Andrew Selkirk -- The Old Ball Game

A one-time cellist with various radio orchestras, Selkirk began a business arranging packaged radio programs until severe financial reverses left the 37 year old on the verge of bankruptcy.  Forced to send his wife to live with her mother, Selkirk was scheduled to vacate their Chicago apartment at 180 East Delaware on September 7, 1934.  That morning, he handed the bellboy two notes, one addressed to the manager of the building instructing him to break down the door of the apartment and to notify his wife, and the other to his wife explaining the deed.  Selkirk then fired a bullet into his brain.

To his wife, he wrote:  "Terese Dear:  These are the last and honest words of a soul in turmoil.  For what has happened to us I am entirely to blame.  Living, I am of no use to anybody, not even myself.  I want you to put all of this tangle out of your mind and begin anew.  Good luck, and I wish you a new and better deal."  In a message found at the scene dated August 7, Selkirk left a whimsical verse epitah addressed to a female friend of the family:  "Dear Honey:  Since we got into this argument, let's have a lot of fun, shall we?  What do you think of this paraphrase as an epitaph:

'Here lies the last work of Andy Selkirk;
For him life held no terrors;
He lived like a fool and died like a fool;
No runs, no hits, some error.
But no one left on bases.'

To get the full significance of the above you should listen to two full baseball broadcasts from beginning to end.  Yours in martyrdom, hi-de-hi, Andy."

Charles Dundas Slater -- One Way Death Cab

London Coliseum

Connected with the management of London's Empire Theatre from 1889 to 1895, Slater was also the business manager of the Alhambra before leaving in 1907 to manage the London Coliseum music hall.  Following years of faithful service, the 60 year old was dismissed on June 29, 1912 when rheumatic gout and failing eyesight prevented him from discharging his business duties.  At 4:30 P.M. on July 8, 1912, Slater flagged down a taxi cab and told the driver to take him to Charing Cross Hospital.  Minutes later, the cabbie heard what he believed was an exhaust backfire.  Arriving at the hospital, the cabbie discovered his fare lying on the back seat with a gaping wound in his head and blood flowing from his mouth.  A seven chamber revolver, with one spent round, was between his knees.  Slater died two hours later.

In a letter found on his body, Slater wrote:  "On the rocks.  No hope.  No daylight.  God forgive me for this act, but I am hopeless, and if there is one among my English and American friends who will have a friendly thought left for me let them now show it by doing all they can for my poor, faithful wife.  I have led a white man's life, but this is a degraded dog's finish,  I am broken-hearted, but not insane.--C.D.S."  On September 10, 1912, a distinguished company of artists gave a performance at the London Coliseum for the benefit of Slater's widow and children.

Clara Bloodgood -- How to Shoot Straight

Worn out by a long road tour of the South, and concerned about her physical and financial health, the 37-year-old actress shot herself in the mouth at the Hotel Stafford in Baltimore, Maryland, on December 5, 1907, as an expectant audience waited in the Academy of Music to see her perform in the Clyde Fitch comedy The Truth.  Bloodgood, gowned only in a loose wrapper, was found lying on her back across the bed with blood flowing from her mouth.  The actress had fired three shots.  The first missed and lodged in the ceiling while another was never found.  The death wound came from a round that passed through the roof of her mouth in front of the soft palate and into her brain.  A few days before the incident, Bloodgood purchased a pistol, a .32-caliber hammerless double-action Smith & Wesson, and had even queried a bellboy at the Stafford on its use.  A medical book containing marked sections outlining the parts of the brain was found in the room as was a tome titled How to Shoot Straight.  The contents of a sealed letter addressed to her stockbroker husband located on a nearby table later proved to have no bearing on the suicide.  Onstage for nearly ten years, Bloodgood previously starred on Broadway in two of Fitch's plays ( The Coronet of the Duchess, 1904; The Girl with the Green Eyes, 1904) before purchasing the rights to The Truth, and embarking on an exhausting 30 month road tour.

