Religion: Sentimental Institution

“We are not too much interested in the business end of our jobs. . . . The cemetery must be considered as a sentimental institution, and can never be handled in a cold, businesslike way.”

Thus warmly in Manhattan last week did Vice President & General Manager Crawford T. Perkinson of Mount Hope Cemetery Association keynote before the seventh annual convention of the New York State Association of Cemeteries, whose 900 member institutions bury 150,000 people a year at an estimated cost of $15,000,000. Superintendent John C. Plumb of Woodlawn Cemetery drove this pious point home, declaring that: “From time immemorial, people have endeavored to perpetuate the memory of their loved ones. In a greater sense this has been a service to the living. By keeping these last resting places as hallowed spots, free from all temptations of a commercial age, we are rendering a service to posterity.

“Our ideals should be to make God’s Acre a shrine of beauty. Gardens of memory are to me far more in keeping with the sentiment of our people than memorial parks.”

How many cemeteries there are in the U. S., no cemetery man pretends to know. In cities of 10,000 population or more there are 8,000, plus thousands of church yards, village cemeteries and abandoned “gardens of memory.” The New York cemetery men were concerned last week with the advisability of expanding Memorial Day, not unprofitably, into a National Memorial Week. Also they went on record against holding funerals on the Sabbath, thus falling in line with ministers, undertakers, hearse drivers, gravediggers. Said Cemetery Man Perkinson: “Most families desire privacy for the interment, but if a funeral is held on Sunday many visitors who have no personal interest leave their lots and hang around while the interment takes place, oftentimes making thoughtless remarks and generally taking away from the solemness of the interment. “The Police Department are in favor of this movement on account of traffic conditions. Funeral corteges on Sunday are many times as long as on weekdays, for many mourners who have nothing else to do follow to the cemetery.”