ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, September 24, 1996 TAG: 9609240046
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND (AP)
SOURCE: GARY ROBERTSON RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
WAVING HIS HAND toward a hill full of tombstones, the gravedigger says: ``I buried most of them a lot of their children.''
Standing straight, lean, strong. And filled with an immense will to work.
At 81, Lorenza Carter can wear you out just watching him toil.
While many of his contemporaries are sitting in rocking chairs or worse, Carter is busy burying them.
He's a gravedigger, and the only one in Richmond still known to dig by hand. He swings a 12-pound pick as easy as a broom handle.
``I swing once, that's a foot down. Dig it out. I swing twice, it's 2 feet,'' Carter said.
He digs by hand because, he said, the narrow confines of the cemetery prohibit machinery.
His graves go 5 feet deep, 36 inches wide, 8 feet long.
Carter has been chief caretaker at the Sir Moses Montefiore Cemetery, a Jewish burial ground in Richmond's East End, for 41 years.
He waved his hand toward a hill full of tombstones and memorials.
``I buried most of them a lot of their children,'' he said.
Jewish custom requires burial within 24 hours of death - unless death occurs on the Jewish Sabbath, between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday.
The demand for swift burial means that sometimes Carter will get a call in the morning for a grave that afternoon.
``It takes me about 3 1/2 hours, working steady,'' he said.
That's assuming the ground isn't frozen like a brick, or the rain isn't coming down in sheets, or the earth isn't so sun-baked that it's like trying to crack a steel shell.
``Then, it takes a little more,'' Carter said.
In the winter, the "little more" can mean thawing the ground enough to let his pick slide in.
``I remember once, we piled up the brush and threw on gasoline. Well, we got the ground thawed out enough to work with, and I dug it.''
There also was that awful day when three family members died in an automobile wreck, and Carter received a call for three adult graves.
This time the ground was so soft that two of the graves collapsed into each other. So, he had to dig them out again.
At 5 feet 9 inches and 148 pounds, Carter makes up in grit what he lacks in stature.
He started at Montefiore in 1955, after the former caretaker, who also was tending two other cemeteries in town, hired him to help.
``Well, it took about a month,'' he said. ``They fired him and hired me.''
He's been on the job nearly every day since.
Carter grew up on a tobacco farm in North Carolina with his two brothers and with a father who imbued him with an uncompromising work ethic.
``My father would come up at 4 o'clock in the morning and stomp his foot and say to us boys, `Wake up!' If he had to come back, he'd throw us out of bed.
``He was a hard worker himself. He died at 91. He came out of the field and was a little sick, so he lied down on the bed. He never got back up.''
In time, Carter bought his own tobacco farm. But he gave it up, after his wife developed ``tobacco poisoning. She broke out all over everywhere. The doctor said the best thing I could do was get her out.''
Carter, who served four years in the Army during World War II, went looking for work in Washington, D.C., but couldn't find any.
On one of his bus trips back home, he was hired for a brief period by a Richmond-area contractor doing asphalt work at the local DuPont plant, before he got the job at Montefiore.
The caretaker said some of those who come to the cemetery have become like a second family to him.
``They've treated me real well,'' he said.
He mentioned unsolicited money and gifts over the years - everything from food to fuel oil. He receives $350 for every grave he digs, plus a monthly salary as caretaker.
Carter said you learn a lot about life when you work among the dead.
``What I've learned is that if you treat people right and you work hard, things will be OK,'' he said.
Carter's wife, Eleanor, and his daughter, Lois, often have encouraged him to retire. And he's tried a couple of times.
``But they won't let me,'' Carter said, referring to Montefiore.
``They say, `Carter, just hang on another year.' Well, I'm still hanging on.''
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Lorenzo Carter has dug graves with a pick and shovelby CNBfor 41 years. color.