—From “Still They Come to the Hillside” by Jimmy Breslin, from the November 21, 1964, issue of The Saturday Evening Post
Clinton Pollard, groundskeeper at Arlington National Cemetery, was one of the last people to serve President Kennedy. He was paid $3.01 an hour for it and he said the whole thing was an honor.
“When I dug the grave, I liked that good dirt that come up and I wanted to grow good turf for the grave on it. Well, we did that. But the summer was so tough it just dried it out.
“You can’t do what you want to do all the time. But it’s still kind of an honor just to try doing something.”
Pollard was silent for a while. He is just a gravedigger who tries, and he is not very important, and around the country there are big people who stand and ask for things in the name of John F. Kennedy. They run for office and write books and wear their sorrow until it becomes frayed, and when you come down to it, the gravedigger worrying about the parched grass on the grave shows more dignity than all of them.
This article is featured in the November/December 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
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Comments
A good article of reflection on this 61st anniversary of the assassination. The best way to honor the late President will be for this nation to come together as the United States; that it’s not just a name only. Equally important is ending the deep state/military industrial complex getting the U.S. into “conflicts” it has no right being involved in at all, strictly for their profit, all coming from stealing billions of our citizen’s money, while nothing is done here.
The U.S. and it’s people, must come first from now on. More immediately that “the warmonger committee” currently running this country doesn’t get us (including themselves) all killed in World War III they want so badly, within the next two months.