James Bradbury, Jr. -- A Terrible Way to Die

Mark of the Vampire (Bradbury third from left)

In films since 1921 (Bits of Life), Bradbury was a supporting actor throughout the twenties and thirties.  His credits include Classmates (1924), The Little Giants (1926), Hellship Bronson (1928), Alibi (1929), The Rogue Song (1930), The Cisco Kid (1931), Gorilla Ship (1932), Helldorado (1934), and Mark of the Vampire, director Tod Browning's 1935 remake of his silent classic London After Midnight (1927).  In Los Angeles on June 21, 1936, the 41-year-old actor turned on the gas in a room he had rented for the day at 1008 West Eleventh Street and struck a match.  Police found Bradbury in the hallway of the apartment house horribly burned about the face and body.  According to authorities, Bradbury told them that a friend he had given $258 for safekeeping had disappeared with the money.  "It's a terrible way to commit suicide," he whispered to nurses moments before dying later that day at Georgia Street Receiving Hospital.

Adolfo Utrera -- The Longest Siesta

cubanosfamosos.com

"`Just Sang My Last Song' sounds good for a song title...It is just a plain suicide.  I have needed a long rest.  And this is probably the longest one I'll get."  So read the note left by the 30-year-old Cuban pianist and singer-songwriter on December 3, 1931, shortly before he stuffed towels around the doors and windows of his Manhattan apartment at 176 West Eighty-sixth Street and then opened the gas jets on a kitchen range.  According to friends, although Utrera had a contract with the Columbia Phonograph Company to make Spanish language records, he was concerned over a recent lack of work and an impending operation.

Sidney Lazarus -- Love Meets the Reaper

Lazarus, 43, came to Hollywood in 1927 as a scenarist for the Warners' silent Patent Leather Kid after enjoying a successful career on Broadway as the author of such plays as Gabette, Come Along Mandy, and Dixie to Broadway.  On December 2, 1933, the screenwriter and his wife, Maud, decided to end their years of ill health by dying together in a well-planned and touching suicide pact executed in their Beverly Hills home at 522 Palm Drive.  The couple wrote and posted a letter to the manager of a Beverly Hills bank asking that he direct the police to come to their garage.  Later that afternoon they dropped off their dog at a friend's on the pretext that they were going away to a mountain resort for the weekend.  Two days passed before the bank manager received the letter and notified police.  Inside the garage, authorities found the car running and a rubber hose leading from the exhaust pipe up through the floorboard into the closed compartment.  In the back seat, the asphyxiated couple sat side by side -- he with his arm draped tenderly around his wife while her head nestled on his shoulder.

Peter Clark MacFarlane -- Dynamiting the Ruins

MacFarlane (born in St. Clair County, Missouri, in 1871) was a railroad man, acted on the San Francisco stage with the L. R. Stockwell repertory company, and served as the pastor of the First Church of the Disciples of Christ in Alameda from 1902 to 1908 before becoming a popular short story writer and novelist (Those Who Have Come Back, 1914; Tongues of Flame, 1924).  MacFarlane also wrote the screenplays from his own original stories for the films Guile of Women (1921) starring Will Rogers and A Pair of Hellions (1924).  On the morning of June 9, 1924, the 53-year-old writer applied for a gun permit in Pacific Grove, California, telling the chief of police there that he needed the weapon for "home defense."  Bidding his wife and children farewell, MacFarlane travelled to San Francisco.  That evening, he fired a bullet from a small caliber pistol into his temple on the steps of the San Francisco Morgue.  He died minutes later en route to the Harbor Emergency Hospital.  Long letters to his wife, children, the managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner and his doctor were found on the body.  The most telling, dated the day before his suicide, was addressed to his friend and physician, Dr. Rufus P. Rigdon.

It read (in part):  "The long battle with ill health is at an end and it is a lost battle.  It is just eleven years since you diagnosed diabetes in my case and told me that up to 40 it usually killed and beyond that it eventually dragged men out.  That is what it has done for me.  Insulin seemed to do its work wonderfully so far as my body was concerned, but the mental vitality would not come back; or rather the nervous energy on which it depends.  To a man of my calling, that makes me a physical bankrupt, without the power of sustaining concentrated thought or will force long enough to be effective for anything.  I tried to delude myself with the belief that the old power was still holding out, but it wasn't.  It has been slipping for a year; it refuses to return.  Nothing remains but to dynamite the ruins, as I shall have done before you receive this...I go -- realizing the grim humor that had I been run over by a Ford, my death would have been honorable, but that since I go of my own hand, it is an act of shame."

