Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
Speaker 1: and we tell stories about well just about everything here
Speaker 1: on this show. And one of our favorite regular features
Speaker 1: is a feature called Final Thoughts. And today our regular
Speaker 1: contributor Bill Brake tells us a story from his little
Speaker 1: town Antrim, New Hampshire.
Speaker 2: Andrim's voters elected me a cemetery trustee in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2: I'd help two other trustees govern the town's for public cemeteries.
Speaker 2: It's meant receiving occasional telephone calls from relatives of deceased
Speaker 2: persons who wanted to be buried in Antrim. Among the
Speaker 2: usual reasons for this or that the deceased was born
Speaker 2: or spent many happy summers in the town. The callers
Speaker 2: generally asked about getting the grave dug. I gather the
Speaker 2: correct term of art is opening the grave. I referred
Speaker 2: them to a pleasant, good natured and compassionate gentleman with
Speaker 2: a back hoe who performs this office for a funeral
Speaker 2: parlor in the neighboring town of Hillsborough, and for anyone
Speaker 2: else in the area who needs his services. Antram's public
Speaker 2: cemeteries are Center Meetinghouse, Hill, North Branch and Over East.
Speaker 2: I visited them all before my election. The town's Department
Speaker 2: of Highways had maintained them well. Three of the four
Speaker 2: are now full with many dark gray, heavily weathered slate
Speaker 2: markers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Only North Branch
Speaker 2: is active, which is to say new customers are welcome. Recently,
Speaker 2: after a friendly and sympathetic chat with an older woman
Speaker 2: who wishes to bury her son's remains here, I strolled
Speaker 2: down to Cemetery Road, a well kept dirt road that
Speaker 2: borders my property, just beyond an unnamed stream that flows
Speaker 2: from my land towards Steele's Pond and the North Branch River.
Speaker 2: It was amidst the heat wave in mid July twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2: The slightest breeze was welcome. As is usually the case
Speaker 2: with rural dirt roads, the trees lining both sides of
Speaker 2: the right of way had grown tall and large enough
Speaker 2: to form a kind of green tunnel, which I found
Speaker 2: beautiful and soothing. Some of the older trees where the
Speaker 2: top of the hills seemed to have grown as mirrors
Speaker 2: of one another, their upper branches entwined. Perhaps they are
Speaker 2: ideal lovers, growing side by side and together completing one another,
Speaker 2: I reached the cemetery and found the second gate open.
Speaker 2: So I entered and found my caller's family plot. It
Speaker 2: is large and inspires confidence that her relatives will find
Speaker 2: room there long after I am gone. When I was
Speaker 2: a child, my family lived at fifty seven Columbia Street
Speaker 2: in Mohawk, New York. House my parents owned. It was
Speaker 2: across from the Mohawk Cemetery. My mother occasionally noted that,
Speaker 2: whatever one might say about a cemetery, its occupants were
Speaker 2: quiet neighbors. I often walked through it. I found the
Speaker 2: markers a kind of history book, nearly all bearing the
Speaker 2: names of ordinary people whose lives were quietly lived in
Speaker 2: a small town away from the shouting and tumult of
Speaker 2: the great world. The Mohawk Cemetery had only one distinguished occupant,
Speaker 2: France's Elias Spinner, who had been Herkmer County sheriff, a
Speaker 2: militia general, a three term US representative, once Democrat twice
Speaker 2: a Republican, and Treasurer of the United States under Presidents Lincoln,
Speaker 2: Johnson and Grant. He was also the first federal executive
Speaker 2: to hire women for clerical work on the same basis
Speaker 2: as men. He was renowned for his flamboyantly elaborate signature,
Speaker 2: which appeared on millions of United States notes. He had
Speaker 2: developed it consciously to discourage counterfeiting. The signature appears on
Speaker 2: his grave marker in the Mohawk Cemetery. It also appears
Speaker 2: on the plinth of his monument across the Mohawk River
Speaker 2: in Herkimer, New York, which also bears this quotation. The
Speaker 2: fact that I was instrumental in introducing women to employment
Speaker 2: in the offices of the government gives me more real
Speaker 2: satisfaction than all the other deeds of my life. Coming
Speaker 2: back to my summer's day in the North Branch Cemetery,
Speaker 2: I paused for a few moments to look north across
