Dan Long is worried about the year 2000. Thoughts of food shortages and blackouts don't keep him up at night, but those fat zeros may be the death of him.
A monument engraver in Westminster for 40 years, Long has spent 20 preparing for the new millennium. He wishes he could say the same for more of his colleagues.
The problem, once noticed, seems so obvious.
The number one is skinny, and a zero is fat (second in girth only to the number four).
The common practice for "pre-need" monuments -- those purchased before the user's death -- is to engrave the person's name and birthday and leave a space for the death date to be filled in later. But some engravers haven't left enough room for a long number. Trying to fit a final date with all those zeros into an area that's too small isn't going to be fun.
In Westminster, the task will probably fall to Long, who works for Joseph L. Mathias Monuments on Main Street. It's the only monument retailer in town that does its own engraving, so Long often works on other dealers' stones.
"Maybe I'll retire early," he sighed.
To squeeze in all the information, engravers will have to leave less space between characters or use narrower lettering.
"It might not match," Long said. "Then they paid all this money for a stone that's supposed to last hundreds of years and be there for the grandchildren, and it's not going to look good."
A granite monument, which usually costs at least $2,000, is no place for sloppiness.
"A monument tells a story that someone lived, someone died and someone was loved," said Lillian Mosley, president of the Maryland Free State Cemetery and Funeral Association. "Monuments are, to me, works of art throughout the world that tell of the times and what was important."
David Brundick, an engraver at Loeblein Memorials Inc. in Baltimore, said he has been leaving room for the fat zeros for 15 years.
"Usually, when people buy a double [husband-and-wife] memorial, the second person is still going strong," he said, "so you kind of anticipate they'll live past the year 2000."
No space for zeros
But he also works on stones that were engraved in quarries by monument manufacturers, and many have not left space for the zeros.
"We'll just have to deal with it and squeeze it in," he said.
Computers and automatic sandblasters make easy work of in-shop engraving, even allowing intricate nature scenes or images of the deceased to be etched into the stone. But the death date is often added at the cemetery, and it's not a simple task.
A recent morning found Long, 58, sprawled on his stomach atop a freshly filled grave in the Meadow Branch cemetery off Route 140 in Westminster as he began the lettering process.
He glued a sheet of white rubber on to the monument, then transferred the death date from tracing paper to the rubber. Using a flat edge to guide the straight lines and going freehand on the curves, he maneuvered a trim knife -- ground to be sharp on both sides -- along the border of the characters, exposing the stone.
With the rubber cutout complete, Long donned a burlap-colored hood that covered his head and neck.
Sitting cross-legged with his left hand guiding his right and peering out of the hood's small plastic window, Long moved a sandblaster over the letters as granite dust and sand spewed in all directions. Once the date was carved, he sprayed black paint into the fresh grooves so that they matched the worn look of the older etchings.
The job took about an hour. He shook his head when he considered how long it will take when he has to deal with the zeros.
"I don't even want to think about it," he said.
'19' problem
Those zeros aren't the only problem presented by the new century.
Some monument companies etch the first two numbers of the death year on stones, and they assumed their customers would die in this century. Some won't. They will be stuck with a "19" literally written in stone on their monuments.
"I don't think it's very widespread," said G. Walter Tyrie of John Tyrie & Sons Inc., a monument company in Cockeysville. "The only time I have seen it is when the old-time stonecutters did it way back."
For those who are faced with the problem, there are solutions, but it will mean an additional cost.
A cheap fix
The cheapest fix is to mix granite powder with an epoxy, then fill in the numbers. A new date can be etched in later. Estimates vary, but the process would probably cost $50 to $100, and the stone is likely to be slightly discolored permanently.
Other options include purchasing a new monument or slicing about a quarter-inch off the face of the stone and re-etching the information.
"It's like this: There is no stone out there that cannot be fixed," said Steve Ashton, owner of Hammaker Memorials in Hagerstown and Martinsburg, W.Va. "It's not like it's a life-or-death situation that cannot be remedied, like a computer where you could lose all your memory and information and your whole business will go down the tubes."
Whichever solution is chosen, the customers, not the monument companies, are likely to pay. Most engravers require customers to approve drafts of the lettering before they begin work.
Consequence of longevity
"The problem may be one of those happy consequences of longevity," said Steven Sklar, director of the Maryland Office of Cemetery Oversight. "If on the draft it said 'Born 1907, died 19 blank blank,' and they've signed and approved the draft, then that's what they've approved. The question is, should the person who sold it have to pay for contracted language?"
"Any monument dealer worth his salt would not have done that," said Raymond V. Merkle, owner of Raymond G. Merkle Inc. "They really should not even put the dash in."
A seemingly innocuous long dash added after the year of birth will make it harder to squeeze in the zeros of the next century, and many monument companies routinely added them.
It's just one more headache facing engravers.
"Yup," Long said, "maybe I'll just retire early."
Pub Date: 3/27/99