Trailer Park Dad Who "Hammered" Room-Temperature Beer, Devoured Fried Food, Goes Viral in Obit

The obituary for a Kentucky trailer-park grandfather who "hammered" room-temperature beer, loved fried food, and made dubious claims about being a ladies' man has gone viral, thanks to the unvarnished tone of its author, one of the man's sons.  Jamie Loveless passed away on June 14 at the age of 60. His online remembrance has been viewed more than 700,000 times since he "had enough and up and died on us," as the posting states. "We've never had an obituary like this," Pulaski Funeral Home director Michelle Godbey told the New York Post this week. Read on to see why. 

James's son Rocky wrote the obituary, so family and friends could laugh despite their loss. He hoped to "kind of bring him back to life just for a few minutes," Rocky told the New York Post, although he didn't anticipate the rock-star reception.  

"Jamie loved his family more than anything else in the world … except ice-cold Busch, room-temperature Busch, T-bones, New York strip, prime rib, shrimp, swimming, poker, hatch-back Mustang GTs, tank-tops, Kentucky Men's basketball, and his personal copy of Eddie Murphy's Raw," the obituary states.

Loveless could often be found in his backyard at the trailer park, "hammering beers, standing over country-style ribs, and yelling, 'It's got a head like a cat on it!', while nearby neighbors would peek out their windows bearing looks of disgust and amazement, as his party guests were slurring remarks about needing to speed up his cooking style," the obit says.  

His sons remembered him as a "gluttonous eater of fried foods and snack cakes, as well as the occasional chili cheese dog," resulting in a 2015 stroke, "When he was heard in the emergency room saying 'Let's make a break for it!', hospital staff forced him to go through with the procedure. He wasn't too excited about the prospect, but went anyway."

"We don't know if he was married, but he definitely was a lady's man," the obit said. "It's the bones,' he told us as proudly pointed his skinny, pasty-white legs. ''Women love a good shin.'"  

He left behind two sons, Rocky and Rodney, a younger brother, an "unofficial daughter," and a pair of old boxers which have 'Buttweiser the King of Rears' printed on the design," the obit concludes. "He will be moderately missed."

Rocky Loveless, a baseball umpire who lives near Phoenix, Arizona, told the Commonwealth-Journal he got a phone call the day before James passed away informing him that his father was "doing pretty bad." He booked a flight back to Kentucky ASAP.

"I was laying over in Las Vegas, and right before I boarded the plane to fly to Nashville (en route to Kentucky), I get a call from my sister, and I knew what the call was about — I knew my dad had passed," he said. "I was on my way to see him, and I didn't make it in time."

"I was really frustrated, but I knew that I wanted to write the obituary," he said. "I'd never done it, and when we met with Michelle Godbey at Pulaski Funeral Home, I asked her (about it). I said, 'I've read a lot of them, but I really don't know how to do it.' And she said, 'Just talk about him.' And that's exactly what I did."

Rocky drove to a nearby parking lot and started writing. "I sat there and it took me about 10 minutes, and I wrote about my dad," he said. "I didn't let anybody else know what I was writing because I knew that they would be like, 'No, don't do that,' but I knew what I wanted and I knew what Dad would have wanted."

Rocky said he had no idea "it would make people all over the world laugh." "I look at the views on my dad's obituary, and it's close to around 670,000, and that's just the obituary, that's not counting all the tweets that have been retweeted and other websites, which have talked about it. It's really mind-boggling to me."

Family members have been "really positive and upbeat about it," Rocky told the news outlet. "This has really cushioned the blow of losing my dad, or being separated from my dad for a time at least, because we see how happy it's made everybody else."