. Like most people, he doesn’t enjoy the idea of winding up in a mortuary. Unlike most people, he’s spent a large part of his life trying to do something about it. Henderson was one of the founders of the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY) – a group of activists who decided that since no one else was tackling the challenge of freezing people, they would have to do it themselves. Continue reading →