He's totally into tombstones
SLIPPERY ROCK — Tom Hannon doesn't call himself an expert and he doesn't call his interest a hobby, but something has driven him to visit more than 10,000 cemeteries in his lifetime.
"People think I'm kind of strange," he said.
He's visited more than 10 different countries and much of the United States. His Slippery Rock residence has a yard full of grave markers and even his car wears an "I brake for old graveyards," bumper sticker.
He's been called Dr. Death, but Hannon, a retired geography professor at Slippery Rock University, doesn't consider it a morbid interest.
"I have no interest in what's beneath the ground, just the material artifacts," he said.
The stone, with all its markings and mistakes, is what caught his interest from the very beginning.
That started when Hannon was a teenager sent to pick up his sister who worked at a cemetery where they grew up in Scranton.
"I'd go increasingly early to walk through the cemetery," he said.
When he went to college, he continued to think about grave markers, eventually making it the subject of his doctoral thesis at the University of Pittsburgh. That document studied ethnic assimilation related to grave markers in the Northwestern Pennsylvania region.
And more than 40 years later, Hannon still believes many of the ideas put forth in that thesis. Simply put, to learn the most about the history and culture of any small town, start in the cemetery.
During a trip to a Yugoslavian town, he found Roman grave markers from the 400s. Closer to home, he found a town in central Pennsylvania where most residents spoke French until the 1960s. A family cemetery in Moraine State Park shows that the original founders were from Switzerland."Cemeteries are cultural landscapes," he said. "They very well reflect the history of the area where they are found."Hannon has done several papers on other cemeteries since, including "The Eerie and Not So Eerie in the Erie Cemetery." He started a book 21 years ago, but admits he's not sure if it will ever be done. For Hannon, the research is time-consuming and addicting.He is now teaching a course at the Institute for Learning in Retirement at Slippery Rock University on tombstone mistakes."People hired illiterate engravers to make the tombstones," said Hannon. Names like Akin were spelled Eakin. Words were mangled to say "infant sun," instead of "infant son," he said. He found one grave not long ago that marked a "Cival War Vetern," he said.Antique dealers give him the tombstones that are at his home, hoping he will track down the cemetery they came from. That research alone can sometimes take years.
Other stones, he's collected himself. One in his foyer is made for great-aunts Molly and Hanoria Hannon, who died around 1898. It weighs between 600 and 800 pounds."The one I have in my foyer ruined the suspension in my van," he said of the trip home from Cathedral Cemetery in Scranton.In the process, Hannon has become involved in several battles with cemeteries to preserve the markers they have. Preservation wasn't his first interest, but has become one of his most important tasks, he said.There are of course, drawbacks to his unusual interest. He's been fined by the police for stepping onto private property. One time he got caught in a snowstorm researching a cemetery in the mountains near State College.The snowplow driver that found him automatically asked if he was from the college (meaning Pennsylvania State University). He explained that he was from a different college, but was a professor doing research."It figures," said the driver. "Go home, Doc. Stay out of the snow."
