Meet the 2 brothers who have maintained Butler’s North Side Cemetery for decades
Even after already spending 56 years at North Side Cemetery, Merle Ealy isn’t planning on leaving. Actually, he is planning on staying forever.
In one of the newer sections of the almost 200-year-old cemetery is a grave stone for Ealy, which includes his birth date as well as the Steelers logo. About once a week, Ealy walks over his own grave, as he mows the lawn, blows away leaves and clears snow from the 30-plus-acre property.
“I love working here,” Ealy said. “It’s all outside, and I love working outside.”
Ealy started as a maintenance worker at the Butler cemetery three days after he graduated from high school, when the best landscaping technology available was push lawn mowers and hand clippers for trimming. About 20 years later, his younger brother, Ron Ealy, started working at the cemetery. When Merle Ealy crossed 50 years of employment, the cemetery board of directors gifted him a grave plot and grave stone as a commemoration.
The brothers Ealy have been the only maintenance workers at the cemetery for decades, but their six-day work schedule has helped keep it in good shape throughout that time. The proof is in the compliments given by the cemetery walkers who frequent the trails at the site.
“We get a lot of compliments from people who walk around our cemetery how beautiful it is,” said Don Bolt, superintendent of the North Side Cemetery. “The running joke is God put the dirt here, then Merle showed up.”
A lot has changed at the North Side Cemetery since Merle Ealy started there in the late-1960s. He said the cemetery got a weed eater about five years into his tenure, allowing him to cover the work a little faster, and different trucks and tractors have come throughout the years to help with other kinds of landscape work.
Merle Ealy explained that the brothers split up each day, six days a week to cover different parts of the cemetery. The brothers work seven hours Monday through Friday, and five hours on Saturdays. Bolt compared the work schedule to the movie “Groundhog Day.”
“We get it all done, then the other end is ready to start all over again,” Merle Ealy said.
Landscaping is the Ealys’ main job at the cemetery, but they dig graves about 30 times a year — the number of burials at the cemetery has been declining for some time. For the past several years, burial ceremonies have all been graveside, because the chapel had been gutted for renovations that had not been feasible.
The older parts of the cemetery are a little more difficult to maintain, the Ealys said, because of how the grave sites used to be organized and laid out.
“Families used to pick where the stones would go,” Merle Ealy said. “A lot of them put them in themselves.”
Despite the long hours and constant outdoor work no matter the weather, both Merle and Ron Ealy said they still like the work after all these years.
“Same time every day, all seasons,” Ealy said.
According to Bolt, the North Side Cemetery’s board of directors is made up of about a dozen people who help keep the cemetery funded. The cemetery has a perpetual care fund, and sends out mailers each November requesting donations to help keep the place maintained.
“We have a very good board, and they have done a good job keeping the cemetery solvent,” Bolt said. “Around Thanksgiving time, we just send out a thing that says ‘Here is what we've done for the year, here's how your contribution helped us.’”
Merle Ealy lives in New Castle, and Ron Ealy in Butler, and although the younger Ealy has put decades into the cemetery, he does not, at the moment, have specific plans about his own resting site. He said he is not even sure he would like to be buried in the North Side Cemetery.
“I've got 34 years in working with dead people here,” Ron Ealy said.
Merle and Ron Ealy each said they don’t have plans to stop working at the cemetery any time soon, calling the job a labor of love. Bolt said that even when the brothers stop working at the cemetery, Merle Ealy will eventually be easy to find.
“Maybe one of the only ones that have a Steelers emblem on his stone,” Bolt said of Merle’s grave site.
