Moe Pass stopped by Tuesday morning while I was reading the paper and asked if I had been following the Frozen Dead Guy Days coverage. I told him I had written about it two weeks ago. He said he knew that. He wanted to know if I had thought about what it means that Grandpa Bredo is arguably the best-housed frozen dead person in the world.
I had not thought about it in exactly those terms.
But Moe is a ranger and he notices things other people walk past. So I put down the paper and thought about it. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. Bredo Morstoel, a Norwegian grandfather sitting in liquid nitrogen in a 1909 ice house at one of the most famous hotels in Colorado, is living, so to speak, considerably better than most of the other frozen dead people in the world.
Some of those other arrangements have been considerably less comfortable.
PULL UP A CHAIR. THIS ONE'S GOOD.
Who Started All This?
Before Grandpa Bredo, before the Tuff Shed, before any of this became a festival, there was Dr. James Hiram Bedford.
Bedford was a psychology professor at UC Berkeley. He died on January 12, 1967, in California, and became the first human being ever cryonically preserved. A small team of enthusiasts showed up roughly an hour after his death and did their best with the equipment they had, which was not much. The procedure was improvised. Nobody really knew what they were doing. They froze him anyway.
Bedford has been frozen ever since. He is the only person frozen before 1974 who remains preserved today.
His body spent the next two decades passing through several informal arrangements, including time in a garage in Topanga Canyon, before his son Norman finally transferred him to Alcor in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1987. In 1991, Alcor moved him into a new dewar, which is when the world got its first look at how he had held up after twenty-four years. The answer was: better than expected, all things considered.
Bedford has been at Alcor ever since. He is now 59 years into his arrangement. Nobody has a date set for the next check-in.
What About Ted Williams?
The most famous frozen dead person in America is not a Norwegian grandfather who liked fishing and hiking.
It is Ted Williams, widely considered the greatest hitter in baseball history. Williams died on July 5, 2002, at age 83. Two of his three children arranged to have his remains sent to Alcor in Scottsdale over the objections of his oldest daughter, who said his actual final wish had been cremation.
The family dispute played out publicly for years. Court filings. News conferences. Competing accounts of what Ted had actually wanted.
The only documentation anyone ever produced showing that Williams agreed to be frozen is a handwritten note, smudged and stained with grease, found in the trunk of his son's car.
Williams is now at Alcor in Scottsdale, in a building near an airport in an industrial park in Arizona. His son John Henry, who arranged the whole thing, later died and ended up at the same facility. Father and son are now in the same room in separate containers.
Williams' oldest daughter eventually agreed to let the arrangement stand. Her one condition was that the family not attempt to sell her father's DNA.
Nobody has built a museum around Ted Williams. Nobody throws him a festival. The city of Scottsdale has not organized a polar plunge in his honor. He is in a building near an airport. He is well cared for. But nobody is buying a ticket to visit.
So How Is Grandpa Bredo Doing?
Bredo Morstoel is in a 10-foot silver steel dewar filled with liquid nitrogen, inside a climate-controlled 1909 ice house, on the grounds of The Stanley Hotel, monitored remotely by scientists at Alcor in Scottsdale.
He has a museum built around him. He gets visitors every day. He has an exhibit explaining the science of cryonics. He has a Norwegian flag on the wall.
Every March, thousands of people come to Estes Park specifically to celebrate the fact that he exists.
He is not in a garage in Topanga Canyon. He is not in an industrial park near an airport. He is not the subject of a family dispute over a grease-stained note found in a car trunk.
He is in Estes Park. In a building that has been standing since before he was born. Forty feet from one of the most famous hotels in Colorado, a hotel that inspired one of the most famous horror novels ever written, in a town that throws the most unusual winter festival in the American West.
The man landed well.
Moe stood at the door Thursday morning and said, "By the standards of the field, Bredo is doing extremely well."
That is the most accurate thing anyone has said about any of this.
