Episodes

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Just in time for Memorial Day, Jennie and Dianne are joined by special guest Andrew Bell, a former Sergeant-Major in the US Army and a veteran of both the Korean and Vietnam wars and a former Buffalo Soldier reenactor. Andrew shares not only the history of the Buffalo Soldiers and who they were, but how their nearly forgotten story was brought back to life in the 1960s. These fighting men represe...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Dianne and Jennie explore Chicago's Mount Carmel Catholic Cemetery and learn about its inception due to Chicago's growing immigrant population at the turn of the 20th century. This cemetery is the final resting place for many who took vows of holy orders including several bishops, archbishops, and Cardinals. It is also the final resting place to some of the most notorious gangsters from the 1920s...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne chat about cemeteries in the spring and summer time! This is the time of year when many cemeteries offer tours and other events and they suggest ways to get involved with your local cemetery. They also talk about some of the appropriate ways to help care for grave sites and who to talk to when you want to get involved in restoration projects or even just basic clean up. Join the...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Henry David Thoreau wrote, "You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.” that is exactly what Dan Fischer, founder of the One Last Wave Project has done. Dan sits down with Dianne and Jennie to share how he turned his devastating heartache from the loss of his dad, dog, and other loved ones in the past two years to one of hope and help for other...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne explore the Harvard Shaker "Lollipop" Cemetery located in Harvard, Massachusetts. The "lollipops" in the cemetery refer to the shape of more than 300 markers marking graves that date back to late 1700s belonging to members of 'The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing', more commonly known as the Shakers. They learn how the Shaker religion has been shaped and ...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. In this episode Jennie and Dianne learn about the April 25th tradition of ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand. ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army corps. ANZAC Day is a day that was originally begun to honor those soldiers who served during the first world war and specifically those who were part of the allied forces that set out to capture the Gallipoli peninsula. These became kn...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. What do a toothpick, a scarf and a banana peel have in common? This might sound like the beginning to a bad joke, but in this episode Jennie and Dianne share the stories of three artists who died under unusual circumstances. You will be introduced to writer and poet Sherwood Anderson, the mother of modern dance, Isadora Duncan, and Roland Reed whose photography helped the world to better understa...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Avast ye, hearties! Jennie and Dianne take to the high seas to visit the world's only known pirate cemetery hidden away on Ile Sainte Marie, a thin strip of land off Madagascar’s northeast coast, where for more than a hundred years thousands of pirates called this place home when they weren't out plundering for booty. Then the ladies batten down the hatches and head back to America to the coast o...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. In this episode Jennie and Dianne are joined by special guest Laurilea McDaniel to discuss three exceptional women who helped tame the wild west. All three were married to men whose names are well-known to history: Davy Crockett, Kit Carson and Horace Tabor; but we only hear the names of their wives in passing... until now. As Dolly Parton once said, “Storms make trees take deeper roots.” Elizabe...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne are joined by David Moffat, a Visitor Services Specialist & researcher at The House of the Seven Gables. David has done a lot of research into the life and work of Caroline Emmerton, the woman who saved the House of the Seven Gables by turning it into the museum we know today and using the funds from that museum to create a settlement house for thousands of immigrants who came t...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Happy St. Patrick's Day! In this episode Dianne and Jennie explore the traditions and customs that have made Irish wakes world famous. Why must a dead body not be left unattended until the funeral? Why would Irish families hire professional mourners? And what in the world is a sin eater? Come along as we celebrate the Ordinary Extraordinary Irish in their customs of life and death. As the Irish s...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne continue their discussion with Sharon Pajka, PhD about the 44 ordinary extraordinary women writers covered in her book 'Women Writers Buried in Virginia'. In this episode we are introduced to Ella Howard Bryan who wrote westerns under the nom de plume Clinton Dangerfield and formed a friendship with President Theodore Roosevelt. We also hear about Amélie Louise Rives Chanler Tro...