I've got a God-given talent: I'm a gravedigger. He gives me the strength to do the work that I do. Hall will only stop digging graves when, as he puts it, he is "called home." He may be contemplating his own resting place now, but that doesn't mean he's ready to stop. He says he'll start digging his grave this summer, just 12 miles away, near his childhood home on Maine's Narraguagus Bay. I got a cross on my grave with my initials on it - a white cross, says EDH, Everard Dallas Hall, right where I'm going." Someday I'll go up to the cemetery, I'll show you where my lot is I know where I'm going. "Oh, I hope to get it laid out the way I want it myself. "I buried my mother, my father, my grandfather, and two aunts and two uncles. But still, some of them have been special. He has photo albums with each grave immortalized on film to prove it. Hall says he'll only stop working when he's "called home." He plans to dig his own grave this summer. "I quit eighth grade to earn money to feed the family." Two of the babies died, and Hall's mother lost the use of her legs after the final delivery. Rural life in the 1940s meant hauling your own water, chopping your own wood and shooting your own dinner. Hall has been digging graves with a pickax and a shovel for 48 years he's even fashioned a custom tool with a flat chopping blade that he jokingly calls "The Everard." It helps him cut through frozen soil and fashion the grave into a perfect rectangle, 8 feet long, 3 feet wide and 4 1/2 feet deep. "She says, 'Everard, I don't want to be put in no darned refrigerator,' she says, 'and I want you to come down and do my grave.' I said, 'Doris, I'll be down there if it's snowing, hail, sleet. I said, 'Doris, I'll be down there if it's snowing, hail, sleet. I don't want to be put in no darned refrigerator.'. Talking with a lady the other day, and she said, 'Everard, I want you to do my grave. They don't want undertakers keeping their loved ones' bodies in cold storage until the spring thaw, and they don't want that for themselves. The folks who call on him tend to be old-fashioned, too, he says. But Hall insists on doing things the old-fashioned way. Today most of the heavy digging is done by backhoes, and with embalming now a standard practice, it's rare even to find someone who performs wintertime burials in the frozen North. Gravedigging is an activity many would be loath to contemplate, let alone do. In his nearly 70 years, no one has ever accused him of that. You've got to have a lot of determination, a lot of willpower. Everard Hall is hard at work, digging graves. There's a funeral in three days, and the churchyard in rural Addison, Maine, is frozen solid. Jennifer Mitchell/Maine Public Broadcasting Network Some have been special: "I buried my mother, my father, my grandfather, and two aunts and two uncles. But watch out for the screen size and wonky controls.Everard Hall estimates he's dug about 2,500 graves over nearly 50 years. For the right buyer, this is a gleaming golden treasure even with bits of tarnish here and there.Īn admirable collection of arcade hits in their original forms, with souped-up modern reinventions originally on XBLA added in. But don’t let that deter you from picking it up if you have an interest. These three concerns are the reason Namco Museum Virtual Arcade didn’t score as highly as we’d have liked. We understand there are challenges on getting 25 year-old games to look good on modern HD sets, but there has to be a better solution than this. The playable area of Grobda was literally only about one-fourth of the 36-inch screen we tested. Secondly, like we’ve already mentioned, some of these just don’t control well with the 360 pad.įinally, you’ll often find more than half of the screen taken up by art, while the game happens in a smaller area in the center of the screen. Even the “Arrange” versions, basically remakes with prettier graphics and tweaked difficulty, have been released before. First, if you’re into arcade compilations, you probably bought many of these already in a previous Namco collection, albeit on a different system. It’s a worthwhile stack, with three big caveats. Buying them all separately would run you nearly $60 at post time, and this comes with another 25 games. Between him with the tire iron and me using the hubcap as a scoop, we get a decent-size hole dug in. However, these oddities don’t change the fact that, if for some reason you don’t have all the XBLA offerings and you definitely want them, buying this is a no-brainer. This'll go faster if we both dig, he says. Also notable is the strange way you play these nine offerings: You actually have to exit back into the Xbox menu system and select the game you want to play in the 360’s Arcade games menu … strange.
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