Group Known as 'Good Cemeterians’ Clean Headstones in California

Headstones in a Los Angeles cemetery get loving care by a small army of helpers.

An all-volunteer group, calling themselves the "Good Cemeterians," arrive at Mountain View, a historic neighborhood cemetery, armed with tools and products to make these old headstones look like new.

It’s not morbid to clean headstones, according to Rene Amy, who told KCBS “it sounds weird to say it's a living vibrant, wonderful place to spend a Saturday morning.”

“We scrub them in the morning time and they come much cleaner. By the end of the day, we've got some stunning examples of just how bright and shiny these things were, you know, the day one that they were put in. And now they're back to that,” Amy told KCBS.

Amy spotted a headstone from 1839 and said “he would've been old enough to have fought in a Civil War. We specifically look out for those.”

The group says they search out the headstones of veterans and also pay special attention to young children and mothers.

“When you see all the babies who died, you know, after a pandemic, it makes one grateful for the breakthroughs of medical technology that we have today,” Amy added. “There are a lot of babies buried here, young mothers victims of the various pandemics. There are more than 700 U.S. Civil War, Union vets.”

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