My Hobby Begins

During the winter, I had been reading up even more about the presidents, and was constantly learning about their childhoods, their terms, and their wives. There remained one topic however, that was always left out of the books: Their graves! Where were our leaders buried? On one night in February, my dad was flipping through the channels when he came upon a show about presidential graves. It talked about how C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb was walking to a meeting when fellow historian Richard Norton Smith presented him with some pictures he took at the final resting places of each president. Intrigued, Mr. Lamb decided that it would be a great experience for him to do the same thing. So within a time period of two years, Mr. Lamb visited the burial sites and future resting places of every president of the United States. At the end of the program, my dad called me into the room and explained to me about the quest Mr. Lamb had gone on. Nearing the end of our conversation, I suddenly threw my dad a curveball. I asked him if we could do the same. After hesitating for a second, my dad decided to comply.

Later that evening, he went on the computer looking for information about presidential burial sites. Where were they all buried? How many were buried together? Were there novels on all of this stuff? Luckily, he found out all of the answers fairly quick, when he stumbled onto a site belonging to a guy named Dave. Dave had been to the graves of every deceased president (at the time), though it had taken him a lot longer than it took Mr. Lamb. My dad told me that he had found a site about presidential burial sites, and I came clamoring down the stairs. Even though it was past my bedtime, I probably spent about thirty minutes on Dave’s website looking at all of the photos of the graves and reading his stories about how he got there. I found it very entertaining and extremely helpful. Finally, we knew where all of the graves were located. I discovered that while some graves were dull and insipid like the Adams crypt or Washington’s tomb, some were outstanding and unique like Garfield's and Lincoln's. In addition, I realized that I was not the only one who found presidential graves fascinating. There were others out there with the same passion. And once I discovered a website called Find A Grave, a gravesite data base, I knew I was onto something special. 

Grave hunting had officially become my hobby.