Completing the Set

Any collector knows the thrill of “completing the set”: getting every item you can possibly find for some aspect of your collection. All the baseball cards for your favorite team. All the albums and singles for a band that you love. All of a country’s mint coins from a specific year. Etc.

I was a kid when I first became interested in both U.S. presidential history and old cemeteries but it wasn’t until 1990 when I first had a job with vacation time, that I considered the possibility of visiting the gravesites of every president. In other words, completing the set. I even planned a route on how it could be done:

I never did do a big trip that would allow me to complete the set all at once, but I was chipping away at my visited presidential gravesites for several years. Eventually, I had visited 14 of them, culminating in a 2011 twofer at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia: James Monroe and John Tyler.

After that, though, nothing. For 14 years.

I’m not sure why so much time elapsed in which I didn’t at least try to get to another gravesite or two. Life just gets crazy sometimes, you know? Ironically, during this time when I wasn’t visiting the presidents, I became a tour guide at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. I don’t know an exact number but I think I can comfortably say I’ve led at least 1,000 people through LHC, telling fascinating tales from the lives of its permanent residents. And who knows? Maybe in doing so, I helped to launch some side quests for Laurel Hill visitors who began to visit other cemeteries as well. If so, I am happy to have stirred up that interest.

But in recent years, I’ve started to get a little bit anxious, thinking that the window was closing on me getting even within range of completing my set of presidential gravesites, especially since there are now five more to visit than there were in 1990.

I have had to own up to the fact that chances are I won’t be completing the set. But wasn’t it about time for me to snag at least a few more?

The answer came to me last Friday morning. Just a few weeks before, I decided to drive to Boston to meet a friend and see Frank Black play a complete set of his own: his entire Teenager of the Year album. While John and John Q. Adams are interred together in Quincy, outside Boston, their crypt is not open in the winter.

The Adams’ being unavailable, I headed to Albany (Chester Alan Arthur) and Kinderhook (Martin Van Buren), New York instead:

To be clear: Boston via Albany is not a direct route. But I had the time and the inclination to do a wacky solo side quest to visit the graves of our 8th and 21st presidents. I even found t-shirts for the occasion.

And, while the satisfaction of motoring down the Massachusetts Turnpike knowing that I had just visited my 15th and 16th presidential gravesites was enough, my happiness grew exponentially when, later that evening, the following conversation ensued in the men’s room at the House of Blues in Boston, minutes before Frank Black hit the stage:

Guy in restroom, seeing my Chester A. Arthur tie-dyed shirt: “CHESTER ALAN ARTHUR!”

Me: “That’s right! I was at his gravesite this afternoon!”

Guy: “In New York?”

Me: “That’s right, I came up from Philadelphia. I’m having a BUSY day.”

Guy: “Chester Alan Arthur was a great dresser, you know…”

This is an historically accurate statement. As perhaps the most gilded of Gilded Age presidents, Arthur did have a great deal of sartorial eloquence.

So, in the end, maybe I won’t ever complete my set of U.S. presidential gravesites. But as long as the possibility of surreal conversations with strangers about Chester Alan Arthur exists, I’m ready to get back on the road again.