Tonight on Showcase with Barbara Kellar, author Michael Griffith discusses his book, The Speaking Stone; Stories Cemeteries Tell.

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(music) KELLAR: Michael, tell us about your book.

You've written a great book that all Cincinnatians will be interested in.

Tell us about your book.

GRIFFITH: Well, thanks so much for having me, Barbara.

I really appreciate it.

My book is called The Speaking Stone Story Cemeteries Tell, and it started because I was playing hooky from a novel.

I was struggling with this novel I was writing that was about an obituary writer and a puzzle divisor and was set against the backdrop of the imploding newspaper.

And I just got stuck on the book and I started taking daily walks in Spring Grove, which is right near my house in North Side.

And priming the pump for the book, but really I was just trying to e fact that I was failing and failing and fai at writing.

KELLAR: Yeah.

GRIFFITH: And I just bought an iPhone for the first time at the moment.

And I started as I walked every day, I just as I passed stones, I would look up the people who are buried there and quickly discovered that I was kind of every time I looked somebody up, I was plunged immediately into this rabbit hole that connected to all sorts of things that, you know, in some cases connected to my own life or the life of my family, in some cases connected to other things I was interested in, in some cases connected to bits of Cincinnati lore or history that I knew about.

And I, you know, pretty soon it occurred to me, "Oh, wait, you're accidentally writing a different book."

KELLAR: Yeah, well, tell us -- Each chapter is about a different person.

And which of these people would you say -- who's the most famous person buried at Spring Grove?

GRIFFITH: Well, I mean, it's interesting.

The premise of my book essentially was that I was simply going to wander.

I was going to -- I had been I had taught at UC.

My day job is teaching creative writing at UC.

And I often talk to my students about kind of what I call the tyranny of plot.

By that, what I mean is that we act as if our lives are plotted, but as we live our lives, they don't actually feel like they have a plot.

Plot is something that you kind of impose after the fact when you find a line.

And so I was trying to think more about digression and about wandering and how those things can aid creativity and how they're connected to narrative.

And so I decided what I was going to do is simply wander, that I wouldn't seek out the most famous people buried in Cincinnati.

So there's no Levi and Catherine Coffin, the President and First Lady of the Underground Railroad.

And there's no -- there's no Alfred P. Mullet.

And there's no Salmon P. Chase and so on.

The most famous person that I wrote about in the book is surely Fanny Wright, one of the most important early feminists in America.

KELLAR: Tell us a little bit about her.

GRIFFITH: She was born, I think, in 1795 in Scotland to a very wealthy family, but she was orphaned when she was just two or three years old.

And when she was about 20, she and her sister came to the U.S. for the first time and fell in love with the ideal of the U.S. And she came back and she started a utopian community in Tennessee called Nashoba.

And she was a, you know, she was an abolitionist.

She was an advocate of free love.

She was an advocate of women in all sorts of ways.

And she actually she brought Fanny Trollope, who's kind of infamous for having written a brutal take down of Cincinnati.

KELLAR: And she was a sister of Anthony Trollope.

GRIFFITH: She was the mother.

KELLAR: Mother, okay.

GRIFFITH: And but she initially came with Fanny Wright to the United States and then ended up in Cincinnati.

Fanny Wright became the most famous female orator in the United States at that time, in fact, and was brutally attacked for being a woman who had the temerity to speak in public.

She was a brilliant lecturer, you know, just, you know, marvelously articulate, spontaneously eloquent.

She would appear on stage in this kind of intimidating looking garb with 15 or so women in a phalanx on the stage with her.

And she then became -- she became so well known that she was known as kind of the -- I think she was sometimes called the Red Harlot of Liberty and was reviled by a lot of, you know, by a lot of conservatives of the time.

And then she became a -- she was one of the first women in the United States to wear pants, to wear bloomers.

KELLAR: At least that were showing.

GRIFFITH: I'm sorry?

KELLAR: At least the ones that were showing.

GRIFFITH: Yes, that's correct.

Yes.

KELLAR: Why is she buried in Spring Grove?

GRIFFITH: She was in and out of Cincinnati a good bit.

Her daughter, from whom late in her life she was estranged, had a home in Cincinnati.

And the daughter was not there, the mother was, they weren't getting along at all.

But she actually died in Cincinnati.

She slipped on icy stairs outside her daughter's house, I believe, and ended up being buried here.

