The mourners knew it wasn't Tex. Nearly everyone who passed the silver casket at Tindley Temple United Methodist Church yesterday morning whispered to each other. That's not Tex, they said. But the corpse was wearing his blue suit and black boots. The late Kenneth "Tex" Roberts, 80, who died Monday of a heart attack, was a jovial, mustached, retired tractor-trailer driver who loved to tell jokes, play cards and help people when they were down. On Monday night, Roberts' wife and others went to check the body at Hawkins Funeral Home, at 1640 Federal St., and told a female employee: "This is not my husband." But family members said the woman at the South Philadelphia funeral home insisted: "That's how you look when you die." Yes, you look like someone else!! When I die, I want to look like Marlon Brando (when he was young).
And so we find that Tex was in another casket, at another funeral home, under a different name. As W.C. Fields gravestone reads: “I’d rather be in Philadelphia….under an assumed name”, I would guess. And I don’t know anyone in Philadelphia named “tex’…not even a horse.
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