Interview with Watchtower Attorney Hayden Covington
http://www.freeminds.org/history/covington.htm
Covington: Oh yes, don't kid yourself about that later. Brother Rutherford had to get away from the intense cold in the East in the winter time. He had a collapsed lung and there was a danger he could contact pneumonia because of that experience when he fell in the water and nearly froze to death in Missouri. Remember he said he wasn't turning any book agents away from his office. When Rutherford was behind bars he put his hands on the bar and said to Jehovah, "If you ever get me out of here I am going to give the old wore [the Catholic Church] the worst licking that she ever had..." and he dedicated his whole life, remaining life, to that pursuit.
Sis. Murray: He sure did, he really let her have it!
Bro. Murray: You came out here to San Diego, were you with him when he died?
Covington: Yes. He died in San Diego because he had been operated on for cancer of the colon in Indiana ... cancer is a consuming thing, and it gradually began to eat his body down where there was little weight on him and he called Brother Knorr and Brother Franz and I out to San Diego. We went out on the Santa Fe train, the Chief and we went there to meet with him and he knew he was dying and he wasn't any maudlin ... he knew he wasn't going to live too long. So he put his hands on the heads of all of us boys and asked us to stick together. That's when I made that declaration that Fred Franz quoted at the assembly in Cincinnati. We all called him Pap, for short, meaning Pappy he was really our father, not our real father you know, but because of age we consider him to be giving us orders. So I said to him, "Well Pap, we'll fight them together till hell freezes over."
Covington: When we were at the assembly in Cincinnati Fred Franz told the Brothers about that quote, which I meant to. It was like we skated on the ice. The lord will make it so.
Bro. Murray: What happened the body, did he want to buried out in San Diego?
Covington: He had no desire to be buried in any place but he had to. He knew he was dying and would have to be buried. He was sensible enough to know that he didn't want to have his bones hauled all the way back to Brooklyn. So he suggested to us that when the time came for him to be buried he wanted to be buried out there. We tried to get him buried there in the Beth Serum property. That was a big property in behind there, went all the way down to Montezuma Road, and then Brother Heath had that big house over across the way that his mother had given him money to build. It would cost a half a million dollars to build and duplicate now, or more. We tried to get him buried at that property and the board in San Diego turned us down. They didn't want him buried anywhere out there, there was so much hostility and hatred against the Judge out there. The authorities turned us down, every turn we took. I filed a lawsuit then in the courts out there in San Diego to force them to let us bury him out there on that property. Judge Mundo, who was the judge of the Superior Court, heard it and passed the buck, jumping from one thing to another, from one technicality to another, and finally after looking at the matter in a reasonable way Bill, Bonnie, and Nathan and all of us decided that we have fought enough on this and it looks like its the Lord's will that we take his body back to Brooklyn, and have him buried in Staten Island, which we did. So Bill and Bonnie were on the train with his body. And Fred, Nathan, and I had already come back and were working. I was trying to get his bones under the ground by legal mandate and we couldn't get it, and there was no other thing to do. And we did, and that ended that. He was laughing down from heaven at us scurrying around trying to get his bones buried.
Bro. Murray: He was probably pleased that you finally decided to let it go! "Didn't I ever teach them boys anything?" He probably couldn't see how that was connected with anything. Since you loved the man that was why it was so important to you.
Covington: We wanted to do his will as best we could, not his will, but Jehovah's will and he had to be buried someplace. It wasn't reasonable to haul his body all the way across the country, but we finally had to do that.
Sis. Murray: Well how long did it take by train?
Covington: It took about two and a half to three days. Two and half days from San Diego and I made that trip a lot of times. From New York to San Diego; it takes two and a half days on a Pullman. Of course, we rode Pullman. We went first class, Brother Rutherford told me, "I want you, whenever you travel, to travel first class." And so I did, and Brother Heath did, Nathan Knorr did, and Freddy Franz did too, all the whole bunch of us did.