KELLAR: Um-hmm.

I was interested in Ernst Huenefeld because very, very close friends of mine are Kathy and Tom Huenefeld, who passed away just recently.

But he invented the stove with a glass door.

GRIFFITH: That's right.

KELLAR: And Tom Huenefeld, as I said, who just passed away, was a Cincinnati historian.

And he, since his passing, he funded a section at the Cincinnati Museum Center about Cincinnati history.

But Scarlet Oaks, maybe you know this.

Scarlet Oaks, I think this was in the book, was gifted by the Huenefelds and that building, Cincinnatians who have been in it, the house at Scarlet Oaks which is now their headquarters, was their home.

And Tom, of course, that was his grandparents'.

So was ERNST -- But Ernst was sort of the patriarch.

He was the first.

Right?

Do you remember what period that was?

GRIFFITH: Sure, that -- I mean, that essay was -- I mean, one of the things about this book that made it really a delight, when we were talking before, before we started the interview about just how brutal it is to finish a book.

And certainly that's been my experience with my other books is that they've taken years and years and years.

This book was a kind of a delight to write, and it moved much more quickly.

And part of that was just that I was discovering constantly these connections to my own life.

And I mean in that case, my daughter -- when my daughter was a toddler, my wife and I used to picnic in Spring Grove with her just so she could run around and get her ya-yas out.

And we picnicked always next to this memorial.

I didn't -- I never noticed the name even, but my daughter would sneak in and out of the columns and I would chase her.

Several years later, she started going to the school for the Creative and Performing Arts, and I would drive down SpringGre her to school.

GRIFFITH: And we would always pass this historical marker.

And all I could read was the headline of it which said: World's First Glass Door Oven.

One day we were running a little bit early, so we pulled over so we could read the whole text and we discovered that on that spot on Spring Grove Avenue, not three quarters of a mile from the studios here, Ernst Huenefeld became the first person ever to devise a way to see your food while it cooks in an oven.

And, you know, at the time I remember thinking a little snarkily like, "This is not the kind of distinction that New York wants to claim."

Right?

But the more I thought about it, the more amazing a thing thatis.

I mean, stoves have been around for 30,000 years and this happened in 1906, I believe is when Huenefeld discovered it.

And so then later, while I was wandering around the cemetery, I walked past that mausoleum that my daughter had -- that I'd chased my daughter around, looked up and for the first time noticed the name, and it's his.

KELLAR: Are all the descendants buried there as well, do you know?

GRIFFITH: I don't know.

I think a good many family members a I don't know that for sure.

KELLAR: I should have done my homework on that and found out.

I think I could have, but it's much easier to ask you.

Well, tell me about some of the other people there.

GRIFFITH: Sure.

One of the essays that was most fun for me to write is about Laura Pruden, who was a famous medium in the late 19th century primarily.

And she was one of the favorites of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

And many people know the story, but Doyle was -- though he was the creator of Sherlock Holmes, like the great king of logical thinking, he was himself a very he was a very, very superstitious sort.

One who believed not only in spiritual mediums, but he got involved in the whole Cottingley Fairy hoax and so on and so forth.

And he championed a number of mediums that he thought were just exquisitely talented, one of those was Laura Pruden of Cincinnati.

And at one point, Doyle invited his kind of frenemy, Houdini, to meet with him in Atlantic City, I think.

And Doyle and his wife held a seance.

Houdini was a skeptic of mediums, but he desperately wanted to be able to speak to his mother from beyond the grave.

And so he was constantly and sincerely in a search for someone who could really do it.

And the byproduct of that is that he became a great debunker of false mediums.

And what happened is after that seance, Doyle thought it went swimmingly and was bragging about it.

And then a couple of years later, Houdini let slip to an interviewer, no, he had not believed it.

That in the first place, his mother spoke no English, but her spirit spoke perfect English.

KELLAR: Oh, red flag.

GRIFFITH: And the first thing his mother produced was a Christian cross, but his mother was Jewish, so.

KELLAR: Oh, dear, yeah.

GRIFFITH: So what happened is they became this kind of -- they became rivals of a kind.

And Houdini, as he traveled around the country doing escapes and various other things, he would visit some of the mediums that Doyle had advocated for.

And in 1925, he came ostensibly to hear Pruden give a reading.

