Fresh Loaf

Cooper Sanchez hosted Oakland: In the Greenhouse Ruins, a one-day art show of paintings and installations, last Friday at Oakland Cemetery.

(Photo by Dustin Chambers)

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For the last 10 years, Reed has overseen historic Oakland Cemetery’s operations, including the digging of graves for funeral services. The West Virginia native can usually be found talking with visitors and giving tours.

How did you get started working in Oakland Cemetery?
I was working as a funeral director at a local funeral home at Murray Brothers and this job came open. Someone called me and said they had a job open at Oakland Cemetery as the Sexton [and said], would you be interested? And I said yeah, because I need some benefits. At these private funeral homes you don’t have benefits.

How did you get started working in a funeral home?
I knew in the first grade I was going to be a mortician. I remember my first grade teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and at that time I we called them “undertakers.” So I said “I’m gonna be an undertaker,” and everybody laughed. But I knew that was my special calling.

Why is that?
I was always fascinated with how people look when they lay them out in a casket at a funeral home, especially when you hear that they were hit by a car or hit by a train. Then, when you get there, you see this beautiful person laying there, just looking at peace. And I wanted to understand that. I wanted to understand how they do that.

(more…)

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OAKLAND CEMETERY: Still waiting on federal evaluation to begin cleaning up most tornado damage, including smashed Confederate monuments and uprooted 19th-century trees with roots tangled around coffins.

CHASE TATUM: Former WCW wrestler found dead in Buckhead home after apparent drug O.D.

CLINTON: It depends what your definitions of “ducking” and “sniper fire” are.

TYRA BANKS STALKER: All the way from Dublin, Ga.

BASKET CASE: Federal inmate Jonathan Lee Riches alone has filed 39 percent of all cases filed this month in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. Among his March “defendants” are Eliot Spitzer, Tom Glavine, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Cyndi Lauper. Last August Riches filed a $63 quintillion suit against Michael Vick for selling his pit bulls on eBay to buy missiles from Iran.

UGA EARMARKS: Surprisingly, the recipients of earmarks like earmarks.

YELLOW JACKETEERING: Another Ga. Tech employee charged with racketeering for allegedly abusing state p-card. (According to AccessNorthGa.com’s news graphic, she is an elf and was arrested in miniature handcuffs much smaller than a dollar bill.)

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If you take Memorial Drive into and out of downtown, you may recently have noticed land-clearing on several woebegone parcels between that street and MLK Drive. And you may have wondered what’s going in where those dilapidated structures had been.

Here’s your answer: Nothing.

The demolition you’ve witnessed is part of an ongoing project to create a linear park between the state Capitol and Oakland Cemetery. The western portion of the park, where the Capitol Homes public housing project once stood, is already cleared and is awaiting state funding to turn it into a greenway.

Just last week, Gov. Sonny Perdue submitted a budget proposal that includes some $11 million to begin designing a pedestrian thoroughfare that will allow visitors to walk from the Gold Dome to the planned Capitol Gateway Park by way of a walkway spanning the Downtown Connector. The ambitious proposal calls for the parking deck next to the Statehouse to be replaced by a rolling lawn, through which Piedmont Avenue will be rerouted, boulevard-style.

As for the land-clearing to the east, at Hill Street and along Oakland Avenue, that’s the city’s handiwork. Through the Atlanta Development Authority, and with support from the Trust for Public Land and private donors, the city is assembling the rest of the strip along Memorial to complement the state’s portion.

Last year, the city bought three blocks, with four more to go. The most recent acquisition – for $1.7 million – was the block on the north side of MLK, just opposite the entrance to the cemetery. The land was vacant except for an old, shanty-ish house, says Ellen Wickersham, the ADA’s manager of parks and greenspace.

“As we were wiring the money to seller, fire engines were called because the house was going up in flames,” she says. “It’s totally unexplained.”

The site could be used for a future visitor’s center for Atlanta’s most famous cemetery, she says.

Meanwhile, a number of existing businesses are still operating in the planned park corridor, including the beloved Daddy D’z. But Wickersham says the city isn’t trying to push anybody out.

“This is a long-term project, so we’re working with individual businesses in order to respect their needs,” she says.

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HALLOWEEN TOUR AT OAKLAND CEMETERY: To keep from awakening this tomb’s brain-eating zombie, please turn your cell phones to vibrate.

(photo by Joeff Davis)

Unless you’re a security guard, a trespasser, or dead, Oakland Cemetery is usually off-limits to you at night. Last weekend, however, the cemetery gatekeepers welcomed visitors who paid up to $15 for spooky, Halloween-themed, nighttime tours of Oakland’s graves and mausolea (which is a real word, by the way). Tours were scheduled to start between 7 and 1o p.m, but turnout was so high both nights the cemetery was turning people away by 8:45.

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