Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mount Auburn as a Community Resource | Page 9

My daily life is shooting a lot of people and activity for
newspapers and magazines. For me the Cemetery is great
because I may have four or five jobs in a day, but I can just
pop in for an hour or half an hour in the middle of the
day and grab a few pictures. You can shoot high or low at
Mount Auburn, photograph birds nesting in the tops of
trees or in the water, on one of the ponds. The view from
Washington Tower is beautiful. Sometimes, when you go
up there, you can shoot birds with the skyline of Boston
behind them, which is just spectacular.
Susan Caulfield and Randall Cox
Cambridge, MA
Susan and Randy are longtime
neighbors of Mount Auburn on
nearby Aberdeen Avenue. They
have two sons, Ben, 16, and
Andy, 15. They are Charter
Members of the Friends of Mount
Auburn, having joined in 1986.
Susan is a reference librarian at
the Newton Free Library and
Randy is an architect with Icon
Architecture, Inc., in Boston.
W
e actually went to the
Cemetery on our first
date! We walked to the top of
Susan Caulfield (far left) with
infant son Andy and slightly
older son Ben (learning his
letters) at Mount Auburn
Cemetery circa mid-1990’s.
the Tower, past really amazing monuments and beautiful
trees. It was early June—and we were hooked! Now our
family has lived near Mount Auburn, practically across the
street, on Aberdeen Avenue, for 17 years.
We started taking our children, now teenagers, to Mount
Auburn when they were babies. We would go for walks
all through the year, just as if it were a park. You could see
ponds, rabbits, birds and foliage—all kinds of things kids
just love.
Our boys had a couple of favorite “hiding trees.” One
was at the foot of Indian Ridge Path, with branches that
bent low to the ground and a hollow, making a hiding
space. The other was up by Winslow Homer’s grave. And
the kids also liked the Dell.
We went to most of the bulb plantings in the fall and all
of the Arbor Day tree plantings each spring. Then, in the
spring, we would go to see the bulbs that we had planted
in bloom—that sort of thing.
We would practice letters by reading letters off monuments.
The whole cemetery was good for teaching all kinds of
things—the letters, tadpoles and frogs in the ponds, leaves
we would collect and identify. The children liked the labels
on the trees. I have photos from years ago, of a big ice
storm, when we went to the Cemetery to see the damage.
We have tenants and when they first move in, we give
them brochures and maps of Mount Auburn. ^
Volunteer Profile: Jim Gorman
A Docent’s Perspective
J i m Gorman ( r ight) of S outh B o ston b e gan
volunteering as a docent at the Mount Auburn Visitors
Center in Story Chapel in November 2007. He has had
“a longtime relationship” with the Cemetery, having been
a member of the Friends since 1986. Of the Cemetery
and himself he says, “Professionally I’m a horticulturalist,
and as an avocation, I’m interested in Boston history. And
it’s all there at Mount Auburn.”
He has been involved with “public horticulture” for 25
years. Currently, he is teaching in the Landscape Architecture
Program at the Boston Architectural College. Prior to that,
he worked at the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain and as
Chief of Interpretation in the park ranger program for the
city of Boston. When he travels, he gravitates toward open
spaces, used bookstores, botanical gardens, and cemeteries.
He finds cemeteries enjoyable “because of their horticultural
pull.”
“At Mount Auburn, I like being able to help people make
connections that are a little more meaningful for them.
If somebody comes in to the Visitors Center and you ask
informally about their interest and it turns out to be poetry,
you can direct
them to the graves
of Amy Lowell,
Robert Creeley,
and Henry Wads-
worth Longfellow.
If sports fans come
in, you can lighten
them up by saying
‘You know Curt
Gowdy is buried here.’ Pick a topic and there are notable
people in the Cemetery from medicine, law, politics, the
military…”
Jim has also alerted visitors to a great horned owl roosting
in Consecration Dell and other avians of note. He enjoys
talking to all the visitors, in all their diversity. He says,
“Mount Auburn is a truly a democratic—small ‘d’—place
where people of all cultural and social strata cross paths.”
What does his work as a docent give him? “I like learning
from others, from the visitors, and being able to share any-
thing that I might have as well—it’s a reciprocal situation.”
Fall 2009 | 7