Eddie Brandstatter -- Restaurateur to the Stars

Los Angeles Public Library

The film capital's most famous restaurateur, the French-born Brandstatter open the famed Cafe Montmartre on Hollywood Boulevard near Highland Avenue in 1922.  One of Hollywood's first night spots, movie people flocked to the trendy upstairs restaurant to see and be seen.  Formerly employed in the famed restaurants of London, Paris, and New York before coming to Los Angeles, Brandstatter was the maitre d'hotel at the Victor Hugo around 1920 before opening Crillon Cafe near Eighth and Hill streets.  A bad business investment in the late twenties closed the Cafe Montmartre, and shortly afterward the caterer was convicted of grand theft and placed on probation.  Undaunted, Brandstatter and a partner opened yet another mecca for the film colony, Sardi's on Hollywood Boulevard near Vine Street.  Stars and the fans who queued to see them packed the place until it burned down on November 1, 1936.  Sardi's was rebuilt, but Brandstatter sold out his interest in April 1938.  He dreamed of building a restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, the Bohemia Cafe, that would rival his past successes.  The cafe never opened, but construction bills continued to pile up.  Converting a former beauty shop on North Vine Street near Hollywood Boulevard into Brandstatter's Grill, he opened the modest restaurant shortly before the Christmas holidays in 1939.

On the night of January 17, 1940, Brandstatter complained of "not feeling well," kissed his wife, Helen, goodbye, and left the grill.  At 3:30 the following morning, a restaurant employee drove Mrs. Brandstatter to her Moorish-style home at 4709 Norwich Avenue in Sherman Oaks.  After a frantic search of the grounds failed to locate the missing 54-year-old restaurateur, they checked the garage and found him still clutching the steering wheel of his car.  Brandstatter had placed a garden hose on the exhaust, ran its length up through the tonneau, and plugged up the window nearest him with his leather jacket.  Authorities found numerous loan applications in the dead man' pockets.

Tamara Charle -- Only One Way

Photo:  J. Willis Sayre

Charle, 26, a vivacious French-Russian nightclub singer also known as "Tamara Zoya" and "Tamara Stephan," appeared in Albany, New York, in the musical shows The Cat and the Fiddle and Music in the Air.  On July 9, 1941, in that city, Charle shot her 4-year-old daughter (born after a separation from her husband) through the heart with a .22-caliber pistol in their room at the Ten Eyck Hotel.  The child's body was later found on the bed surrounded by pillows and dolls.  Foiled in the attempt to take her own life when the gun jammed, the despondent singer walked the streets of Albany for more than 12 hours before returning to the hotel, clearing the gun, then firing a bullet into her heart.  A note found at the scene read:  "To Whom it May Concern -- I wanted to go with the baby, but after the first bullet the gun jammed.  I then bought potassium ferricyanide.  That didn't work either.  There is only one way."  An autopsy revealed no trace of the poison.  In a separate letter to her estranged husband apparently referring to a telephone conversation, the singer wrote:  "I will not annoy you any longer after what happened last night."

Jean Le Brun -- Flyboy Blues

Historical Ziegfeld Group

Days after her married lover, pioneer aviator Leonard Bonney, died while piloting his experimental aircraft In Long Island, New York,, Le Brun, a 35-year-old contralto who appeared in 1921 as the prima donna in Lena Dailey's Burlesque Show and later as a singer in Florida cabarets, joined him in death.  On May 10, 1928, Le Brun's landlady smelled gas escaping from the singer's apartment on the second floor of a brownstone at 63 West Eighty-eighth Street in New York City.  Authorities entered to find an automatic pistol on top of a table in the living room surrounded by live shells and newspaper clippings concerning the dead flier.  Unable to disengage the gun's safety, Le Brun opted for gas.  Forcing open the locked bathroom door, police discovered Le Brun's body face down on the floor.  She had carefully stuffed every opening in the room with paper before opening two gas jets.  Four neatly written notes explained the deed.  To a brother she wrote:  "My suicide is unavoidable.  I cannot live any longer...My sweetheart was killed in an aviation accident Friday and I cannot possibly live without him.  Bonney's widow, denying that her husband ever knew Le Brun, asked, "Could you blame Rudolph Valentino, for instance, for all the silly women who killed themselves over him?"

