Third generation Chippewa Valley gravedigger retiring after creating 10,000 burial sites

Apr. 29—EAU CLAIRE — Jeff Bluem remembers helping his dad spread grass seed in an Eau Claire cemetery at age 6.

By the time he was 10, Bluem started digging graves for the family business.

Now 62, Bluem figures he has dug more than 10,000 graves — including many by hand — and it's time for some rest before he's ready for a final resting place himself.

"I'm tired and it's time to wrap things up," said Bluem, a third generation gravedigger from the town of Pleasant Valley who sold his excavating equipment in January and plans climb out of the grave business completely this summer.

His explanation for how he was able to work around death and in cemeteries for so long is pretty simple.

"By the time I was of age, I was used to it already," Bluem said. "You learn to tiptoe around people, and if they're in a bad mood because of what happened, you've just got to deal with it."

Not only did Bluem's father, William, spend over four decades digging graves and caring for local cemeteries, but he even used to help his grandfather dig graves in Pepin County.

As time went on, however, the younger generations in many of the families that once provided cemetery services in west-central Wisconsin were no longer interested in carrying on the family tradition.

"I'm the only one left of the old guys who used to do it," said Jeff Bluem, who reported spending Monday morning "crawling around on 150-year-old graves in the rain" while carrying out a project to raise and clean sunken headstones in Hadleyville Cemetery, a tiny graveyard that started by serving a long-abandoned settlement where stagecoaches once stopped in the town of Pleasant Valley.

For years, Bluem and his father served as sextons for the collection of five cemeteries off Omaha Street on Eau Claire's north side, handling much of the maintenance and recordkeeping for the facilities.

"Jeff's work is kind of in the background, but he's always right there and ready to do his job, and he does it well," said LeRoy Johnson, treasurer of the Lutheran Church Cemetery Association, a partnership of Grace, Spirit and Immanuel Lutheran churches that operates the 142-year-old Lutheran cemetery in the neighborhood. "He's just a very conscientious guy who has gone above and beyond what he had to do for us many times."

Ready to respond

While Bluem doesn't recall ever having to cancel a burial, that doesn't mean arrangements always went smoothly. He offered an example in which a family inspected a grave site two hours before a funeral and told him the hole was supposed to be on the opposite side of the headstone.

"We made that one happen too, although we had to stall them a little before they came out of the church," he said with a chuckle.

The life of a gravedigger also involves being available at a moment's notice.

"Every hour of the day your schedule might change," said Bluem, who hasn't taken a vacation since 2006 and came home early from that one because of a business call.

Now that he is no longer buried by work, Bluem plans to take a trip to Montana this summer. One of his expected highlights: touring old gold mining cemeteries.

After annually digging more than 100 graves — each roughly 8 feet long, 3 1/2 feet wide and 4 1/2 feet deep — by hand for several years, the strain of the back-breaking work eased in 1997 when Bluem first acquired power excavating equipment to replace his shovel.

The technology advance enabled him to dramatically expand the territory he served.

"It just kept getting bigger and bigger and I stayed with it," Bluem said. "When it finally came time to sell my equipment, I was doing 60 cemeteries in six counties."

Passing the torch

Still, he faced the same challenge as other gravediggers approaching retirement age. Nobody in his family was interested in taking over the business.

"I told them you've got to work nine days a week and 30 hours a day, and nobody wanted to work that hard," Bluem joked, perhaps demonstrating why he didn't pursue a career as a salesman.

Bluem did, however, find a buyer with a similar comfort level for having both feet in a grave, as long as it's not his own.

Larry Plumer of Durand also started helping his dad provide cemetery services as a young boy, taking over the business about six years ago when his dad retired after five decades of digging graves. After meeting about four years ago, Plumer recalled telling Bluem to let him know when Bluem was ready to retire.

Last summer Bluem called Plumer and said the time had arrived. The pair negotiated a deal for Plumer to buy Bluem's equipment and take over the business in January, expanding from serving about a dozen cemeteries to nearly 80. Thankfully, Plumer said, the transaction meant he could stop digging graves by hand.

"It's not something a lot of people think of for a career, but it's a job that needs to be done and obviously there's a need for it," said Plumer, who calls his business LP Cemetery Services. "It's a behind-the-scenes thing. People usually don't even see us. They just come to the funeral and there's a hole there."

As Plumer introduces himself to his new clients, he reported hearing nothing but praise for the job that Bluem and his father have done for so many years in a line of work that would make many people uncomfortable.

"Some people say, 'I couldn't do that,' but Jeff and I we grew up with it our whole lives," Plumer said. "I like it that we have kind of similar stories. It makes me feel like I'm kind of taking over where Jeff left off."