Word: one
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...these was Edith Barrett Parson's Duck Baby, later followed by a vast sculpture group called The Mystery of Life, in which 22 figures watch a baby chick as it hatches out of an egg. From Europe, Eaton also brought back plans of three famous British churches-the one where Gray wrote his Elegy, the one where, according to legend, Annie Laurie prayed for her lost lover, the one where Kipling was (possibly) inspired to write Recessional-and had them rebuilt in Forest Lawn. The churches were intended for funerals, but last year 183 weddings were held in Eaton...
...Angeles suburbs, lies a brilliant green oasis of more than 300 acres, which at first glance seems to be a golf course. On closer examination, the oasis turns out to be none other than Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, the Versailles of cemeteries that Novelist Evelyn Waugh (The Loved One) celebrated as the supreme expression of the American Way of Death...
Forest Lawn is a cemetery in which nobody calls a spade a spade. Here the loss of life is known as "leavetaking," a corpse is "the loved one" or "the revered clay," the dead are merely "out of sight." Here 1,500,000 visitors a year wander, secure in the knowledge that they can avoid seeing a tombstone; graves, marked only with bronze plaques set level with the ground, are clustered in such consoling sites as Sunrise Slope, Slumberland, Resthaven, Sweet Memories, Everlasting Love. Infants are buried in Babyland, which is "shaped like a mother's heart," and Lullabyland...
...managed to finish college, got a job as a mining engineer, finally bought a promising silver mine in Rawhide, Nev. When the vein ran out, he looked around for a job, after due consideration signed on as manager of a rundown cemetery near Los Angeles. One day in 1917, as Eaton surveyed his "depressing patches of devil grass, straggling untidy pepper trees [and] grim granite headstones," he was seized with a thrilling vision of "a great park, devoid of [the] customary signs of earthly death," where the dead might, in the biographer's prose, have "a beautiful passage...
Selling Immortality. Next came "shock tactics," a series of suave radio commercials about what Eaton later called "the one purchase everybody has to make." Next, the builder boosted sales by offering waterproof, fireproof, wormproof and even quakeproof vaults. Every morning he called his salesmen together and started the day with a prayer and a pep talk. They must always remember, he told them, that they were selling immortality...