John Markle -- The Demon's Seed

www.arkansasbusiness.com

On November 16, 1987, three days after being fired from a brokerage house for embezzling funds, the 45-year-old investment banker son of Academy Award winning actress Mercedes McCambridge went on a murder-suicide spree in his home in Little Rock, Arkansas.  Police found Markle's 45-year-old wife, Chris, in the third floor master bedroom, sprawled across a king-sized waterbed, shot three times.  In the childrens' second floor bedroom, Markle's 12-year-old daughter, Amy, shot four times in the head and chest, lay in bed next to her 9-year-old sister, Suzanne, who had been shot five times.  After killing his family, Markle descended to the first floor study, pointed a .38-caliber pistol to one temple and a .45-caliber gun to the other, and took his own life.  A rubber "Freddy Krueger" mask (believed to have been worn by Markle during some of the shootings) was found near the body.  A tape of Nightmare on Elm Street was in the VCR.  A two line handwritten note stating that he had killed his wife and children was on a desk in the study.

McCambridge, an Oscar winner for her supporting performance in the 1950 film All the King's Men, and well-known as the demonic voice of the possessed little girl in The Exorcist (1973), was visibly moved at the funeral service in Little Rock attended by then Arkansas' first lady Hillary Clinton.  Afterward, McCambridge quickly went on the legal offensive to block the publication of a bitter 13 page handwritten letter left to her by Markle.  In April 1989 the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled against the actress and made the damning document part of the public police file.  In the letter, dated October 1987, Markle exonerated McCambridge from any financial wrongdoing in his scheme to divert funds into her account, but indicted her as a mother.  It read (in part):  "I was essentially raised by live-in maids and relatives...I was conceptualized to save a bad marriage...I watched you try to kill yourself twice.  You have never been there for me when the chips were down.  When I cried on the phone you called me a "snivelling wimp"...Is this clear to you?  That you have hurt every member of my family.  That you have hurt me; that I stood by you under some really adverse conditions and that you have never done anything but manipulate me for your purposes...You were never around much when I needed you so now I and my whole family are dead -- so you can have the money.  Funny how things work out, isn't it?"  McCambridge, 87, died on March 2, 2004 of natural causes.

Lester Cuneo -- The Shootin' Fool

silentgents.com

Cuneo (born  in Chicago, Illinois on October 25, 1888) carved out a niche as an actor in independent Westerns beginning in 1921 with a starring role in the Capital Film Company five-reel silent The Ranger and the Law.  His other films include Blazing Arrows (1922), Silver Spurs (1922), Fighting Jim Grant (1923), Ridin' Fool (1924), Western Grit (1924), Range Vultures (1925), and Two Fisted Thompson (1925).

The Western star had been drinking heavily for several weeks when he returned to his Hollywood home at 1741 Crescent Drive to visit his estranged wife (actress Francelia Billington) and two young children. A few days earlier, Billington had filed for divorce, charging that her husband of five years had slapped her, and called her a "grafter and a thief."  After heatedly arguing with his wife on November 1, 1925, the 37-year-old actor picked up his children and kissed them goodbye, telling them, "Daddy's going away."  Cuneo then pulled a revolver from a closet, barricaded himself in the bedroom, and blew his brains out.

Elna Lassen -- Dancer with a Broken Heart

Lassen (born August 27, 1901, in Lyngby, Denmark) studied under dancer Valborg Borchsenius at the Royal Theater from 1909 to 1918.  The ballerina danced at the Royal Theater from 1918 to 1921 before relocating to the United States to study with Michel Fokine from 1921 to 1924.  Returning to Denmark, Lassen scored a triumph as "Swanilda" in Coppelia.  Her reputation as a strong technician was further assured by technically flawless performances as the "Ballerina" in Fokine's 1925 production of Petrouchka, and as the first Danish Firebird in 1928.  In 1930, stage producer-director Max Reinhardt was so impressed with Lassen during a visit to Denmark that he created a waltz for her in his production of Strauss' Die Fledermaus.  She performed the piece in Berlin on May 30, 1930, Reinhardt's 25th professional anniversary.  On September 19, 1930, the 26-year-old premier danseuse of the royal Danish ballet was discovered dead in the bed of her Copenhagen apartment from a self-inflicted pistol wound to the heart.  According to press reports, Lassen suffered from diabetes, but was also depressed over her rocky marriage to a medical doctor.  Lassen's body was found by the man after he reportedly returned from a night out spent in the company of a Danish countess.

