At the center square of the Eugene Pioneer Cemetery behind a shed rests a graying trailer. For 16 years it has been George Dull’s solitary home. He spends his days mostly among the graves of the long dead, killing weeds and caring for the grass.
Asked if he ever gets lonely out there, Dull said “naw.”
Asked about ghosts, Dull said “I don’t believe in that stuff.”
“Some people say, ‘How’d you live in the cemetery with all the dead people around you?’” he said. “I say it’s the only neighbors I get along with.”
Eugene Pioneer Cemetery
Size: | 15.52 acres |
First burials: | 1863 |
Total burials (in 2000): | 3,803 |
Total plots (in 2000): | 759 |
Source: Eugene Pioneer Cemetery Association |
For Dull, it’s 17 hours per week working in the cemetery alongside part-time custodian work in the Bethel School District. He said he started at the cemetery in September 1991. It’ll be 17 years this September.
“Gives me something to do,” he said.
It takes him three or four days to mow the raised plots of graves “cause I have to push.”
The rest of the 15-plus acres takes him just a day and a half because he gets to ride the sit-down mower. Weeding the whole cemetery – around the gravestones and the concrete plot-barriers, along the gravel lanes – takes him just 16 hours with a weed cutter.
With the barrels of grass, tree limbs and trash he collects, “I’ll go to the dump,” he said.
With his free time, he gambles.
“That’s the only bad habit I got,” he said. “A couple years ago it was real bad.”
“I’ve been to every one of” the casinos in the area, he said. “I used to take my wallet and throw it out the window when I drive by. I put the carpets on their floors.
“I used to go through a thousand dollars in a weekend,” he said.
He said he averaged $500 per weekend playing blackjack, but “now I just take a hundred (and) just do the slots.”
Also, he started buying certificates of deposit from the bank instead, which are like savings accounts but with less access for the buyer so interest can accrue over longer periods of time.
Dull was born in Sutherlin, Ore. His father worked for Weyerhaeuser for 30 years, and though his mother didn’t work outside the house, she had six kids to raise “so there’s a job right there,” Dull said.
Most of his brothers and sisters live in the area still, though one brother lives in Houston, Texas.
Dull grew up going to Springfield schools. He served in the U.S. Army from 1976 to 1980, then in the National Guard from 1980 to 1987, he said.
Having just missed the Vietnam war, Dull never saw combat.
“Yeah, I was glad to get out of that,” he said. “If I was over there (in Iraq) I’d be dead by now.”
He continued, “If I was over there, I’m the type of guy that if I went over there for 15 months I’d come back home and get killed the next day.”
From 1987 to 1991 he worked in the school district and at a gas station before a woman at the school asked him if he wanted the job, he said. He moved out of his parents’ house and into the cemetery.
Dull seems better with general ideas than he does with details.
He said he was hired by “a big board” that manages the cemetery. “I don’t know what they’re called.”
Standing in front of the Civil War veterans plot, Dull told the story of the towering statue of a soldier that has stood watch there for more than a century.
Back in 1902, Dull said, “this guy back east had $2,500, and that’s like $250,000 today.”
The man had been poor, Dull said, but had saved that $2,500, and in his will, the man put it aside for a statue to commemorate the cemetery’s Civil War dead. Dull said the family was furious because it wanted the money, but the statue was built and “they brought it all that way up from Pennsylvania without putting a scratch on it.”
“All on oxes and everything,” he said.
A 2003 Emerald report tells it differently. In 1903, a Eugene-area man willed the money for the statue. It came by train from a Vermont quarry and a team of horses later drew it to the cemetery.
Giving a Eugene Pioneer Cemetery Association document to the reporter, he saw an address on it and said that it must be his address in the trailer.
“I never did know what it was,” he said.
But for Dull, though the details are sometimes different, the big picture is right there in front of him.
Dull doesn’t know how long he plans to keep living there in his trailer, saying, “I don’t know. Until I die I guess.”
“Yeah, I should probably pick out my spot,” he said.
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