Merle Ealy cuts grass at North Side Cemetery, along North Main Street Extension. Ealy has been working at the cemetery for 50 years.

For 50 years, Merle Ealy has made a living at the cemetery.

Joining the staff at North Side Cemetery June 10, 1968, as a 17-year-old three days after his graduation from Butler High School, Ealy turned 68 earlier this summer and has no inclination to retire despite a half century of mowing, digging and plowing snow at the 68-acre cemetery at the north edge of Butler.

Don Bolt, the cemetery superintendent, joked, “He's already got a spot up here picked out. He said, 'When I fall over, just put me here.'”

Ealy said cemetery maintenance in the summer is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Once you are finished, it's time to start over.

“It takes a week and a half to mow the cemetery,” he said. “And then we start again. We do that all summer until the leaves start coming down, and then we clean all the leaves up.”

Other tasks include plowing the cemetery roads in the winter, removing fallen trees and resetting fallen or shifted tombstones.

“It doesn't happen too often, but when it does we set it back up with the tractors,” Ealy said.

Surprisingly, the cemetery workers — Ealy, Bolt and Ealy's brother, Ron, who has only been working at North Side for 28 years — don't actually do any grave digging.

Ealy said, “We have no backhoe. A company comes in and digs the grave.”

They are responsible for digging the foundations for tombstones and monuments.

“We put in the foundations, and the monument company sets the monument,” Ealy said.

He said there won't be any lack of work in the future. Only 28 acres of the cemetery has been filled, leaving 40 acres available.

Bolt said anyone can buy a plot wherever they want.

The south side of the cemetery is the oldest, dating back to the cemetery's founding in 1825. But the record-keeping for that part of the cemetery is skimpy at best, Bolt said.

“There's the high school lot,” Ealy said. “There used to be a cemetery right in the middle of town.

“When they built the junior high school, they brought some of the people up here. They were buried in a mass grave.”

The cemetery can be pretty lively, especially in the summer months, the men said.

“We get a lot of walkers and bicyclists in the summer,” Bolt said. “In September, they are doing the cemetery walk.”

Ealy said other visitors include an albino squirrel that's been sighted in the cemetery and two years ago a bear wandered through the grounds.

Ealy, who had quadruple bypass surgery a year and a half ago, starts work at 7:30 a.m. and knocks off at 3 p.m. Monday through Friday and works from 7 a.m. to noon on Saturdays.

“I love working outside,” he said. “I never thought to look for something else. I loved the job so there wasn't any sense looking for something else.”

“I plan on working as long as they want me. The board members said as long as I am able to work the job is mine,” Ealy said.