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For eight months or so Remington Solander was busier than he had ever been in his life. He superintended the building of the tomb and he had on hand the job of getting his endowed radio station going–it was given the letters WZZZ–and hiring artists to sing and play and speechify his fourteen volumes of gloom and uplift at 327 meters, and it was too much for the old codger. The very night the test of the WZZZ outfit was made he passed away and was no more on earth.

His funeral was one of the biggest we ever had in Westcote. I should judge that five thousand people attended his remains to the cemetery, for it had become widely known that the first WZZZ program would be received and loud-spoken from Remington Solander’s tomb that afternoon, the first selection on the program–his favorite hymn–beginning as the funeral cortege left the church and the program continuing until dark.

I’ll say it was one of the most affecting occasions I have ever witnessed. As the body was being carried into the tomb the loud speaker gave us a sermon by Rev. Peter L. Ruggus, full of sob stuff, and every one of the five thousand present wept. And when the funeral was really finished, over two thousand remained to hear the rest of the program, which consisted of hymns, missionary reports, static and recitations of religious poems. We increased the price of the lots in the new addition one hundred dollars per lot immediately, and we sold four lots that afternoon and two the next morning. The big metropolitan newspapers all gave the Westcote Cemetery full page illustrated articles the next Sunday, and we received during the next week over three hundred letters, mostly from ministers, praising what we had done.

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But that was not the best of it. Requests for lots began to come in by mail. Not only people in Westcote wrote for prices, but people away over in New Jersey and up in Westchester Country, and even from as far away as Poughkeepsie and Delaware. We had twice as many requests for lots as there were lots to sell, and we decided we would have an auction and let them go to the highest bidders. You see Remington Solander’s Talking Tomb was becoming nationally famous. We began to negotiate with the owners of six farms adjacent to our cemetery; we figured on buying them and making more new additions to the cemetery. And then we found we could not use three of the farms.

The reason was that the loud speaker in Remington Solander’s tomb would not carry that far; it was not strong enough. So we went to the executors of his estate and ran up against another snag–nothing in the radio outfit in the tomb could be altered in any way whatever. That was in the will. The same loud speaker had to be maintained, the same wave-length had to be kept, the same makes of batteries had to be used, the same style of tubes had to be used. Remington Solander had thought of all that. So we decided to let well enough alone–it was all we could do anyway. We bought the farms that were reached by the loud speaker and had them surveyed and laid out in lots–and then the thing happened!

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Yes, sir, I’ll sell my cemetery stock for two cents on the dollar, if anybody will bid that much for it. For what do you think happened? Along came the Government of the United States, regulating this radio thing, and assigned new wave-lengths to all the broadcasting stations. It gave Remington Solander’s endowed broadcasting station WZZZ an 855-meter wave-length, and it gave that station at Dodwood–station PKX–the 327-meter wave-length, and the next day poor old Remington Solander’s tomb poured fourth “Yes, We Ain’t Got No Bananas” and the “Hot Dog” jazz and “If You Don’t See Mama Every Night, You Can’t See Mama At All,” and Hink Tubbs in his funny stories, like “Well, one day an Irishman and a Swede were walking down Broadway and they see a flapper coming towards them. And she had on one of them short skirts they was wearing, see? So Mike he says ‘Gee be jabbers, Ole, I see a peach.’ So the Swede he says lookin’ at the silk stockings, ‘Mebby you ban see a peach, Mike, but I ban see one mighty nice pair.’ Well, the other day I went to see my mother-in-law–“

You know the sort of program. I don’t say that the people who like them are not entitled to them, but I do say they are not the sort of programs to loud-speak from a tomb in a cemetery. I expect old Remington Solander turned clear over in his tomb when those programs began to come through. I know our board of trustees went right up in the air, but there was not a thing we could do about it. The newspapers gave us double pages the next Sunday–“Remington Solander’s Jazz Tomb” and “Westcote’s Two-Step Cemetery.” And within a week the inmates of our cemetery began to move out. Friends of people who had been buried over a hundred years came and moved them to other cemeteries and took the headstones and monuments with them, and in a month our cemetery looked like one of those Great War battlefields–like a lot of shell-holes. Not a man, woman or child was left in the place–except Remington Solander in his granite tomb on top of the high knoll. What we’ve got on our hands is a deserted cemetery.

They all blame me, but I can’t do anything about it. All I can do is groan–every morning I grab the paper and look for the PKX program and then I groan. Remington Solander is the lucky man–he’s dead.