ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Former U.S. Sen. Thomas Eagleton, who resigned as George McGovern's vice presidential nominee in 1972 after it was revealed he had been hospitalized for depression, died Sunday. He was 77.

The cause of death was a combination of heart, respiratory and other problems, his family said in a statement. Eagleton had suffered from a variety of illnesses and ailments in recent years.

"It's a real loss to the country," McGovern said. "He was a scrapper - he didn't back away from a fight. Yet he was disarming in his dealings with people."

Eagleton, a Democrat, served in the Senate representing Missouri from December 1968 through January 1987.

Eagleton was McGovern's vice presidential nominee in 1972, but dropped out after it was revealed that he had been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment and had twice undergone electroshock therapy for depression. McGovern chose Sargent Shriver to replace Eagleton and lost to Richard Nixon in the general election.

In a telephone interview, McGovern said Sunday he erred in removing Eagleton. He said Democrats could have won the election if he had kept Eagleton on the ticket.

"My first reaction was to say I was going to stay with him," the former South Dakota senator. "But gosh, the outcry across the country was pretty intense. We felt that since we were starting a new campaign we needed to get that off the front page and we needed to get Tom to step down.

"But I think that was a mistake," McGovern said.

Eagleton told The Associated Press in 2003 that he had no regrets.

"Being vice president ain't all that much," he said. "My ambition, since my senior year in high school, was to be a senator. Not everybody achieves their ambition. I got to the level that I really had no great right to claim."

Former Sen. John Danforth, a Republican, served alongside Eagleton for 10 years and was his friend for four decades despite their political differences.

"Tom Eagleton was an outstanding public servant throughout his career in elective politics and beyond," Danforth said in a statement. "As a United States senator, he was highly respected on both sides of the aisle. He was a person of high principle and consistent good humor."

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., called Eagleton an outstanding senator in the tradition of Harry Truman.

"He made a difference on every issue he touched in the Senate, especially Vietnam," Kennedy said in a statement. "He'll long be remembered for his outrage over the senseless bombing of Cambodia and for his leadership in the anti-war effort."

Eagleton was born in St. Louis in 1929, the son of noted civil trial attorney Mark Eagleton, who once ran unsuccessfully for mayor and encouraged his son's interest in politics. The younger Eagleton was elected circuit attorney at age 26 in 1956, the youngest man ever elected to the position.

He was elected Missouri attorney general in 1960 and lieutenant governor in 1964 before winning election to the U.S. Senate.

Eagleton was considered liberal, but he criticized busing to achieve school desegregation and, as a practicing Roman Catholic, strongly opposed abortion.

He told the AP in 2003 he had not had any symptoms of depression for years and "didn't think it was all that big a deal."

Most recently, he was co-chairman for the Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures, which backed a successful constitutional amendment in November guaranteeing that all federally allowed stem cell research also can occur in Missouri.

Eagleton is survived by his wife, Barbara Ann Smith Eagleton, whom he married in 1956, a son and a daughter.

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Associated Press writer David Lieb in Jefferson City, Mo., contributed to this story.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/OBIT_EAGLETON?SITE=NYCAN&SECTION=SPECI...

By Brian Lamb

Special to the Chicago Tribune

Sunday, September 22, 2002

This story ought to come with a warning label: Contents best suitable for history buffs. And, we're not talking garden-variety history travelers, drawn to the manicured grounds of Civil War battlefields or the air-conditioned exhibition halls of American history museums. This story will take you on the road to 38 cemeteries, to visit the grave sites of 40 U.S. vice presidents.

Well, 39, actually, but more about that later.

First, a quick sketch of American vice presidents. There have been 46; 40 have gone to their reward; six are with us still. Their average age on taking the oath was 54. The youngest, at 36, was John C. Breckinridge, No. 2 to James Buchanan. Harry S. Truman's running mate, Alben W. Barkley, was the oldest at 71. Seven died in office.

Fourteen, either through election in their own right or through the untimely deaths of their leaders, made it to the Executive Mansion and into the history books. Most of the rest, especially those in the age before television, toiled in relative obscurity in a largely ceremonial job. It seems amazing to us today, but in the days when party bosses selected the tickets, some vice presidents barely knew their president before the election and weren't consulted once in office. Their job was to help the president get elected. Success at that task consigned them to attending funerals and fairs, making speeches and wondering whether history would ever call for them to step forward into the top post.