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne welcome writer and professor of English Sharon Pajka, PhD back to the show to discuss her latest book, "Women Writers Buried in Virginia". What started out as a summer visit to the grave of acclaimed Gothic horror writer VC Andrews, soon became a trek across Virginia to visit the graves and share the stories of 44 Ordinary Extraordinary women writers whose final resting places a...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne visit the gravesite of Bill Pickett a black man who was born just after the American Civil War. He spent his early life working as a ranch hand, but in his adult life he performed in wild west shows around the world! He wowed audiences with his steer wrestling skills and later became Hollywood's first black cowboy hero. This ordinary extraordinary man would be the first black co...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne visit the gravesites of two heros of the American west, Bose Ikard and Nat Love. Both men were born into slavery, but became cowboys after the end of the American Civil War. They faced the dangers of cattle drives and life on the frontier proving themselves to be the best of the best. They were both highly trusted and respected. Their Ordinary Extraordinary lives were full of ad...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. In this episode Jennie and Dianne visit the gravesites of three couples who were truly in love in life and are buried side by side in death. The first is a story of young love that had barely started when it was nearly lost during the American Civil War. Second, is the true love story that sank below the seas with the RMS Titanic. Finally, a wild west madam who had many lovers throughout her life...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne are joined by Martin Begnal, president of the Friends of Riverside Cemetery in Waterbury, Connecticut. Martin shares the stories of several Riverside residents as well as his own very special familial connection that dates back almost to the beginning of the cemetery. Join us for the Ordinary Extraordinary stories of Carrie Welton, a pioneer woman who lived and died by her own r...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne are joined by special guest Casper Johnson as they revisit one of Diane's favorite cemeteries, Greenwood Cemetery in Cañon City, Colorado. They will begin with a brief history of the cemetery and then continue with the tragic story of Joe Arridy, a gentle man with an intellectual disability who was wrongly convicted and executed for a crime he never could have even begun to comm...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Alvin “Creepy” Karpis once said, “Of all the midwest cities the one I knew best was St. Paul and it was a crook’s haven." In this episode Jennie and Dianne visit the mausoleum of Police Chief John J. O'Connor in Calvary Cemetery in St. Paul, Minnesota. They delve into O'Connor's plan to fight "organized crime with organized intelligence", and how this led to creating a sort of gangsters' paradise...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne interview their first guest of the new year! Dr. Thomas Edge is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University. Tom recently took a sabbatical to research looking at the history of lynching in a different way: specifically the care given to the deceased and the efforts to remember them. His studies took him to 11 different U...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne delve into the beauty and stories of Lincoln, Nebraska's Wyuka Cemetery; a cemetery with the distinction of being the only state appointed cemetery in the United States. Follow along with them as they explore the flora and fauna, the statuary, and the many unique monuments of this 140 acre park cemetery. They also share the ordinary extraordinary stories of a tragic train accide...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Drifter and Gypsie of the Rebel at Large Adventure podcast join Jennie and her son Charlie and husband Dave in an abridged retelling of Charles Dickens's beloved short story A Christmas Carol. What does this have to do with cemeteries? There is an Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery at the end of the story that truly does help Ebenezer Scrooge to learn the true meaning of Christmas. From our families...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Jennie and Dianne visit the Land of Enchantment, specifically Mount Calvary Cemetery in Albuquerque, New Mexico where every Christmas Eve the cemetery is full of of candlelit luminarias. What are luminarias and how did this tradition start? Find out in this episode of the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery. We also give a quick news update on the Wreaths across America events around the United State...

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email. Dianne and Jennie explore one of the world's largest Gothic cathedrals, Winchester Cathedral in Winchester, England. This cathedral is the final resting place to kings, bishops, and many other famous persons including legendary English author Jane Austen. They also discuss how Christmas was an important holiday to Jane in her personal life and how it even played a role in many of her novels. Join...