She was a slate medium, so she would -- She would wrap a slate in a very elaborate curtain, put it at her feet, talk to someone for 20 minutes or so, and meanwhile you would hear scratching.

And then at the end she would pull the slate out from the curtain and it would be written on like a slate, like a chalkboard, would be elaborately written on, sometimes decorated in t anyway, apparently she avoided Houdini during that particular trip.

But the postscript to is that Pruden, after she died, she lived to a ripe old age.

I think she died in the '30s.

She's buried in Spring Grove next to her sons.

And one of her sons became an engineer who devised as a tribute to his mother he made a toy.

The toy was called the Syco-Seer.

And the Syco-Seer was then bought by the Brunswick Billiards Company, I think, and made into The Magic 8-Ball.

KELLAR: Oh, my gosh.

GRIFFITH: Yeah.

So the Magic 8-Ball is a tribute to this person, Laura Pruden, whose grave I happened upon in Spring Grove.

KELLAR: Yeah.

Wow.

That -- yeah.

There is one section about eight degrees of separation and most of your stories are like that, you know?

One person and then the other person and then it evolves into a story with lots of characters.

GRIFFITH: Yeah, that's very much the kind of premise of this was just that.

I quote in the introduction the writer John Barth, who said, you know, "We live in an ocean of story and no matter where you drop your bucket, once you haul it back up, it's going to be full of stuff."

And that was kind of the guiding principle of the book.

I wanted to -- I wanted to look at the connections that I found.

And I think a couple of essays came about because -- Oname about because I was chasing a wild turkey through a hedge and came upon a stone that interested me and that connected me to someone else and someone else and someone else.

KELLAR: Yeah.

How many acres are at Spring Grove?

GRIFFITH: I believe it's about 750.

KELLAR: Wow.

Is it all -- is there -- Are there graves on all of it or some of it just empty?

GRIFFITH: Some of it's empty, I think, I mean a good bit of that acreage at the back is not yet filled in.

And then there are -- there's a big stretch right in the middle that's woodland.

So there are graves on, I would think, probably more than half of that acreage, but not on all of it.

KELLAR: So there's room for us?

GRIFFITH: There's room for us.

KELLAR: Yes.

Right.

Do they have guided tours of Spring Grove that would tell some of these stories?

GRIFFITH: So far as I know, there is a -- Spring Grove has a historian.

I've not met him.

I think he's in fact, I think his name is Nuxhall.

I think he's Joe Nuxhall's son, Phil maybe.

KELLAR: His name is Phil.

GRIFFITH: I've heard wonderful things about him.

KELLAR: Yeah, he's terrific.

GRIFFITH: I've never met him.

Yeah, but I do -- I know there are docents and that they do give tours.

As I said, I mean this book because I was not seeking -- I was not seeking out Miller Huggins and George Reeves and all that.

I was not looking for the most famous residents of Spring Grove, so I'm not sure how many of the graves that I talk about would be on those tours.

But there are tours and I think I've heard nothing but great things about them.

KELLAR: Yeah.

George Reeves, tell me what he did.

GRIFFITH: George Reeves was the first TV Superman.

KELLAR: Oh, of course.

GRIFFITH: And he died young and tragically.

And he's not actually buried at Spring Grove.

He was buried briefly at Spring Grove and then was removed to California some months later, I think.

KELLAR: Tell us about some of the other people.

GRIFFITH: Sure.

One of the things that I had not known that was really interesting to me was that on November 25th, 1963, which is the day of the famous picture of JFK Jr. in his sailor suit saluting his father's casket as it passes.

And it was the day that they lit the eternal flame at Arlington.

On that day, the crime scene arrived in Cincinnati.

And the reason that is, is that the armoring company, Hess & Eisenhardt, that had handled the armoring of the limousine is here.

And I mean, at that time, the limousine was -- I mean, it still had plenty of evidence of assassination.

But the United States could not do without that car.

They needed it and they couldn't redesign it.

And so on that day, a flatbed truck pulled up to Hess & Eisenhardts and delivered the limousine, which they then spent some months reupholstering and, you know, re-outfitting, adding extra weight, putting in a hard top, bulletproofing and so on.

And so that's an essay that came about because Cincinnati became, in part because of Spring Grove, around the middle of the 19th century became one of the things funerary.

So caskets, catafalques, chases, wagons, hardware, all that stuff was made in Cincinnati.