Driving on U.S. Highway 1 in Maine, on the way to Hannibal Hamlin's grave at Mt. Hope Cemetery in Bangor and halfway through my list of 40 dead vice presidents, it dawned on me how much fun I was having. Not only was I in one of the nation's prettiest and least populated states, but my thoughts were not on the business trip I had just left, but on the politics of the United States, circa 1860. For a history junkie, this is the travel equivalent of nirvana.

Here's what I'd learned about Hamlin: He was a Democratic senator from Maine who'd left the party in protest over slavery to join the new Republican Party. His defection brought him national attention, and when Republican party leaders were casting about for a vice presidential candidate in 1860, this northeastern former Democrat seemed a good balance to Abraham Lincoln, the former Whig from the West. Knowing that the office was largely ceremonial, Hamlin didn't want the vice presidential nod. He learned that he'd been selected for the ballot only after party members sought him out in his hotel room, interrupting a card game. He never met Lincoln until after the election.

Four years later, hoping to increase his chances for re-election in the midst of war, Lincoln dumped him in favor of a pro-Union Southern Democrat named Andrew Johnson, from the key border state of Tennessee. Hamlin returned to the Senate for two more terms, while just six weeks after his second inauguration, Lincoln's assassination put Johnson in the White House.

What kind of tourist seeks out goal-oriented travel? Maybe it's a male thing. Or, perhaps I've been influenced by a bunch of like-minded friends. A longtime colleague, Brian Lockman, has visited every major league baseball park. An Indianapolis friend, Jim Poole, made it to each county seat in his home state. Achieving a goal of my own appealed to me, but until presidential historian Richard Norton Smith told me about his just-completed tour of presidential grave sites I hadn't found my own hook—history. Taking on a grave site tour personalized American history and gave me specific incentives to keep learning.

My first round of political grave sites was the presidents, out of that came a guidebook called "Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?" Once that tour was finished, I was looking for a new goal. Tackling the vice presidents was not only a natural, it let me begin the list with 12 grave sites under my belt (two of the 14 Veeps-turned-president—Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush—are, of course, still alive). Besides, being wonkishly competitive, it would put me a step ahead of my old friend Smith, the presidential historian.

Once you've visited a few political graves, you begin to realize how much thought famous people and their families put into posterity. They clearly want you to visit, a fact underscored by funerary designs that attempt to reflect the best qualities of the person interred. Evolving burial practices also offer an interesting timeline through our society, as customs changed from the simple graves of the post-colonial era, to the Victorians' grand memorials, to the post-modern minimalists who favor slabs of glossily polished granite.

Epitaphs are key. My vice presidential favorite is probably Hubert H. Humphrey's at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis. It says, "I have enjoyed my life, its disappointments outweighed by its pleasures. I have loved my country in a way that some people consider sentimental and out of style. I still do, and I remain an optimist, with joy, without apology, about this country and about the American experiment in democracy."

Here's a tip if you're inspired to start your own historic grave site travel: Make it a longer-term goal, something you do over time. The stops are far-flung—20 states and the District of Columbia have vice presidential burial sites—and sometimes they are simply not on the way to anywhere. John Nance Garner, nicknamed "Cactus Jack," who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's vice president for the first eight years is buried in his hometown of Uvalde in south central Texas, 60 miles from San Antonio. More remote is the grave of William A. Wheeler (Rutherford B. Hayes' vice president) in the upper reaches of New York State, near the Canadian border.

Because I travel a lot for business, it was most convenient to add a leg here or there to business trips. Occasionally, I'd create a circuit of relatively close-by grave sites and turn that into a short driving vacation. These more leisurely trips allowed time to visit other historic sites along the way.

Chicagoans can sample a VP grave site tour without leaving town. Charles G. Dawes, Calvin Coolidge's vice president and winner of the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize, is buried at Rosehill Cemetery (5800 N. Ravenswood Ave.), Chicago's largest burial grounds. Once you have pinpointed Dawes' mausoleum, be sure to check out the cemetery's 350 acres, which have some impressive tenants.

