MONTICELLO, Ill. (AP) - If you want the sure and certain hope of the resurrection, you had better call R.I.P. Ltd.
The Monticello-based firm (it stands for Restoration in Progress) really digs the preservation of old cemeteries, no matter how grave their condition. R.I.P’s owner, CEO and key staff member is a retired high school industrial arts teacher named John Heider, who recruits other help when needed but is otherwise an industrious one-man graveyard resurrection machine.
From undergrowth clearance and grave location to monument repairs and historical research, Heider has been the answer to a prayer for customers whose efforts to find someone to save their abandoned cemetery had otherwise hit a dead end.
Landowners, historical groups and even the state of Illinois have all recruited his services over the past 21 years, and he’s says he’s restored about 12 cemeteries and repaired or reset more than 3,000 gravestones.
A man for all seasons, he also happens to be a private pilot and has ranged as far as Ohio to tackle cemetery projects. Heider has even been contacted by someone in Bavaria, Germany, who needed restoration advice, which just goes to show how far his reputation has seeped along the eternal grapevine of the dead.
“I think word of mouth has spread about him because he cares so deeply about what he is doing,” says Heider’s wife, Geni. She’ll take along a Kindle for outdoor reading while her husband confronts the undiscovered country of some long-buried rural cemetery, wreathed in brambles. She says the force riffling his pages is a burning passion for the job of cemetery saving and preservation.
“He has researched, he has taken classes, he has listened to people and he has looked at and learned from what other people have done, whether it worked or lasted, and he abides by all the rules and regulations,” says Geni Heider, 63. “I think that is the big thing about him, his preparation and his caring.”
Heider used to be into restoring antique John Deere tractors and farm machinery with his father-in-law, H.J. Adams, but got into graves, so to speak, in 1994. It began when a fellow member of the Piatt County Museum board, which he was serving on at the time, persuaded him to take a look at restoring a rundown country cemetery. Heider didn’t have a clue what he was doing at first but got hooked on the multistep process, the resurrection shuffle, of bringing back a piece of history.
“I eventually found a workshop on cemetery restoration being taught in Indiana, and I attended that,” says Heider, 75. “And it was like the heavens opened up and there was sunlight everywhere; it was just mind-blowing for me. I couldn’t get enough of it, I just sucked it all in.”
Many workshops and long research hours later, Heider is now the only state-approved cemetery restorer in Illinois.
“And I finally started charging for my work,” he said. “Because I knew what I was doing.”
But it’s still a labor of love more than anything else, and he isn’t going to relocate to Hawaii in a financial state of grace at some future point based on his less-than-monumental earnings. Pride in a job well done, however, is eternally priceless.
“Oh, it’s almost a passion for me, and you meet so many nice people (he means live ones) who are thankful for what you do,” Heider says. “And you are saving something important, because once that forgotten cemetery is plowed over and gone, it’s not coming back.”
He can’t say he’s ever felt a prickle across the back of his neck and the sense of a beyond-the-grave “atta boy” from the grateful dead, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t occasionally tapped into the supernatural for assistance.
One of the ways our resurrection specialist finds long-lost graves is through divining for them with L-shaped copper rods.
Similar to the technique long associated with finding water, the rods twist in his hands when he walks over a grave.
And it gets better: if a single rod tends to twist clockwise, it’s a male grave; if it tends to twist counter-clockwise, it’s a female resting place. He’s done countless blind tests on graves where the markers are intact, and he says the magic is real.
“No. I’ve no idea how it works,” he says. “And I don’t need to know.”
Whatever the unseen forces that are being harnessed here, it sure brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “dead reckoning.”
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Source, (Decatur) Herald & Review, https://bit.ly/18Hpueh
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