And around the turn of the century when they started making hearses and then when they started motorizing hearses, Cincinnati was at the forefront.

and so this essay is all about that stuff leading up to Hess & Eisenhardt in the 1960s.

KELLAR: Do they still exist?

GRIFFITH: I think they do exist, they're under a different name, but I'm -- and I'm not sure what it is.

But I believe Hess's still -- I think the Hess name is still part of it.

KELLAR: But they're the lead, the heads of that company are buried at Spring Grove.

GRIFFITH: Hess is, the person to whom the car was delivered is, and a number of the others who were part of the company leading up to that.

And then there's a casket company called Crane and Breed that is also a big part of that essay.

KELLAR: I think I read in that essay part that they did not use the glass when JFK was on that tour, but even if they had that, it really wasn't bulletproof.

GRIFFITH: That's right.

And it's kind of shocking, but, yes.

I mean, at the time, they weren't thinking primarily of security.

In fact, a number of the innovations that they put in, a number of the things they put in the car were about making the President potentially more visible.

There was a little railing that he could stand up and wave to people from.

There was a little thing, I think, that would lever him up a few inches so that he was more visible.

And as you said, they decided not to use -- they did have a hard top.

They decided not to use it in Dallas that day.

But one of the things I discovered in my research is that it's not likely it would have saved his life anyway, unless it saved his life by having somebody not take a shot at him because they couldn't see.

KELLAR: Yeah, fascinating.

Absolutely fascinating.

Anybody else you want to tell us about?

GRIFFITH: Well, one other one that I would mention is this one has all kinds of personal connections for me.

I'm a big fan of ghost signs, which Cincinnati is really rich in, which are those -- the remnants of painted signs on buildings, often on bare brick.

And the people who painted them are often called wall dogs.

They were called wall dogs because seen from the side, they were hanging in trusses off of buildings, and they looked like dogs on leashes, on vertical leashes.

But that profession, which has now passed from the world, is totally fascinating.

I mean, the reason that those signs have lasted so long is that they used heavily leaded paint.

And in fact, it's the places that were most leaded that have stayed.

And so it was poisonous.

But just the idea of like you're dangling in a truss and you're painting some gigantic thing on an uneven surface by hand.

And you've got to get all the proportions right.

You've got to get all the colors right.

You've got to get -- you've got to make sure everything's symmetrical.

Anyway, I had noticed in Cincinnati that a couple of the old signs, a couple of the signs from the '40s and '50s are signed quite discreetly in a corner.

GRIFFITH: And I had noticed the name Gus Holthaus on one of those signs, and hadn't thought about it much after that.

But about the middle of my year at Spring Grove, I had not realized that there were any indoor mausoleums.

And I tried to avoid the front corner of the cemetery, because that's where business was going on, and that's where more we're mourners were going to sign up for grave sites and so on.

And then one day from the back in the winter, I saw the stained glass in that building and I thought, "Oh, I should go ask my way in."

So I talked to someone who let me in and I walked down one of the beautiful side hallways and there was a grave that said Holthaus.

And I remembered, "Oh, wait, that's that guy who signed those things."

And so I started investigating him and it became an essay about, not just about that, but about the way that cities developed in the late 19th century, about advertising, about my own brief career in advertising, and so on.

And it turned out Gus Holthaus lived and died just a few blocks from my house.

He died in 1970 in Northside.

KELLAR: Oh, yeah, that name I've noticed on the signs.

And of course, now we have Artworks doing all those fabulous murals.

GRIFFITH: That's also part of that essay, yes.

KELLAR: Yeah, we've done a show about those.

Maybe we should do another one showing people where they are and who they are, because I think that's one of the fabulous things about Cincinnati.

Well, your book will be in the stores when?

GRIFFITH: April 15th.

KELLAR: Okay, and like Josephet?

GRIFFITH: And it should be at Joseph Beth and it's at Downbound in Northside and several other places.

KELLAR: Yes.

So people want to read the stories upon the stories about the stories, they can read your book.

And thank you so much for coming and sharing this with us.

And best wishes for all your other writings in the future.

It sounds like you'll have a few more.

GRIFFITH: I hope s Thank you so much for having me, it's really been a pleasure.

KELLAR: You're welcome.

Join us next week for another episode of Showcase with Barbara Kellar right here on CET.

(music) Closed Captioning: Maverick Captioning Service,