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Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
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Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
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West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
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Thousands watch FDR funeral train |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Friday, 11 June 2004 |
By ROBERT MARCHANT
THE JOURNAL NEWS
June 11, 2004
Thousands of mourners, waiting patiently for hours, standing silently in slow-moving lines, gather together whenever a president passes through death into history.
The death of former President Ronald Reagan last week brought 100,000 mourners to his presidential library in southern California, with many waiting for hours merely to pass by the flag-draped coffin. A similar scene has unfolded in Washington, D.C., where an estimated 5,000 people an hour passed by the president's casket lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda.
In the Hudson Valley almost 60 years ago, mourning for a fallen president also drew vast crowds for a national ritual that pulls the country together in shared sorrow and respect. Tens of thousands of ordinary Americans mourned the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt and waited for hours to watch the funeral train on its way to the presidential burial site in Hyde Park, N.Y.
Mark Renovitch, an archivist at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, said the attachment to Roosevelt was particularly intense. "Most people felt connected to him, through the radio for the most part," said Renovitch. "And people could see an end in sight to the war, and he had brought them through that."
People broke down in tears when the news was announced that Roosevelt had died on April 12, 1945.
"I was in Washington as a soldier at the time when Roosevelt died," recalled Henry Graff of Scarsdale, an Army officer assigned to interpreting Japanese military transmissions in 1945. "I can still remember people crying on the streets. And for millions of American soldiers, they had no recollection of any other president — it was like daddy himself had died."
Graff, a presidential scholar and emeritus history professor at Columbia University, said Americans have always held a strong personal attachment to the presidency, which combines the head of state as well as the head of government. "The president of the United States is the most important person — outside the family — that they know. And the United States is rededicated at every inauguration," said Graff.
Graff said the outpouring following Reagan's death was quite unique. "We haven't had this popular a president in a long time," he said.
Former President Dwight Eisenhower was given an elaborate Washington funeral in 1969, and former President Lyndon Johnson, who died in 1973, was the last ex-president to have had an official Washington ceremony. Former President Nixon's family, acting on his wishes, did not stage a formal ceremony in Washington when he died in 1994. Neither did Harry Truman's family in 1973.
When Roosevelt's funeral train steamed through the Hudson Valley on April 15, 1945, tens of thousands gathered along the route to watch it pass, as crowds had done on its way here. In Philadelphia alone, for example 3,000 mourners rose in the wee hours early that Sunday morning to catch a glimpse of the 17-car special train.
Besides an act of national mourning, the journey carrying Roosevelt from his vacation home in Georgia to Washington and then to his burial in the Hudson Valley was also a military operation. The nation was at war, with news of the carnage at Okinawa and the final Allied push in Germany bracketing press coverage of Roosevelt's funeral preparations. President Truman was on board the train that carried Roosevelt's funeral procession, as was every member of the Supreme Court and many cabinet members. In New York City, more than 200 heavily armed military and civilian police officers cordoned the train as it underwent an engine change in the Bronx.
As it steamed north, people began to arrive in quiet groups along the Hudson before dawn. At the Ossining train station, a few mourners took a position at the station platform at 5 a.m. to catch a glimpse of the train, more than two hours before its arrival. About 100 people eventually turned up at the station to watch the train pass by.
"The observation end of the last car was open, and the casket and flowers were in view as the train passed the platform and out of sight," reported The Citizen Register of Ossining. "The people silently turned away and left for home."
It was a scene repeated just up the line at the Harmon train yard in Croton-on-Hudson and many other small towns up and down the train line. A crowd of about 1,500 attended a memorial service for the president at the Westchester County Center in White Plains.
The funeral service for Roosevelt next to the century-old rose garden at his Hyde Park estate lasted less than an hour. He did not lie in state in Washington, and his wife, Eleanor, requested that no flowers be sent to the White House.
Roosevelt was not the only president to have made his way in death through the Hudson Valley. Ironically, the same scene of mourning had taken place 80 years before his passage, almost to the day, when a train carrying the body of President Abraham Lincoln journeyed through New York en route to Illinois to the accompaniment of large crowds dressed in black and bent in prayer. Lincoln's funeral train stopped for three minutes in Peekskill, where the president had delivered a short speech in 1861 on his inaugural trip to Washington. A large memorial arch was built in Ossining to honor the fallen president.
Four presidents are buried within sight of the Hudson, including Ulysses S. Grant on Riverside Drive in upper Manhattan, Martin Van Buren at Kinderhook and Chester Arthur in Albany. With the burials of Theodore Roosevelt at Oyster Bay and Millard Fillmore in Buffalo, New York has more presidents interred within its borders than any other state in the union.
http://www.nyjournalnews.com/newsroom/061104/a0111prezfuneral.html |
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“When you have solved all the mysteries of life you long for death, for it is but another mystery of life.” Kahlil Gibran
Shirtless and Sculpted
The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.
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