By Mike Sula
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“Park lawn cemeteries have no character,” he says, looking out over the flat landscape. Like all park lawns, Queen of Heaven owes much of its design to Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, which opened its gates in 1913. “The thinking was that you could come to this place and not be constantly reminded of death, because there are no visible headstones to remind you of dead people. You know, ‘How dare you come to a cemetery and think about dead people?’ It’s also easier to run a lawn mower through.”
Olivero prefers the older Mount Carmel Cemetery just across Roosevelt Road, where forests of stone tree trunks and angels reach skyward among stately family mausoleums with elaborate stained-glass designs of saints and bleeding hearts, and where glazed ceramic portraits of the dead are embedded in many of the stones. He says, “Families used to plan outings in cemeteries, have picnics, talk to their relatives, reflect on family history and their own lives.” He remembers playing in the cemetery during his own family’s outings–20 to 30 relatives from the Italian side of his family are buried there. It was also the site of his first funeral, when he was three years old; his uncle had died, and he vividly remembers his fainting aunt’s shoes flying up in the air.
By the 1880s there was still no law against stealing a body from a grave–only against stealing the clothes and jewelry buried with it. So robbers would strip a corpse before taking it. The issue didn’t receive national attention until 1878, when the body of Senator John Scott Harrison–son of President William Henry and father of President Benjamin–was discovered being hoisted into a dissecting room at the Medical College of Ohio one day after his funeral. The case instigated legislation that enabled doctors to obtain cadavers legally, usually those of indigents or asylum inmates. “In typical American fashion,” says Olivero, “nothing is ever done about a situation until it happens to somebody famous.”
