Tag Archives: Arlington National Cemetery

Adventures in Cemetery Travel

This is reblogged from the Western Legends Publishing blog, where it appeared almost two weeks ago.  I’ve been traveling and blogging from my phone was much more difficult than I expected.  This will be a new Cemetery of the Week tomorrow, though, so tune in again!

Adventures in Cemetery Travel

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How did I pick all those cemeteries I visited in Wish You Were Here? That’s a funny story…

I visited the first cemetery by accident. I found a lovely book of cemetery photos — who knew such a thing existed? — in the bookshop at London’s Victoria Station. That was toward the end of our unexpected stay in England, but my husband Mason decided he would rather see beautiful, overgrown Highgate Cemetery than the Tower of London. It was the right choice.

We’d already planned to work Pere Lachaise Cemetery into our trip to Paris, because Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, and so many other famous people were buried there. I’d found a cemetery guidebook (my first!) calledPermanent Parisians in the Rand McNally store in San Francisco. That book also led us to the cemeteries of Montparnasse and St. Vincent and the Paris Municipal Ossuary, but I wasn’t such a geek yet that we saw a single graveyard when we visited Amsterdam that same trip.

For a while after that, I simply stumbled on cemeteries. My mom saw the sign for the Pioneer Cemetery in Yosemite while I was looking for the anthropology museum. Jack London just happened to be buried at the State Historical Park that bears his name. A friend was touring St. Louis Cemetery in New Orleans and encouraged me to come along.

Other places had such an impact on history that I wanted to see them for myself. When Mason and I went to Japan for the first time, I wanted to go out of our way to see Hiroshima and the Peace Park. When my mom took me to Honolulu, I went alone by tour bus on Easter morning to see Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona Memorial. I ducked out of a family trip to Washington DC to visit Arlington National Cemetery.

Then I started to get a reputation. Japanese friends took us to the old capitol of Kamakura to show me a monks’ graveyard. A friend who’d grown up in Westchester County said I shouldn’t miss the Old Dutch Burying Ground in Sleepy Hollow. Other friends gave us a private tour of the Soldiers National Cemetery and battlefield at Gettysburg.

By the time Mason and I went to Italy in 2001, we were building our vacations around cemeteries. In Rome, I targeted the Protestant Cemetery, final home of Keats and Shelley. In Venice, I wanted to see the island set aside as a graveyard, where Stravinsky is buried. Strangely enough, my goal in Florence was La Specola, the jaw-dropping medical museum — but we managed to score an hour alone in the English Cemetery, where Elizabeth Barrett Browning is buried. It had the most amazing iconography. Oh, and we discovered that the roads into the archaeological site at Pompeii are lined with tombs, although that story didn’t make it into Wish You Were Here.

Graveyards are everywhere you go. Next time you travel, take a look.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Launch

Space Shuttle Challenger Memorial

It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than 25 years since the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch. I was watching TV that morning before I went to my job as the Undergraduate English Secretary at the University of Michigan.

Much of the country was watching TV on January 28, 1986. Among the crew members was Christa McAuliffe, who’d won the honor to be the first Teacher in Space. She represented the opportunity for normal people to go into space. Her death marked the end of that dream for most people.

On June 12, 1986, Congress resolved that “the Secretary of the Army should construct and place in Arlington National Cemetery a memorial marker honoring the seven members of the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger.” Artist Robert Harding designed the bronze plaque on the front of the monument. John Gillespie Magee Jr.’s poem “High Flight” is inscribed on the memorial’s back.

Some of the Challenger crewmembers’ remains could be identified and were buried in private graves. Everything that could not be identified using 1980s technology was cremated and is buried in the base of this monument.

Vice President George Bush dedicated the monument on March 21, 1987. Family members of the seven Challenger astronauts, along with a small crowd of 400 other people, attended.

Faces and names engraved on the monument are:

Commander Michael J. Smith, Pilot (buried in Arlington in Section 7-A)
Commander Francis R. “Dick” Scobee (buried in Section 46 to the left of the Challenger Monument)
Ronald E. McNair, Mission Specialist
Ellison Onizuka, Mission Specialist
S. Christa McAuliffe, Payload Specialist (and teacher)
Gregory B. Jarvis, Payload Specialist
Judith A. Resnik, Mission Specialist

“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings…”

Cemetery of the Week #1: Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia

Recording the graves at Arlington

After recent scandals in which graves have been misidentified at Arlington National Cemetery, members of the Old Guard are photographing every single headstone.

What cemeteries have you visited on vacation?

Greetings from Boot Hill!

As a product of the classic American childhood road trip, I’m curious to know which cemeteries you’ve visited on vacation.  Please check all that apply.

Feel free to add anything I’ve missed in the comments.

Thanks!

Guide to the Soldiers’ National Cemetery

Lincoln and the Human Interest Stories of the Gettysburg National CemeteryLincoln and the Human Interest Stories of the Gettysburg National Cemetery by James M. Cole

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Unlike Arlington National Cemetery, which has had many books written about it, Gettysburg National Cemetery — a.k.a. Soldiers’ National Cemetery — has very few, most of which are out of print. That’s a shame, since the whole system of American national cemeteries, including Arlington, owes its existence to this plot of ground in Pennsylvania.

This booklet, which I picked up at the gift shop at Gettysburg National Park, seems to be the most comprehensive information available on the subject. It opens with photographs of corpses strewn across the battlefield and subsequently laid in a temporary grave, then goes on to describe the movement to honor the fallen, which grew until it inspired President Lincoln to write the Gettysburg Address. I found this portion of the book worth the price. In fact, I would have liked even more detail.

The book’s second half fulfills its title by providing biographies and some photographs of the men laid to rest at Soldiers’ National Cemetery. I was impressed by the research that went into uncovering these stories. I wonder if more could be added since this book was published in 1995.

Soldiers’ National Cemetery was a crucial development in the way the dead are treated in this country. If you have any interest in the matter, track down this book.

You can order your own copy from Amazon: Lincoln and the human interest stories of the Gettysburg National Cemetery

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