Leona Hutton -- Iron Lung Exit

Hutton (real name Mary Epstein) was a leading lady in silent films and starred in The Typhoon (1914) with Sessue Hayakawa and The Market of Vain Desire (1916) with H. B.  Warner.  Prior to her Hollywood career, she toured in stock companies as "Jane Whitman."  Retired from acting, Hutton had resided in Toledo, Ohio for 13 years, and was the president of the local chapter of the Women's Overseas Service League when a leg fracture in 1949 confined the former actress to her home at 1741 Evansdale Avenue for ten weeks.  On March 31, 1949, Hutton informed her husband that she had taken an overdose of the painkilling drug codeine.  She died 13 hours later in an iron lung at Maumee Valley Hospital.  Hutton's death was ruled a suicide.  Her niece and protege, June Clyde, starred onstage and in British films (Dance Band, 1935; Poison Pen, 1939).

William J. Hilliar -- The Disappearing Bullet Trick

The London-born Hilliar, 60, began in show business as a magician working with such greats as Harry Houdini and Thurston.  In Chicago in 1902, he founded one of the first illustrated monthly magazines devoted to magic and magicians, The Sphinx, allied at the time with the Western Organ of the Society of American Magicians.  Hilliar also wrote several books on the subject including Magic Made Easy:  Money Catching and 50 Other Tricks (1902) and Modern Magicians' Hand Book:  An Up-To-Date Treatise on the Art of Conjuring (1902).  In addition to working on the staff of Billboard, the show business veteran also did publicity and press work for circuses and carnivals.  On November 15, 1936, a cab driver picked up Hilliar in downtown Cincinnati and drove him to the magician's home at 1228 Iliff Avenue in the suburb of Price Hill.  Telling the driver, "I'll be back in a minute," Hilliar went to the garage in the rear of the home and fired a bullet into his right temple.

John Henry -- The Laughter Dies

Gladys Horridge ("Blossom") and Henry.

Henry (real name Norman Clapham) had been one of the most popular radio comedians in England, but his career was in rapid decline when he committed suicide in his London home on Holland Road, W. on May 14, 1934.  The 52-year-old entertainer was found on the floor covered with an eiderdown comforter  nestled on three pillows, clutching a photo of his beloved who had recently died and his head inside a gas oven.  Letters found at the scene and earlier posted to friends by the dead man explained the act.  Separated from his real wife, Henry had been living with Gladys Horridge, a featured player known in his radio act as "Blossom" whom he had been passing off as his wife.  When Horridge died, weeks before he took his own life, Henry testifed that she was his wife in order to spare her any embarrassment.  When Henry's actual wife notified him that she was filing a lawsuit against him for support, he realized that he would not only be publicly embarrassed, but also face prosecution for giving false evidence at an inquest.

In the suicide note read at Henry's inquest, the comedian wrote:  "I am going to join my girl.  Please bury me with her and put her photo with me.  She was good to me and without her life is not worth living.  I am sorry to cause everyone trouble, but perhaps I have given a little happiness to others by the wireless.  It will require only a few minutes after I turn on the gas.  Hello everybody, John Henry.  I am going to my girl.  Goodbye everyone."  Henry's funeral was paid for by the Variety Artists' Benevolent Fund and attended by some 500 people.

Henry R. Thies, Jr. -- Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Thies (born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1893) became known in Detroit, Michigan, as a "boy wonder" on the violin and rapidly rose to lead his own orchestra in one of the city's top hotels.  In 1926, the orchestra leader brought his stylish brand of symphonic jazz to Cincinnati where appearances at the Chatterbox Club led to a devoted following on local radio.  Well known on the Ohio hotel circuit, Thies also toured on vaudeville and performed in theatres.  In the early thirties, he left the road to become orchestra leader for Cincinnati radio station WLW.  Following a nervous breakdown in 1933, Thies survived an overdose of sleeping pills, but spent 15 months under observation in a sanitarium.  Thies was apparently in good spirits after arriving at his home in the Phelps Apartment at 506 East Fourth Street in the Queen City shortly after 6:00 P.M. on June 12, 1935.  While his wife, 19-year-old son, and a musician-friend waited dinner for him in the dining room, Thies went to the bathroom to change.  The 41-year-old orchestra leader stood in front of a long mirror, placed the muzzle of a .32-caliber pistol in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