Speaker 2: the valley of the North Branch River toward Campbell Mountain
Speaker 2: in Hillsborough. Then I went down the rows of stones,
Speaker 2: noting several fellows who cantered off with the New Hampshire
Speaker 2: Dragoons during the Civil War, and a quantity who had
Speaker 2: served in World Wars one and two. One fellow had
Speaker 2: served in both when I was a boy. Such men
Speaker 2: and women call themselves retreads. There were also a few
Speaker 2: who had served in Vietnam. There were also a f
Speaker 2: few revolutionaries, mostly identified by the militia company in which
Speaker 2: they had served. Although I know he's buried in North Branch,
Speaker 2: I couldn't find a marker for the long lived George
Speaker 2: Gates born August eighth, seventeen fifty three and died December thirteenth,
Speaker 2: eighteen forty five. He had fought at Bunker Hill on
Speaker 2: June seventeenth, seventeen seventy five, among those commanded don't fire
Speaker 2: until you see the whites of their eyes, and helped
Speaker 2: prove as One British officer wrote that the Americans are
Speaker 2: full as good soldiers as ours. One fellow named Tuttle,
Speaker 2: an old New England family, had a few small stones
Speaker 2: placed atop his marker. It's a touching custom derived from
Speaker 2: the Jews, flowers, fade stones and dewer. Perhaps a secular
Speaker 2: meaning might be found too, As long as one is
Speaker 2: remembered by someone, one never truly dies. So I found
Speaker 2: a suitable pebble in the dirt road I was on
Speaker 2: and placed it among the others on the tunnel marker.
Speaker 2: Two markers were particularly memorable. One read Archie F. Perry
Speaker 2: eighteen eighty six nineteen fifty an honest man. There are
Speaker 2: worse things for which to be remembered. The other was
Speaker 2: a bench for a member of an old Antrim family
Speaker 2: whose relatives I know. It reads Dennis C. Gales Senior,
Speaker 2: nineteen forty three to two thousand and eight. We sit
Speaker 2: here thankfully he was the man. He didn't have to be.
Speaker 2: There were several other benches about North Branch. They reminded
Speaker 2: me of the nineteenth century custom of picnicking in cemeteries,
Speaker 2: bringing the baskets to the family plots. Before Sir Alexander
Speaker 2: Fleming identified penicillin, death was a constant visitor for many families.
Speaker 2: Perhaps this custom allowed people to share good times with
Speaker 2: their deceased relatives. It waned by the twenties as early
Speaker 2: deaths became less common. The peenchas also reminded me of
Speaker 2: Conrad Aiken, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet and man of
Speaker 2: letters who retired to Savannah, where he had been born.
Speaker 2: He often sat by his parents grave in Bonaventure's cemetery,
Speaker 2: at least in part for the view of the harbor
Speaker 2: and of the arriving and departing merchantmen. He once saw
Speaker 2: a ship with an intriguing name heading down to the sea.
Speaker 2: He did some research at the port authority where he
Speaker 2: confirmed the ship's name and looked up her destination. That
Speaker 2: information gave him a two line poem, Aiken's tombstone is
Speaker 2: a bench. He wanted people to sit and enjoy a
Speaker 2: Martini by his grave on it is the poem which
Speaker 2: is his epitaph Cosmos Mariner destination unknown.
Speaker 1: And great job as always to Robbie Davis for his
Speaker 1: work you're at our American Stories. And a special thanks
Speaker 1: to Bill Brike for this piece. He's one of our
Speaker 1: regular contributors and just a great voice. And my goodness,
Speaker 1: I keep thinking of Archie F. Perry eighteen eighty six
Speaker 1: to nineteen fifty and all it says on his grave
Speaker 1: marker are three words an honest man. It doesn't get
Speaker 1: better than that. And by the way, we'd love to
Speaker 1: hear your final thought stories, stories about death, stories from
Speaker 1: people who are in their final days. There are not
Speaker 1: more interesting stories than that, or it could even just
Speaker 1: be a eulogy. My goodness, the eulogies we heard from
Speaker 1: the Kobe Bryant memorial, from the memorial of Arnold Palmer,
Speaker 1: which is it's some of the best material we've ever
Speaker 1: put on the air. The storytelling is so beautiful again.
Speaker 1: Send all of your stories and suggestions to our American
Speaker 1: stories dot com. Bill brike are of his storytelling from
Speaker 1: the little part of America called Antrim, New Hampshire. Here
Speaker 1: on our American Story