Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn President Bill Clendaniel Retires | Page 5

“If there is one image of Bill that comes to
my mind, it’s of Rodin’s sculpture, The
Thinker, the long lean guy sitting there
in ultimate contemplation. Bill is a gifted
thinker. The Master Plan for Mount
Auburn which has had such a profound
positive effect was his brainchild. Bill was
born to be President of Mount Auburn,
and he hit the ground running. He has taken Mount Auburn
and turned it into a national touchstone. He will be a hard act
to follow.
“In terms of my career, our firm’s work at Mount Auburn is up
there with Post Office Square Park, as far having wonderful
clients and feeling a real sense of accomplishment. It doesn’t get
much better than working at Mount Auburn, and I thank Bill
for that. He is one of my real folk heroes.”
— Craig Halvorson, of Boston; Landscape Architect
“Bill revolutionized Mount Auburn and moved
the institution, the landscape, all aspects of its
form and functions way beyond the Mount Au-
burn I knew when I began doing my research for
Silent City on a Hill in 1977. He has again
made Mount Auburn a world-class institution.”
— Blanche Linden Ph. D., of Fort Lauderdale, FL; author of
Silent City on a Hill
“Bill took the Cemetery back to its roots as a ce nter of the
community.”
— Carl Nold
President and CEO, Historic New England
“Bill is a builder, someone not interested in the status quo. He
represents the kind of leader from whom
you always learn something. Whenever
you encounter Bill, you realize you are
in the presence of someone who is very
intelligent, magnanimous, knows exactly
what his job is, and where he wants to go
with it.”
— Susan W. Paine, of Cambridge, MA
Honorary Trustee, Friends of Mount Auburn
“The Master Plan was such a wonderful op-
portunity for all of us to really look in depth
at Mount Auburn and push the limits of what
a plan could do… This was really innovative
work; nobody in cemeteries was doing anything
like this. And thanks to Bill, there was enough
money to do it right and have the time to
explore, to go through yet another cycle of ques tions. And it spun
off to other cemeteries, other master plans that we’ve all worked
on.”
— Shary Berg, of Cambridge; Landscape Historian
ship. He and Craig Halvorson gathered together a team
that included Liz Vizza as project manager and Shary Berg
as landscape historian, as well as many additional special-
ized experts, Cemetery Trustees, and staff. They all worked
for three years. While master plans were nothing new for
corporations or universities, writing one for a cemetery
most certainly was. Mount Auburn’s was one of the first
and the best, becoming “a gold standard,” studied and
emulated by cemeteries across the nation. The Master Plan
provided a framework, a compass, a spine on which to build
the improvements and innovations—including new policies,
staffing, interment spaces, and gardens—that were to follow.
You’ve Got to Have Friends
As part of his plans for expanded community outreach,
Bill wanted to enlarge the role of the Friends of Mount
Auburn that had been founded in 1986. When Bill arrived
in 1988, the Friends was offering programs but not raising
funds. The Friends had been born out of the controversy
that flared when Mount Auburn tore down the Cemetery’s
dilapidated 19th-century cast-iron fence on Mount Auburn
Street. The Trustees realized they had no “built-in constitu-
ency,” so they created the Friends to provide one. But Bill
says “this was a defensive measure rather than a proactive
reaching-out to the community.”
Bill was convinced the Friends could do more and be
more, both in programming and in fundraising. In 1990,
he and the Trustees established the Friends as a 501(c)3
charitable trust because they realized that it would be easier
for both foundations and individuals to give to this kind of
entity instead of directly to the Cemetery itself. “I always
characterized it as putting another arrow in our fundraising
quiver,” Bill says. He worked with one of the Cemetery’s
Trustees, the distinguished non-profit lawyer and scholar
Marion Fremont-Smith, to set it up. “Marion felt it was
very important, and I agreed, that the majority of the
Friends Trustees should also be Cemetery Trustees, ensuring
that the work of the Friends would always be in sync with
that of the Cemetery.” Mount Auburn was one of the first
historic cemeteries to have such an organization.
And in the fundraising realm, the Friends “paid off,” and
quite soon. “We sent out a solicitation letter to our lot
representatives and were convinced we’d get a great return,
but the response was disappointing except for one phone
call. On the spindle in my office was a pink slip saying that
a lot representative wanted to talk about his estate plan.” An-
thony and Mildred Ruggiero eventually set up a trust that
has now given Mount Auburn over $1,068,000. The Trust’s
stipulated future annual gifts are equal to an endowment of
several million dollars. This success was followed by others
when foundations, government agencies, and individuals
began contributing support to the Cemetery.
Summer 2008 | 3