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What's New at Arcadia
Historic Burial Grounds of the New Hampshire Seacoast By Glenn A. Knoblock
Arcadia Publishing has releases a new title in the Images of America series, the historic account of the cemeteries along the New Hampshire Seacoast. This collection is a must for anyone interested in local history, genealogy, or colonial-era art. Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Historic Burial Grounds of the New Hampshire Seacoast and browse other cemetery books!
Green-Wood Cemetery By Alexandra Mosca
Arcadia Publishing announces the release of the historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery.
Announcements
Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb By Scott L. Newstok
An innovative study of the Renaissance practice of making epitaphic gestures within other English genres. A poetics of quotation uncovers the ways in which writers including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Holinshed, Sidney, Jonson, Donne, and Elizabeth I have recited these texts within new contexts. Visit Palgrave Macmillan and purchase your copy today!
Living by the Dead By Ellen Ashdown with illustrations by Mary Liz Moody.
A memoir about living beside a cemetery--and about the members of my family who came to rest at Roselawn Cemetery in Tallahassee, Florida. Please visit Kitsune Books for more information.
Graveyards of Chicago: The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski.
Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!
Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.
Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman
Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture is now available. Please visit Studio Indiana for more information.
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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Some celebrities will be starring forever in Las Vegas cemeteries |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Thursday, 26 February 2004 |
By JOHN PRZYBYS
February 24, 2004
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Plenty of famous people come to Las Vegas, but some are mere transients compared with celebrities like Sonny Liston, Bo Belinsky and Harry James - who are staying forever.
The boxer, the baseball player and the bandleader are just a few of the famous who are reposing for all eternity in southern Nevada's cemeteries and mausoleums.
Jim Tipton has been charting the locations of celebrity and noncelebrity grave sites for years at a Web site devoted to the final resting places of the famous, the infamous and the little known.
Tipton said some people visit celebrity grave sites for the thrill of the hunt, and many people are attracted by genealogical research.
"There are a lot of people out there literally walking cemeteries, recording the names and entering them," he said. "And they love it when someone else writes in and says, 'I'm so glad you posted my grandmother."'
But, Tipton said, "I think the single-biggest motivation is the same reason you'd visit a grave in real-life. As cliched as it sounds, it's to pay your respects."
Candice Vo, assistant administrator at Paradise Memorial Gardens in Las Vegas, said most people who visit the grave sites of the famous do so because they're fans and want to pay their respects.
Ned Phillips, vice president of Palm Mortuaries & Cemeteries, said tourist visits to burial sites aren't as common in Las Vegas as in celebrity-rich Southern California.
Nonetheless, Redd Foxx's grave site at Palm Valley View Memorial Park is popular enough to be shown on a map visitors can obtain from the cemetery office.
The headstone of the comedian and television actor, best known as the star of television's "Sanford & Son," is a simple one. It is just off the cemetery's main entrance and features his stage name, not his real name: John Elroy Sanford.
Also inscribed on the headstone is the face of a red fox and the inscription "You are my (red heart) always."
Palm Valley View also is the final home of actor Peter Lind Hayes, a TV and film star from the '50s and '60s whose work included "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T," a surrealistic 1953 children's film written by Dr. Seuss.
Hayes' headstone also is a simple one, flush in the ground and next to the grave of Grace Hayes, "beloved mother."
Sports fans can find the grave site of boxer Charles "Sonny" Liston at Paradise Memorial Gardens.
The former heavyweight champion's stone features his name, his birth and death dates, and the enigmatic epitaph, "A Man."
Not far from Liston, in the same section of the cemetery, is the grave of Robert "Bo" Belinsky, well-known for a busy social life and his baseball prowess. Ann-Margret, Tina Louise and Mamie Van Doren were a few of the Hollywood starlets he dated.
Belinsky's stone contains the image of a baseball, the notation "No Hitter" and the May 5, 1962, date that Belinsky, then with the Los Angeles Angels, pitched a no-hitter against the Baltimore Orioles.
On a recent afternoon, a few loose pennies were spread across Belinsky's grave site.
Around the hedges behind Liston's and Belinsky's graves is the final resting place of Grammy-winning blues guitarist Albert Collins.
While some moviegoers may remember Collins' witty turn playing himself in the 1987 comedy "Adventures in Babysitting," his headstone offers a more fitting epitaph: "Master of the Telecaster."
At Bunker Eden Vale Memorial Park, in the Chapel of Eternal Peace, is the niche of big-band trumpeter and bandleader Harry James, who gave his last performance in Las Vegas before dying from cancer in 1983.
In the same building, right off the entrance, are the niches of casino pioneer Benny Binion and his son, Ted Binion, whose September 1998 slaying soon will be revisited with the retrial of Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish.
Tipton conceded that finding celebrity graves can be tricky, even with the row, section and plot number.
There are no standard ways of laying out graveyards, and cemeteries often don't have well-marked signs to delineate sections and rows.
Many cemeteries also have confusing names like "Serenity Plot."
"I've spent hours of my life literally walking every row, thinking, (writer) 'Isaac Asimov should be here somewhere,'" Tipton said.
Not every lead pans out.
Tipton's Web site lists a reader's submission that Col. Tom Parker, Elvis Presley's manager, is buried at a Las Vegas Palm property.
But Palm's Phillips said he could find no record of that.
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=11016864&BRD=1817&PAG=461&dept_id=222087&rfi=6 |
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