Memorialists

Superintendent John C. Plumb of Woodlawn (N. Y.) Cemetery was delighted. With a professional eye he inspected the plot of real grass, the border of daffodils, the flowering dogwood blossoms, the background of evergreens and the three tombstones that they set off. To Ernest Leland, No. I tombstone designer in the U. S., he cried:

"Ernest, it's perfect! You're quite right, I'm glad we left out the mounds."

The occasion last week was the 30th annual convention of the Memorial Craftsmen of America, an exposition only slightly disturbed by the fact that it occupied space in Manhattan's Grand Central Palace directly above the National Liquor Show. Besides the landscaped family plot, the girders of the building groaned beneath more than 500 tombstones, 700,000 Ib. of marble, bronze and granite. Secretary Roswell M. Austin of the Memorial Extension Commission announced that 1935 was the biggest year for the tombstone industry since Depression, that the average price of tombstones had risen from a Depression low of $350 to nearly $500. The industry sold 2,734,000 cu. ft. of granite and marble in 1935. Possibly because things looked so bright for the tombstone trade, last week's convention talked little about business, a lot about art. Dealers and salesmen were driven to cemeteries, taken on a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shown tombstone art. Sculptors Robert Aitken, Harriet Frishmuth, Charles Keck, Augustus Lukeman and the Piccirilli Brothers lent pieces to the exhibition. And at the annual banquet, the chief address was de- livered by Bainbridge Colby. "I want to use this occasion," declared Woodrow Wilson's last Secretary of State, "to make an earnest plea for the revival of the epitaph. . . . The power of words, suitable and just words, is very great. True words age slowly. Some live forever."

Eager to oblige, Vermont Marble Co. recently issued a booklet of ready-made epitaphs, subdivided under such subjects as DEITY, CONSOLATION, LOVE, REST, INSPIRATION and SORROW and mostly quoted from Scripture or familiar poetry. Recommended:

It is I; Be not afraid.

Children are the keys of paradise.

Till we shall meet and never part.

Love is love for evermore.

How blest are those who from their labors rest.

Life's a voyage that's homeward bound.

An outspoken address was given by venerable Sculptor Lorado Taft. On the subject of war memorials, he said:

"We rejoiced that we had outgrown the aftermath of the Civil War. Those funny figures at parade-rest look absurdly old-fashioned to us now. But do you know the most stolid and wooden and expressionless of them was in a way better sculpture than the wild things that we are setting up today. . . .

"The output of our foundries at this moment is too aggressive, too strident, to be overlooked with a pitying smile. These bronze rowdies whoop and vociferate on all sides. I recently heard a witty artist friend size up the situation in this wise: 'After the Civil War they did the worst they knew how; today we have become more skillful and we are able to do much worse.' "

After the banquet Artist Taft told friends of his latest encounter with State authorities. Commissioned to do an Illinois memorial of the Lincoln-Douglas debate, he was told that in his preliminary sketch the figure of Stephen Douglas was not prominent enough. "I told them that the fault was not mine but God's," chuckled Lorado Taft, "and they haven't answered yet."

Responsible for the details of the tombstone show was grey-haired, convivial Designer Ernest Leland of Manhattan's swank Presbrey-Leland Studios. He is a self-taught draughtsman, whose forebears for generations have been tombstone-makers. Salesmen know that he has embellished more graves than any other single individual in the industry. From his drawing board came one of the most expensive tombs ever erected in the U. S., the $300,000 William Rockefeller Mausoleum at Tarrytown, N. Y. He is responsible for the Back-to-the-Epitaph movement now stirring the industry.

"Ernest," said his good friend President Lucian ("Lu") Schlimgen of the Memorial Craftsmen, "borders on being a genius."

President Schlimgen, who was re-elected for a second term, is a third-generation tombstone-carver. His father was founder and first president of the Memorial Craftsmen. Yet tombstones are not his only interest. He is president and chief benefactor of the Madison (Wis.) Zoo. President Schlimgen could scarcely wait last week for the tombstone convention to close. Back in Madison, Princess, his favorite lioness, had had a litter of cubs.

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