Lake View Cemetery, continued...

Quite a few other famous Americans are buried in Lake View Cemetery.

Eliot Ness (1903-1957) has a very unassuming stone near a lake in the cemetery. I almost missed it – again I didn’t do any advance research on others to find, but as I was driving around slowly I was struck by the stone sitting alone by itself, the name is of course a unique one, known to all who have heard anything about Al Capone – and if you live in Chicago, you have. Although he lived in Pennsylvania when he died, Ness wanted to be buried at Lake View Cemetery. Actually the stone is just a memorial, his ashes were sprinkled in one of the cemetery's ponds by the Cleveland Police Department, as part of Ness' final requests.

Raymond Johnson Chapman is a sad story – he was killed playing baseball for the Cleveland Indians. While playing the New York Yankees in New York on August 16, 1920, Chapman was hit in the head with a ball thrown by pitcher, Carl Mays, and died 12 hours later. Chapman is the only major league baseball player to die due to an injury during a game. Dedicating the season in memory of "Chappie", the Indians won the league and world championship for the first time. His stone is decorated by Indians team gear left over the years - a poignant reminder of how much he is still remembered almost 90 years after his death.

John Hay’s (1838 - 1905) grave I noticed because of the artistry of the statuary, not because I recognized his name. He was an important and (formerly) famous American, serving as Secretary of State under presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt and as US Ambassador to England. The statuary caught my eye not so much because of the size, but because of the style, and come to find out; it was designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a sculptor I’m quite familiar with (more on him later, probably - he did several large sculptures now in Chicago). The sculpture was executed by James Earle Fraser (a Saint-Gaudens apprentice), and erected in 1916.

From the New York Times, July 6, 1905:

The body of John Hay rests to-night in his family burying ground in a corner of Lakeview Cemetery. Five hundred feet to the west of his grave is the great memorial of James A. Garfield; 200 feet to the north rises the monolith of the Rockefeller family; closer are the graves of the Otises and the Rusts.

Most of these men were buried with funeral services far more elaborate than that of John Hay, certainly none of them could have been interred with ceremony more simple.

The day of the funeral was one of bright sunshine, whose warmth was tempered by floating clouds, and the wind that seems to blow forever over Euclid Heights. From the arrival of President Roosevelt in the morning until his departure in the afternoon brought the official day to its end, not a single untoward incident was in evidence. (NY Times, 7/6/1906, p. 9)

This was obviously written before the installation of the Saint-Gaudens statue, which is anything but simple and understated.