Adolph Tandler -- Classical Gas

Photo:  University of California

The Viennese-born Tandler moved to Los Angeles in 1908 and for several years played with a string quartet in the Alexandria Hotel.  In November 1913 he became the conductor of the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra, the forerunner of the Philharmonic, a position he held until the orchestra's dissolution in 1920.  Professionally, Tandler returned to Germany to serve as the conductor of the International Music Festival in Salzburg, became the conductor of the American Chamber Symphony in 1934, and played viola with the Philharmonic Orchestra before retiring in 1951.  On September 30, 1953, the bodies of Tandler, 78, and his 50-year-old daughter, Hedwig, crippled by arthritis since age 14, were found in a parked car on a hillside in the Eagle Rock section of Los Angeles where the pair had often driven to enjoy the view.  A hose led from the car's exhaust pipe into the closed interior of the auto.  The maestro left three notes, one of which lamented that he was unable to make his wife happy.

Kay Kent -- Marilyn Redux

As a teenager, the aspiring British model became obsessed with film star Marilyn Monroe, who overdosed on pills in her Brentwood, California, house on August 5, 1962.  Kent repeatedly bleached her naturally brown hair until it became the same shade as Monroe's.  Spare time was spent in her room practicing the dead star's pout and perfecting her makeup.  Finally, Kent spent $4,000 to have her breasts augmented to match Monroe's 38-inch bust.  As a Monroe look-alike, she became a well-known face in British tabloids and television knocking down $90,000 annually impersonating the sex goddess in media advertising.

In early 1989, Kent's mother died of cancer and soon afterward the model broke up with her childhood sweetheart, 28-year-old rock singer Dean Hammond.  On June 12, 1989, a tenant found the nude body of the 24-year-old Monroe impersonator dead on her bed in a row house in Chatham, England, some 34 miles southeast of London.  Like her idol, Kent was found with an empty pill bottle beside her.  Authorities reported that a half-empty vodka bottle and photos of Monroe were strewn across Kent's bed.  Movie stills of the actress, books about her, and Monroe recordings littered the room.  A note addressed to her former boyfriend read:  "Dear Dean, I love you so very much."  Kent's older brother told a reporter:  "She was so involved in her Marilyn image that she couldn't help herself from dying just like her idol.  I don't know why she killed herself.  She had hundreds of people around her.  Maybe she died of loneliness."

Anthony Paul Kelly -- One Face West

A film scenarist since 1915 (Body and Soul, The Builder of Bridges, The Great Divide), Kelly is best remembered as the author of the play Three Faces East, first presented on Broadway at  the Cohan & Harris Theatre on August 13, 1918.  The successful mystery melodrama was filmed as a silent in 1926, and as a talking feature by Warner Bros. Pictures in 1930.  Following the play's debut, Kelly enlisted in the Navy and served for the rest of World War I.  Afterward, he returned to writing screenplays that include Love's Redemption (1921), My Old Kentucky Home (1922), The Silent Command (1923), and The Scarlet West (1925).

In 1932, Kelly received treatment for tuberculosis at a hospital in Mount Vernon, New York.  Terminally ill, he left the facility and returned to his apartment at 410 W. 110th Street in New York City.  On the morning of September 26, 1932, Anna Delaforce, a longtime friend of Kelly's, received a letter from the scenarist informing her that he intended to end his life.  In it, he asked that she notify his brothers and other friends of his death.  Delaforce immediately contacted police, who forced entry into the 35-year-old writer's apartment.  Inside the gas fume-filled rooms, the lifeless Kelly lay on a couch, the floor around him littered with the manuscript of Three Faces East and notes written for friends and the landlord.  The writer left $27.00 to his landlord to cover any damage to the apartment.  In an explanatory note addressed to police, Kelly wrote (in part):  "This is a plain case of suicide.  Having contracted an absolutely hopeless case of T.B. in both my lungs and intestines and since I have contracted it in my throat, I can see no sense in prolonging this agony any longer.  I thought I could endure it a little longer but I can't...Give my belongings, such as they are, to the American Legion and kindly notify them that I requested that no religious services be held before my burial."