Digging a career
Tuesday, November 1, 2016 3:56 pm
Editor's note: This is the conclusion of a two-part story that began last week. KEN BECK 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. 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' "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. "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. Keeping traditions alive "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. 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.
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