Comment
Email
Print
Editor's note: This is the conclusion of a two-part story that began last week.
KEN BECK
The Cannon Courier
A bit more than halfway through his 50-plus-year career, gravedigger Frank Thomas hired two young men, Michael Hunter and Kenneth Vickers, to help him on occasion.
He has never forgotten the time they scoffed after he told them about hand digging a grave in an hour and 45 minutes. Months later, the two went to the same Mt. Juliet cemetery to dig a grave, and a man, who lived nearby, strolled over to tell them about the tall man he observed digging a grave in an hour and 15 minutes.
Thomas said, "Michael helped me all through high school. After college, he came back home and wanted to know if he could work with me. He was with me over 20 years off and on. One of the best hands I ever had, he and my boy."
Hunter and Vickers later worked as a gravedigging team for four or five years. Hunter started his own Hunter Grave Service (HGS) 10 years ago, and he now prepares about 200 graves a year.
Protégé shares observations
Hunter, 50, began helping Thomas when he was 18. At the time the veteran had been digging graves for his grandfather, Mr. Nave, and father, Mike Hunter, for over 15 years.
Said Hunter, "Frank got everybody for my granddaddy from the 1960s until my granddaddy died in 1997, unless they [the bodies] went to Wilson County Memorial Garden or Cedar Grove. And the last 20 or so years he worked, Frank dug in Cedar Grove.
"Frank was probably one of the first ones that come in professionally, whether he meant to or not, and turned it into a business. I remember Frank telling me the first time he was handpicking a grave up at New Hope Cemetery, my daddy drove up and got out his car and said, 'I've got a grave at Jones Hill. You want to dig it for me?' He never said no to anybody.
"From that time on he dug every grave for my daddy. About a week after that, my granddaddy called up at Liberty and said, 'This is Jewell Nave. You opened a grave for Mike up at Watertown, and I wondered if you would come up to Lebanon and dig a grave for me?' And from that point on, my granddaddy used him every grave after that."
Thomas 'last of a dying breed'
"When I went to work with him in 1984, he was practically digging everything in Wilson County and DeKalb, and since Frank retired, there's probably six, maybe eight sets of gravediggers that do what he used to do by himself. That is how gravedigging kind of evolved. It ain't that long since the communities went out and dug the graves," said Hunter.
"He's the last of a dying breed. I don't think nobody's gonna dig that many graves by hand again. He was the transition between the families or communities that came out and dug a grave and to when it turned into a business. He was the one around here. Won't never be anybody else like him.
"I remember back in the '80s, when I first started helping Frank. We would go to most of these country cemeteries in Wilson County. One of them I think of right off hand is Conatser Cemetery off Berea Church Road off Coles Ferry Pike. We would go the day before to dig and go back the next day and do the funeral service.
"There would always be five or six old men show up, and they would watch us work. They would start telling the stories of how they used to hand dig the graves. Some of them would tell WWII stories and all that kind of stuff. They have slowly all passed away, and when we go to these cemeteries today, nobody shows up like that.
"From my perspective, those guys took an active part in digging graves during their lives, and Frank was the first to take it on to the business route. There's people that work at cemeteries, and there's gravediggers. There's a big difference between them. There's not many true gravediggers. There's more now than when Frank did it solo, but still, as a profession, there are not that many gravediggers.
Keeping traditions alive
"A gravedigger deals mainly in these country church cemeteries, community cemeteries and family cemeteries. That's where we primarily make our living. They don't have cemetery workers there to do the work," said Hunter.
"You've got your corporate cemeteries, like Wilson County Memorial Garden. They hire people to work at the cemetery. In Nashville most of your cemeteries are corporate. You go to Memorial Garden, they're gonna back a tractor down a row of graves and have a hydraulic dump trailer behind it, and they're gonna dump that grave full of dirt instead of hand filling in.
"You would almost have to see it to truly know what I am talking about. There's a difference between what we do, but it is the same job.
"Frank would always quit digging out of the grave a little bit early and finish the rest of the grave with a pick and a trim bar. We would shovel it out, and the bottom would be perfectly flat, even to the corners, and today most don't even get into the grave.
"I make my graves 100 percent to specifications because I learned trimming graves from Frank. I've kept the 4-foot and 3-foot yardsticks when the majority of gravediggers use a tape measure now," said Hunter, who does the brunt of the digging with a mini-excavator and busts up rock with a 500-pound jackhammer.
"Frank was one of first that cut the sod up and hand rolled it. Most people think we use a machine to take it up. It's a little more work but a lot of people really like that. Most people have gone to hydraulic dump cart or a ratchet cart. To me it's just as easy to calculate your dirt, put it on a cart and shovel it in. Families still like that, what I call the traditional way.
"I never remember Frank ever making a mistake in the cemetery, and I've tried to apply that to this day, and I've never had a problem. He loved helping the people in their time of need and people remember that. You just don't see that personal touch any more, and Frank brought that. I try to keep that part of it alive and well."
On the lighter side, Hunter hints at Thomas's sense of humor and his stamina, saying, "One time he paid me off in Susan B. Anthony dollars, and he was always threatening that he was going to pay me with pennies.
"Frank is pretty stout. He wouldn't stop. It wouldn't be fast work but a steady pace all day.
He never did beat me in arm wrestling but will tell you that I never beat him.
