Gravedigger gets new home at archdiocesan cemetery

Published: 2004-01-05

PORTLAND, Ore. (CNS) -- Eddie Viellgas, caretaker of the Mount Calvary Cemetery for the past 15 years, is getting some care of his own these days. The dilapidated mobile home where he raised his children with his wife, Irene, has been replaced by a $40,000 three-bedroom modular house purchased by the Mount Calvary Cemetery Association. "Common sense and social justice go hand in hand," said Deacon Jim Roy, who directs the Mount Calvary Cemetery Association, a ministry of the Portland Archdiocese. "I thought the mobile home was absolutely terrible. It was wrong for me to be living in a nice home and for him to be living like that." Father Charles Dreisbach, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Klamath Falls, agreed, saying, "the old mobile home was run down to begin with and it just got worse. (Viellgas) really deserves this new house. He has been a great worker." Viellgas, a native of Guadalajara, Mexico, digs 40 to 50 graves per year at the cemetery, 15 miles east of Klamath Falls and just north of the California border. He mows and waters the grass, trims shrubs and keeps vandals at bay.

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