Memorial Park Groundskeeper Gets Into the Spirits of the Place

In niches carved along the walls of the San Francisco Columbarium rest silent reminders of the city’s proud and quirky past.

The ash remains of members of the most famous families in San Francisco history can be found there--Stanford, Folger, Magnin, Shattuck, Eddy, Steiner.

If those walls could talk, what a story they would tell. Fortunately, they have Emmitt Watson to do the talking for them.

“When I come here in the morning, the first thing I holler is, ‘Good morning, y’all,’ ” says Watson, groundskeeper cum tour guide. “The second thing that I do, I sit in a chair and I thank God that I don’t live here.”

For more than a decade, Watson has made it his responsibility to keep the building’s walls painted, the urns polished, and the stories of the dead alive.

“By meeting the families, I started caring about them. And by caring about them, I also started caring about these,” Watson says, pointing to decorated niches and urns. “And I say to myself, these people shouldn’t die mentally.”

Watson highlights the more unusual spots on his impromptu tours, where design themes are anything but mundane. Follow along.

Here’s a niche for Norman White’s remains, featuring antique martini shakers surrounded by toy-size Munsters: Grandpa, Herman, Eddie and Lilly.

Watson moves on, without slowing his well-worn patter.

“The young man below him, he was a Johnnie Walker Red drinker,” he says, fingering an engraved shot glass. “All of his name wouldn’t fit, so the family brought me a blue Victorian jar and if you touch the top of it, it hums, ‘How dry I am . . . ‘ “

Move along. Lilly Moy loved baseball, so her niche is decorated with a big ceramic baseball and hand-painted bleachers full of fans. By placing a magnetic key to the glass front, family members can illuminate the display.

Here’s two 150-year-old tobacco canisters holding Barbara Fernando’s remains. Her husband Jim, still living, will someday occupy two others in the same niche.

“Each one has a name,” Watson says, peering at the back of the canisters. After locating Bacchus, the god of party and wines, he was unwilling to insult the other three. So he named them alphabetically: Antoinette, Bozo, Cochise.

Now, Watson stops to tell a story that touches him deeply. It’s how Viola von Staden (1900-1907) drank polluted water after the great quake of 1906 and died in her bedroom.

Gone too soon, but still. . . .

“I saw her,” Watson says. “I saw her one day.”

Here’s how. Working one afternoon from a ladder, he heard a girl’s voice. Eager to greet visitors, he climbed down and saw her standing near her niche. As he walked toward her, she disappeared.

Eventually Watson met her family, and they brought the photograph that now sits on his desk. “I’m not looking at her as a spirit,” Watson says, staring at a spot in front of the girl’s niche. “That was a person to me.”

Watson also transfers cremated remains into urns, guaranteeing respect and accuracy. His clients are relieved, especially after more than 5,000 boxed cremains turned up in a Bay Area rental unit, abandoned. “It’s very important that when they want Mom, they get Mom,” Watson says.

Watson taps his chest, near the heart. “You see somebody that’s hurting. How do you not reach out? God didn’t give you this thing in your body to be beating for nothing. This thing is a motivator. All you’ve got to do is listen to it.”

Though Watson doesn’t want to live at the columbarium, he’s clearly at home there.

The 1898 Beaux Arts building blends Roman, Baroque and English designs in cast plaster walls and stained-glass windows. It is a proud survivor of the 1906 quake, which shook everything nearby and triggered a fire that devastated the city.

Off busy Geary Street, it holds 8,000 remains in more than 4,000 niches. Each niche costs between $3,500 and $50,000, depending on size and place.

Cards and letters of appreciation fill Watson’s office.

“Emmitt does the little things that make it nicer,” notes Robert Kirkham, after visiting his wife’s remains. Kirkham was dubbed “Tomato King” after placing the season’s first ripe tomato in her niche.

“He’s not a groundskeeper,” Kirkham writes of the 41-year-old Watson. “He’s a friend.”

At the columbarium, Pearl Krzenski visits her husband Eugene’s urn and her son’s memorial.

She too considers Watson a friend. “He talks. All you have to do is listen to the man. He’s amazing. . . . Emmitt is always there, and he always cheers me up.

“He should be a minister,” she says. “On the other hand, I like him where he is.”