Business Spotlight: Fountain National Academy of Professional Embalming Skills

Picture a man who wakes up in the morning for a routine day of work. He dresses, drinks coffee with his wife, wishes his kids a good day and hops in his car headed for work. Fifteen minutes later, the man dies in a tragic car accident. His family is left picking up the pieces, without the chance to say goodbye.

This is the average client for Vernie Fountain, an embalmer and post-mortem reconstructive surgery specialist in Springfield. Fountain reconstructs the bodies of traumatic death victims, most often killed by car accidents and gunshot wounds.

His work grants families the opportunity to have an open-casket viewing at the funeral and the chance to say goodbye.

"I am extremely strong on viewing and doing everything you can to repair an injury so families can have an open casket," Fountain says from his West Norton Road office. "It confirms that reality and gives them strength to move forward."

'Like any job'

"There is nothing spooky about what we do," Fountain says of the funeral-service business that he got his first taste of at age 15. "It's a professional sort of thing. It's perhaps like any job."

Fountain started working as a gopher for a family friend who owned a funeral home in Fulton. As a graduate of the Kentucky School of Mortuary Science, Fountain became licensed as a funeral director in 1972 and as an embalmer in 1977. Until 1995 he owned and operated Fountain Mortuary Service in Columbia, where he took care of embalming and funeral transportation, forensic work and clinical autopsies, exhumations, teaching and consulting.

Fountain admits that people often ask him why he chose this business, and he notes not everyone has the emotional strength or wherewithal to do the job.

"I would not make a good emergency room doctor; it's just not my cup of tea, dealing with that trauma," he said. "But with embalming you get used to what you do. You have to be an individual who has a compassion for people and a compassion for dealing with the most tragic, difficult thing ever to happen in their lives."

The academy

After recognizing a need for embalmers to receive additional training beyond mortuary school, he started Fountain National Academy of Professional Embalming Skills in 1990. He says formal training in embalming techniques is often limited to personal trial and error, advice from other professionals or attending chemical-company-sponsored seminars.

Now, teaching takes up most of Fountain's time. He has a small training facility on West Norton Road where he holds a series of seminars in May and September. "People come from various part of the U.S. and the world to take these classes," he says.

In addition, Fountain travels to national and international conventions. This year he has spoken about embalming techniques to professionals in Canada, South America, China, the Philippines and across the United States.

"The main thing that always comes through in Vernie's presentations is his great passion for and commitment to embalming," says Ron Foley, CEO of Walter Carter Funerals in Sydney, Australia, who met Fountain for the first time during his Australian seminar tour in 1996. "I believe many embalmers, once qualified, may tend to continue throughout their careers working in pretty much the same way as from the beginning. Vernie challenges embalmers to 'look outside the square' and try new methods and ideas."

In addition to difficult reconstructions, Fountain also teaches airbrush makeup techniques that he learned in Hollywood. "There are things that make the decedent look more natural in the casket and less ghostly," Fountain notes.

Another portion of his work is made up by consulting with embalmers on difficult reconstructive cases, and occasionally he'll fly out of state to help with particularly challenging situations.

"You have certain cases in trauma in which it's an extreme challenge," he says. "It exhausts your mind and your physical body. I have worked 12, 15 and 24 hours on cases to make them viewable."

Human contact

While typical funeral-service work revolves around the death rate - an estimated 8.27 per 1,000 Americans in 2008, according to the CIA World Factbook - Fountain says reconstruction work is "not an everyday thing." And open-casket funerals are becoming less common, which he attributes to dwindling human contact. The evidence he points to is a higher dependency on e-mails and phone calls, leaving personal interactions to wither.

"That is something that I believe the public is losing," he says, "and I don't know if I can explain why."

Fountain, who is married to KOLR 10 news anchor Joy Robertson, says he makes a clear distinction between his work and personal lives.

"Embalmers, like those in law enforcement, develop some sort of barrier between what they do and their personal lives," he says. "I have developed a disassociation with that. However, I admit that there have been times I have cried with families. Your heart has to be in it to stay in it. If you are in it for the money, that type of individual doesn't stay."