Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 306, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 December 1912 — CARING FOR GRAVES [ARTICLE]

CARING FOR GRAVES

Hugh Kenney Utilizes Remnants of Costly Emblems. For Forty-five Years Brooklyn Man Has Removed Discarded Wire Frames From Cemeteries in Gotham and Elsewhere. New York. —More than $1,500,000 is spent every year in Greater New York city for floral emblems for funerals, and it is said that 200,000 designs are annually sent to the cemeteries. What becomes of them? The flowers fade and wither; the wind and rain help to scatter broadcast the leaves and petals, but the wire framework, the moss and the tinfoil remain to litter up the most carefully kept cemetery unless they are disposed of after serving their purpose. New York city is reputed to have the most beautiful and best kept cemeteries in the world, and it is because they are cleaned out frequently and their aspect not marred by objectionable dumps of discarded floral emblems. For forty-fife years a Brooklyn man has removed from the cemeteries the discarded wire frames and their accumlated debris and today, with the assistance of his seven sens, he claims not only all of those of South Orange in New Jersey and Kenisco and Woodlawn above New York city. This man, Hugh Kenney, receives no pay from the cemeteries for this work. His teams or auto trucks call at the cemeteries at regular Intervals: at the larger and better grades as often as every three weeks, but at the smaller cemeteries only once in six months. From each cemetery he removes from one to six wagon loads of the discarded floral emblems and takes them to his plant in Brooklyn. Here 80 men are employed, who handle the refuse as it arrives. As wagon load after wagon load comes from tlfe-cemeteries their contents are dumped into the large vacant lot which forms a part of the plant, and the crew of men, armed with sharp knives, pincers and wire cutters, tackles the weatherbeaten, faded pjeces, and one by one they are stripped. The tinfoil and moss are ripped away and the stems, natural and artificial, are pulled from the moss backing, until the wire framework is cleaned.

The wire frames are theii scraped with wire brushes, bent and twisted back into their original shapes and dipped into an immense tank of benzine to cleanse them. As they emerge from the benzine bath, bright and clean, they receive their final treatment, a dip into a tank of green paint, and then are once more ready for the market and are resold to the florists. All of the refuse that comes from the frames is cremated. A crematory of the Colorex type, burning liquid oil, is maintained on the premises for this purpose. Some of the wire frames are so badly bent and twisted that they are beyond repair, and these are thrown into a dump heap in the rear of the lot. Four tons of the wire refuse accumulates monthly and the material is carted to one of the big iron foundries in Kings county and there transformed into sash weights for windows. Of the 200,000 floral designs that are used at funerals in New York every year, there are about l,Boo__different .styles and sizes, ranging all the way from the simple wVeath, or cross, for probably one dollar complete, to a miniature locomotive and tender, 42 inches long. The working materials that are used extensively in the manufacture of the funeral emblems, besides the wire frames, are moss,- toothpicks, butchers’ skewers, tinfoil and white pigeons. In addition to the millions of flowers ÜBed every year on funeral there is a large demand for white “doves,” emblematic of purity. For these “doves” pure white pigeons are 'substituted. Sometimes the market goes shy, for the pigeon’s feathers must be pure white, without a trace fit color. The hotels, clubs and restaurants get the meat for squabs, and sometimes “quail orders,” and the taxidermist gets the skin and the feathers. '>