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Program Title: A Cemetery Special
NOLA Code: ACEM 000 K1
Feed Information: October 2005
Broadcast Rights: 6 Releases, 4 years – 10/17/2005 – 10/25/2009
Program Distribution: PBS
Genre: Documentary
TV Rating: G
Short Description of Program:
Today cemeteries aren't quite so popular and full of people, but they are still valuable and often beautiful places full of surprises and stories of all sorts celebrating some old and interesting places where people are buried. "A Cemetery Special" includes a tour of several great "rural garden cemeteries" including Allegheny in Pittsburgh (where a family finds its long lost Uncle E.Z.), Mount Auburn in Boston (the first of the great American cemeteries), and Lake View in Cleveland (where there's a mighty memorial to President James A. Garfield and an annual celebration of the flowers on its Daffodil Hill.) At the Key West Cemetery in Florida, there's lots of local history and a few funny epitaphs amid the palm trees and the monuments. On Memorial Day, the town of Waterloo in New York's Finger Lakes region carries on the town's tradition of decorating the graves of soldiers who died in the line of duty. And in Atlanta, the Historic Oakland Cemetery is essentially full – it sold its last family plot back in 1884 – but its Foundation and many volunteers are working together now to restore its Victorian grandeur and to attract lots of visitors.
Then traveling to the town of Colma, California, where there are seventeen cemeteries because the city of San Francisco decided to "evict" all its old cemeteries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In central Vermont, the folks at Rock of Ages' quarries take granite out of the ground and transform it into memorials, while local stonecutters and workers have made sure that Hope Cemetery in Barre has one of the world's best collections of unusual sculptures and monuments. The last stop is at Birch Hill Cemetery in Fairbanks where Alaskans often make their markers of wood and frequently leave a variety of personal objects and mementoes atop the graves.
"There's nothing spooky or scary in the program," said Rick. "It's a brisk sort of tour that we hope will convince people to wander through a cemetery someday soon, looking for unusual headstones, visiting a departed friend, remembering beloved parents or grandparents or ancestors of any sort. We may remind people how short life can be. That would be OK too." Visit
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Total Running Time: 56:46
On-Air Offer Tag: To order "A Cemetery Special" on videocassette, or DVD, call PBS Home Video at 1-800 "PLAY PBS"
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