A few hours south on Interstate Highway 55, in the city of Bloomington, is Illinois' other vice presidential grave, that of Adlai E. Stevenson, grandfather to the twice unsuccessful presidential candidate of the same name. The two Adlais are buried across from one another in Evergreen Memorial Cemetery. The senior Adlai was Grover Cleveland's vice president from 1893 to 1897 and made a second bid for the job in 1900, when he teamed with the great orator and gold-standard activist William Jennings Bryan. Bloomington is deep in Lincoln country, so while you're at the cemetery, visit the burial site of one of Lincoln's Supreme Court appointees, David Davis.

A few hours to the east of Bloomington, lies Indianapolis. If Virginia is the birthplace of presidents, Indiana is a mother lode of vice presidents. Five hail from the state, including the very much alive J. Danforth Quayle. Three are buried in the capital city's Crown Hill Cemetery: Charles W. Fairbanks, who gave his name to the Alaskan city, was Theodore Roosevelt's vice president from 1905 to 1909. His personality must have been the mirror opposite of the brash Roosevelt's; during the 1904 campaign, Roosevelt and Fairbanks were tagged as "the Hot Tamale and the Indiana Icicle." As a fellow Hoosier, I'm betting it wasn't frostiness that marked Fairbanks' personality, just a classic case of Indiana reserve. Thomas R. Marshall, the man who reportedly gave us the maxim 'What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar," served under President Woodrow Wilson, and is another of Crown Hill's eternal residents. The third vice presidential internment is Grover Cleveland's first running mate, Thomas A. Hendricks, who had an unlucky history with the vice presidency. His first try for the office was with Democrat Samuel Tilden in 1876; the ticket was vanquished during the infamous Hayes-Tilden electoral battle, when a Republican-dominated commission gave the election to their man, Rutherford B. Hayes. Hendricks picked a winner in Grover Cleveland, and then died in office just eight months after the 1885 inauguration.

Opened in 1864, Crown Hill bills itself as the third-largest non-governmental cemetery in the United States and is a bonanza for graveyard tourists. A few names among the 185,000 departed who caught my attention are President Benjamin Harrison, the notorious bank robber John Dillinger, Richard Gatling (inventor of the Gatling gun), Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley and the graves of 1,600 Confederate POWs.

New York state is the final resting placefor 10 vice presidents. There's a good political reason for this: In the earliest days of the country, politicians from powerful New York state were often drafted for the No. 2 spot to balance the Virginia presidential dynasty.

Although only one vice president is buried in New York City itself, six other vice presidents are buried within a 90-minute drive of the city (including two in New Jersey), making the greater New York City area especially fruitful in the hunt for vice presidential graves.

In the city's East Village area, you'll find James Monroe's vice president, Daniel D. Tompkins, buried in the churchyard at St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery. There is a statue of him, as well, quite a tribute to a politician who drank too much and was accused of mismanaging state funds as New York's governor. After his death at the age of 50, Congress voted to pay off his debts.

In the close-in part of Long Island, an easy drive from LaGuardia Airport, you can find Theodore Roosevelt's grave site, just down the road from Sagamore Hill, his National Park Service-preserved home in Oyster Bay. In 1900, Republican Party leaders pickedhim to run with William McKinley as he campaigned for re-election, hoping to send the young, publicity-seeking reformist governor of New York into the vice presidency's political oblivion. Fate had other plans. Just 186days after McKinley's second inauguration, a crazed anarchist named Leon Czolgosz shot the president at close range; McKinley's death eight days later put Roosevelt into the White House at the tender age of 42. He became the nation's 26th president; 26 steps now lead to his grave.

McKinley's first vice president was Garret A. Hobart, who died in office. His burial place is also within commuting distance of New York City, in Patterson, N.J. About 40 minutes farther south, in Princeton, is New Jersey's other vice presidential grave, that of Aaron Burr. While in office, he dueled with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton; when Hamilton died, Burr went on the lam. His grave is marked with a plain stone.

Three vice presidents are marking eternity just up the Hudson River from New York. In the leafy Dutchess County town of Rhinebeck is the grave of Levi P. Morton, vice president under Benjamin Harrison. In his time, he was a major banker and financier, a contemporary of J.P. Morgan. Harrison replaced him on his losing ticket in 1892. Four years later, Morton made his own bid for the White House, but lost the nomination to William McKinley and returned to banking.

Across the river in Kingston, just about 15 miles away, is the burial site of George Clinton. This long-time New York governor served as Thomas Jefferson's second vice president and James Monroe's first, dying in office.

