Business & Finance: Tombstone Backlog

The Exhibition Hall of Chicago’s Hotel Stevens was jampacked last week with $1,000,000 of gravestones. Around & around the Hall walked dozens of joking, back-slapping businessmen who eyed each granite block with official pride. They tramped into a private dining room, sat down to a banquet at which no one made a speech. For five days they haggled over code chiselers, discussed new ideas on designs, talked about cashing in on their backlog. Gravestone sellers all, members of the Memorial Craftsmen of America, they wound up their annual convention in the hotel taproom and went home with schemes for carving out more business from the living and the dead.

Theirs is the only industry in which a man already in his grave is a prospect. Even though the average price of a tombstone dropped from $500 to $350 as Depression deepened, many a man preferred to leave his loved one’s grave unmarked until he could afford a memorial. These unmarked graves are the industry’s backlog, each a potential sale.

Most people buy tombstones out of insurance money left by the deceased. Because insurance is among the last assets a man forfeits, the tombstone makers were serene long after hard times had pinched other manufacturers. In 1929 they sold $100,000,000 of memorials. By 1932 their gross had slipped to a third of that sum. but this year they expect to take in $60,000,000.*Ideal tombstone customer was the late Steelmaster Judge Elbert Henry Gary who built no less than 42 crypts and declared: “I believe every man should consider Death as carefully as he would consider a business proposition.”

Only 450 craftsmen attended last week’s convention, but there are more than ten times that number of gravestone companies in the U. S. They range from the little fellow on the corner lot who buys his stock readymade, to such potent concerns as Charles G. Blake Co. of Chicago who built the $100,000 Gary mausoleum, and Presbrey-Leland Studios Inc. of Manhattan who erected the $300,000 William Rockefeller mausoleum at Tarrytown, N. Y. Most big firms do their work on contract, employ their own designers. Architect Raymond Mathewson Hood who died last week (see p. 28) once worked for Presbrey-Leland. The bigger firms are apt to buy their materials from manufacturers like Rock of Ages of Barre, Vt., J. D. Sargent Co. of Mt. Airy, N. C., Georgia Marble Co. of Tate, Jones Bros. Co. of Boston, Smith Granite Co. of Westerly, R. I. who supplied the pink-white granite for Calvin Coolidge.

But materials are far from being the most expensive item in a tombstone. A $500 granite monument of average size contains only $36 in materials. The rest is workmanship. Ordinary stonecutters get $9 a day in Chicago and Boston, $10 in New York. Carvers get as high as $18 a day. But all work on granite tombstones is hazardous, especially sandblasting, because of the danger of silicosis infection. The average sandblaster is ready for his own tombstone at the age of 45.

* By contrast, the corset business held steadily to $75,000,000 in Rood years and had (TIME, Aug. 20).