COLMA, CA — On a cloudless October afternoon, Richard Rocchetta piloted his Toyota through a sea of weatherbeaten headstones and mausoleums that sprawl over hilly, manicured lawns of his hometown. He points to some of his best-known neighbors.
There’s Joe DiMaggio, the “Yankee Clipper.” There’s Wyatt Earp, the mustachioed Old West lawman. There's music impresario Bill Graham and William Randolph Hearst, the news tycoon. And in between, the lesser-known: Bankers, priests, Hells Angels bikers and Alcatraz inmates. And the mass graves of corpses evicted from San Francisco cemeteries a century ago.
Rocchetta is a gravedigger’s son, and he knows this place by heart.
Colma, incorporated as a necropolis in 1924 after San Francisco banned new burials, is home to 1.6 million souls in 17 cemeteries that take up most of its 2.2 square miles. In one of America’s most grave-dense cities, there are Italian, Serbian and Japanese cemeteries. Majestic arched entrances and elegant columbariums. Even a pet cemetery, where Tina Turner's dog is buried with one of her fur coats.
It's fitting that in a place where the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one, its roughly 1,600 above-ground residents have embraced the winking motto: “It’s great to be alive in Colma.”