And just outside New York City on the Hudson River in picturesque Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., is that 40th grave site, the last one on my list, which I was simply unable to conquer. It is the final resting place of Nelson A. Rockefeller, the four-term New York governor who sought the presidency three times and was appointed vice president by Gerald R. Ford in the rocky days after Watergate. Two years after leaving office, he died in New York City of a massive heart attack. He's the only vice president to be cremated.

His plot, along with other famous members of the Rockefeller family, is in a private gated area of a cemetery in Sleepy Hollow. Despite numerous attempts to visit, including a personal letter of request to Nelson's widow, Happy, the grave site remained off limits. Rockefeller, who was influential enough to lend his name to a branch of Republicanism ("the Rockefeller Republicans"), is the only person to serve as president or vice president whose grave site is not accessible to the public.

Finding any vice president's final resting place is made easy today with the Internet (see sidebar). Detailed research materials are available on the least known, men such as Schuyler Colfax, who served under Ulysses S. Grant; Richard Mentor Johnson, vice president to Martin Van Buren; or George Mifflin Dallas, for whom the Texas city was named. A Philadelphian on the ticket with James K. Polk, Dallas' grave is in Philadelphia's St. Peter's Churchyard, a National Historic Landmark, located on Pine Street in the city's historic district. While visiting Dallas' tomb, I paid my respects to the great portrait painter Charles Wilson Peale and saw the graves of eight Indian chiefs who contracted smallpox while in Philadelphia—then the capital—on an official visit to President George Washington.

One of the hardest sites to find is the grave of Spiro T. Agnew, who resigned the vice presidency in disgrace in 1973, just 10 months before his president, Richard M. Nixon, resigned over the Watergate investigation. You have to search the grounds of the Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens in Timonium, Md., to spot the small, understated marker that bears his name.

If you find it, perhaps you're ready to advance to Political Graveyards 301—tracking down the 51 deceased speakers of the House, the 15 dead chief justices, or if you're really hooked, all 101 departed justices of the Supreme Court.

http://www.americanpresidents.org/places/chitrib_vp.asp

Preparing a final resting place for a president has changed in the last four decades, thanks in part to the creation of presidential libraries and museums.

"A long time ago, most presidents were buries at their homes," said Barbara Owens, spokeswoman, State Funeral Plans, Joint Force Headquarters, National Capitol Region/Military District of Washington.

The MDW handled the details of the late President Gerald Ford's interment. Even the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, where the late president is buried, was prohibited from discussing details, according to its director, James Kransis.

Although Lyndon B. Johnson is buried at his Texas ranch in what Owens called a grave "just like any other cemetery," other presidents since John F. Kennedy have had more public final resting places created. Kennedy is at Arlington National Cemetery. Ronald Reagan is buried at his library, and Gerald Ford is buried at his museum. Presidents and their families choose the location and the type of monument.

The museum and library locations tend to increase public visitation. That affects design and construction.

"When it comes to the actual preparation of a grave, some of the things they have to consider are topography of the land -- is it sturdy enough that it will hold up in the weather (and) community visitation?" Owens said.

The site is prepared so soil doesn't wash away in heavy rains, she said.

"If you take President Ford's grave, it's on a hillside up against the property of the museum," Owens explained. "Depending on the soil, the construction engineers would have to decide what would work best for the infrastructure of the tomb."

Structural dimensions are influenced by the site, and the president's family chooses the site, she said.

President Ford is buried in a mausoleum-style grave, as is President Reagan, Owens said. Typically concrete, it is their architecture that makes each unique.

"The architecture has to support the traffic of many visitors," Owens said.

Whether a president's final resting place is a grave or a mausoleum, it is built more robustly than an ordinary person's, in order to support large numbers of visitors. Designers have to balance that against practical demands -- the tablets, or doors, of a mausoleum must be able to be opened for eventual interment of the president's spouse.

Everyone who worked on the construction of President Ford's tomb signed a confidentiality agreement, Owens said. The secrecy extended to the identities of the contractors.

"That has to do with the family, not the military," Owens said.

http://www.mlive.com/mbusinessreview/west/index.ssf?/base/test/11702342773092...

Collecting the presidents on $1 coins

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/north/chi-0701250187jan25,1,3895269....

