continued from page 15 jail in 1987 and now oversees its staff, remembers Waldron. Some people called him Wild Bill. “I was just with a bunch of guys, talking about the old days in the jail, and his name came up,” Flint said over the phone one recent Friday. “Someone said, ‘I heard he died.’ We haven’t seen him in a long time.” The last time Waldron was booked in the county jail was Dec. 14, 2012, for public intoxication and probation violation. In his mug shot, he looks grim and shaggy. His Santa-bushy beard is gray, his blue eyes are sunk deep and there’s a hard set to his mouth. Flint, on the phone, described him as being lean, muscular and street savvy. He said Waldron once told him he’d been a boxer. But Waldron wasn’t mean. Flint’s voice softened as he recalled a typical interaction at the jail with Waldron. “He was pretty gruff sounding, and sometimes he could be pretty belligerent when he was brought in,” Flint said. “He’d say, ‘I’ll fight all you guys!’” and bunch up his fists. “Then he’d wink at you and slap you on the back. But if you were new and didn’t know him, it could get your adrenaline up.” When he sobered up, Waldron would
“I’ve been with this office since 1990. In that time, we’ve only had 24 cases where we couldn’t identify a person.”
Meanwhile,
rise and say something like, “Hey, the remains that the knuckleheads,” to county coroner’s office the staff. He’d wink think are Waldron’s will at the female ofrest in the county burial ficers and tell them ground at Ocean View they were pretty. Cemetery, sprawled “But it was never across a knoll in southinappropriate,” Flint western Eureka. added. “It was more On a warm, sunny, like, ‘Hey, you sure eucalyptus-scented have a pretty smile,’ day in September, or, ‘I’m sure you cemetery administrator have a lucky man at Don McCombs strolled — Charly Van Buskirk home.’” toward a sweep of Waldron was smilawn — the county’s ley when he wasn’t plot — passing first by drunk, Flint said. He a row of large, granite wasn’t the sort of guy who’d spit on you mausoleums. He paused at the last mausoor blame you for his troubles. “And when leum. Inside it are stored the urned remains he would leave it would not be unusual of 60 people whose families paid for their for him to say, ‘Sorry if I was a jerk last cremation but never returned for them. night.’ And you don’t get that a lot.” The oldest dates back to 1934. McCombs He was courtly and even sensitive, has tried everything to repatriate them — it seems, when he wasn’t fist-bunching, even mailing them to their kin’s last-known fall-down drunk. But who knows why he address. They all came back, unclaimed. lapsed in and out like that, why he frayed McCombs, a tall, middle-aged man with his connections until they broke? a full cap of brown hair and sad brown Maybe somebody will come forward, eyes, is troubled by these abandonments. someday, who can tell us. And by others stuck in similar post-death
burial-limbo — at mortuaries, at the coroner’s office, in storage units and emptied houses. Once, he stumbled upon the urn of a friend’s remains, in a house he was considering buying. “What people don’t realize,” McCombs said, “is cremation isn’t the end-all. You have to do something with them once they’re cremated. And if you don’t do it, it becomes somebody else’s problem.” His 60 urns will stay in the mausoleum indefinitely. But the roughly 100 abandoned urns at the coroner’s — some from the days when the coroner kept cremains for families to pick up, others turned in by community members — are finally getting buried. Veterans’ remains go to the Igo Veterans Cemetery in Redding. The rest go to the county plot. Every time McCombs opens a new eight-urn niche to bury indigents in the cremation section of the county plot, he opens another eight-urn niche beside it and fills it with those old coroner’s urns. They, too, will get no markers. And there they will stay. In the orderly but crowded company of others abandoned, or poor, or alone, or — as in the case of John Cooper-Gulch-Swamp Doe — possibly forever unknown. ●
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