From the Associated Press, 8/21/2005:

Grave hunters bring lively activity to cemeteries in search for famous

Some focus on film stars, sports or military figures

ALBANY, N.Y. - Here lies President Chester A. Arthur, amid the tall trees and tousled grass of Albany Rural Cemetery.

A dribble of people still visit the Victorian-style grave of the little remembered 19th-century president. More than a century after his death, Arthur is something of a cemetery star.

Patrick Weissend has traveled hundreds of miles to see Arthur's grave - twice - as part of his quest to visit all 38 presidential graves in the country.

"This kind of thing gets you off the expressways and you get to see America," said Weissend, a 37-year-old museum director from Batavia, N.Y.

Weissend is part of the thriving community of people whose idea of fun is checking out lonely roads and rows of granite. They are sometimes called "gravers" or "grave hunters." They are an odd assortment of history buffs, celebrity hounds, military aficionados, amateur genealogists and the occasional Goth kid.

They like the tranquillity, the connection to the past, the beauty, the thrill of the hunt and the buzz of being close to famous people - albeit dead ones.

"People initially think it's this morbid, weird fascination," said Jim Tipton, proprietor of the popular Find A Grave Web site. "I'm not there thinking about what their decaying body looks like or anything like that. You're thinking about their life."

Cemetery tourism is nothing unusual. Visitors flock to Arlington and Gettysburg national cemeteries, as well as to the handful of star-packed graveyards around Hollywood. Grave hunting is a bit different. Gravers typically seek out individual plots of specific people, be it megastars such as Marilyn Monroe, less lustrous lights such as Gen. George Armstrong Custer, or their great-uncle.

Some, like Salt Lake City-based Tipton, will visit graves of famous people even if they're not quite sure who they were. He once searched out Cy Young's grave in Peoli, Ohio, on a cross-country trip with his sister even though they were not sure what sport Young played.

"He has a baseball with wings on it on his grave," he said. "We said, 'Well, that pretty much definitely answers what sport he was involved in.'"

Then there are the specialists. Weissend began focusing on presidents after a visit to Millard Fillmore's grave in nearby Buffalo, N.Y. He has since crisscrossed the nation visiting the graves of 30 dead presidents, often notching more burial sites during side trips to events such as Kiwanis conventions.

Other hunters limit themselves to Civil War figures or movie stars. Then there are grave canvassers: Deborah Dash is in the process of taking pictures of thousands of graves near her home in the San Francisco area and then logging the data on Find A Grave.

She likes looking at the words etched into stone and considering the mysteries they convey.

"You read stones from the turn of the century where you've got a married couple and they have five kids who all died in infancy," she said. "And it's, 'OK, was it a smallpox epidemic? Was it the flu? Was it an accident?'"

That sense of connection is common among gravers. Weissend describes the poignancy of visiting Calvin Coolidge's hillside grave in Vermont - a simple headstone befitting a farmer.

Tipton talks of visiting gangster Al Capone's grave before it was moved from Chicago to Hillside, Ill., and feeling "something powerful" being six feet up from the iconic gangster. It got him hooked. He has now visited about 1,200 graves and maintains the Web site full time.

Tipton relies on an army of volunteers to contribute to Find A Grave, making it a Wikipedia-like listing of graves of just about anyone who amounted to something in anything ("Where's the Beef?" lady Clara Peller is listed as resting in the Chicago area). Celebrities actually make up a small fraction of the 7.9 million graves listed, since registered contributors can also put their dead grandparents or anyone else on the site.

Tipton said he'd like to get every grave in the nation cataloged eventually.

Other sites have a narrower focus. The Political Graveyard bills itself as "The Web site that tells where the dead politicians are buried."

A number of sites are devoted to dead celebrities, such as Karen McHale's Hollywood Underground. Her site gives tips like this one from Home of Peace Memorial Park: "Jerome 'Curly' Howard - Actor, Curly of the 'Three Stooges' and brother to Shemp and Moe. Location: Western Jewish Institute Section, SW Corner, Plot 1, five rows back."

The wealth of detailed information can make "grave hunting" seem like a misnomer, since most of the famous graves are logged already. But there are still challenges such as finding poorly marked graves and the occasional hassle.

McHale says that while staff at some more heavily trod cemeteries are unfriendly, gravers should stand their ground: "As long as you are unobtrusive and stay out of their way, then there's not a whole lot they can do. Open ground is fair game."