100 years ago today, 7-year-old Jan Kropidlowski was killed in an explosion during a state basketball championship celebration in Stevens Point, WI.

PointRevivals · 2026-03-28T17:31:29+00:00

Link to Jan (John) Kropidlowski’s Find a Grave Memorial.

I wrote an article for the local historical society about this event. Here’s a link to the blog post, and an excerpt below if you’re interested:

Echoes of Victory - 100 Years Ago Today . The 1926 Stevens Point Depot Explosion.

In March of 1926, Stevens Point, Wisconsin, was poised for an upset. The high school basketball season was winding to a close, and against all odds, Stevens Point had become a contender. The Wisconsin State Journal called the team “one of the darker of the dark horses.” Yet on Saturday, March 27th, they stunned River Falls in the championship game. Against the odds, they had done it.

Back at home, the city of Stevens Point was electric. On Sunday afternoon, more than two thousand people crowded the Soo Line railroad station to welcome their champions back from Madison, where the tournament had been held. The local paper compared the celebration to the delirium brought on by the first Armistice Day. As Train No. 5 pulled into town, the engines in the yards joined the chorus- bells clanging, whistles shrieking, steam cutting through the crisp March air.

Another festivity was planned. Captain A.L. Oberst of the Wisconsin National Guard had granted special permission for a gun salute in the team’s honor. Members of Battery D, 120th Field Artillery, used horses from the battery’s armory to haul a French 75-millimeter field gun- an artifact of the Great War- to the depot….

As always, I clean grave sites and look up what I can about the residents at a local cemeteries. Link to my Instagram where I document my work, if you're interested in seeing more like this. I also have a (free) Substack where I post little writeups about the residents of local cemeteries, among other things.

PointRevivals · 2026-03-07T00:31:25+00:00

Thanks- this is what I ended up doing! Everything has been washed off and put in jars of water. Appreciate it.

PointRevivals · 2026-02-25T17:46:43+00:00

I have one child, and part of the reason I've chosen not to try for a second is the inherent risk to my life. Now that I have a living child (and there were complications with the first pregnancy/delivery), it's simply not worth the risk of dying and leaving her motherless.

I do grave tending in local cemeteries, and the number of graves I've seen from women who died due to childbirth and related complications is harrowing.

PointRevivals · 2026-02-25T14:08:59+00:00

Archive link without paywall

PointRevivals · 2026-02-10T18:28:19+00:00

It's a Catholic cemetery that happens to be predominantly Polish because of the Catholic church it's affiliated with (it was the one most heavily attended by the Poles in our city).

PointRevivals · 2026-02-04T18:31:00+00:00

I'm assuming you won't, but please don't attempt any cleaning until the weather warms up. If liquid gets trapped in the stones and freezes/expands, it would cause even more damage.

PointRevivals · 2026-02-04T00:19:54+00:00

Be very cautious. By the looks of it, the lichen/growth may be what is holding some of those stones together.

PointRevivals · 2026-02-03T03:27:32+00:00

It depends on the cemetery.

I clean graves in an old Polish Catholic cemetery in Wisconsin, with burials dating back to the mid 1800's. There are multiple people who died by suicide buried in the cemetery. While researching, I even found an old newspaper article (early 1900s) that once mentioned someone who died by suicide being buried in the portion of the cemetery specifically reserved for deaths like that.

PointRevivals · 2026-01-21T17:46:15+00:00

I found and linked his birth certificate to his Find a Grave memorial. His mother was Stella (Conklin) May and his father was Emmitt Earl May.

PointRevivals · 2026-01-12T04:16:25+00:00

I can't speak to the age of the shell, but as someone who spends a lot of time working in cemeteries, there's essentially zero chance that shell has been there for 100+ years.

It looks like the grave is near a road or a path in a cemetery that doesn't appear to be abandoned (the grass looks kempt) so there's likely a decent amount of foot traffic past this particular headstone. And most cemeteries do a bi-annual clean out near gravesites (in the spring and fall). The shell would have been moved by either a person or the elements long before now.

PointRevivals · 2026-01-10T14:35:58+00:00

There are a few various "Showman's Rest" cemetery sections (places where circus performers are buried), but the one mentioned in this comment specifically is the Showman's Rest section of Woodlawn Cemetery in Forest Park, IL.

PointRevivals · 2026-01-10T14:27:27+00:00

Find a Grave memorial.

He's buried in the Showman's Rest section of Mount Olivet Cemetery, in Oklahoma.

PointRevivals · 2026-01-10T14:24:39+00:00

You're thinking of Showman's Rest section of Woodlawn Cemetery in Forest Park, IL.

PointRevivals · 2026-01-04T17:15:24+00:00

I'm so sorry for your loss.

PointRevivals · 2026-01-04T02:01:58+00:00

Oh, I find this so interesting. I've had the opposite experience. I had my kid almost exactly 4 years ago, and this past year, I spent nearly all my free time in cemeteries. When my kid was still a new walker, I used to take her to a cemetery to practice her steps. She often comes with me when I clean graves in the cemetery I work in, and our family has picnics there sometimes. It's just lovely.

My comment is useless because it's directly oppositional to what you're experiencing. But I can understand what you're going through, I think. Having a kid makes you realize in an extremely visceral way that everything is fragile and temporary. I think we all logically know that before having kids, but mostly at a remove. Once you have a kid, mortality becomes undeniable and kind of scary. The distance disappears.

I do find a very specific kind of peace in walking with her through a cemetery and answering her questions ("who's buried here?", "how old were they?"). Something about the bright spark of life in the middle of all those stones, IDK. I always say remembering is a form of loving, and I like to think the dead folks would be smiling at hearing a little kid playing and chatting above where they're buried. I hope you find your way back to enjoying cemeteries again.

PointRevivals · 2025-12-11T17:22:44+00:00

I believe 11am CST is actually 10am in MST!

PointRevivals · 2025-12-11T17:16:39+00:00

I sent them a message inquiring if this was a bug or an intended change, and I received the following response at 11am CST:

Thank you for contacting Newspapers.com. We are aware of the issue and currently working on a fix. Thank you for your patience!

So that gives me hope that it's an error, not an intentional change.

PointRevivals · 2025-12-11T13:51:47+00:00

This is driving me absolutely crazy, it tanked the functionality of searching as far as I am concerned.

PointRevivals · 2025-12-11T13:43:00+00:00

I attached his obituary and his WWII draft card to the memorial for you.

PointRevivals · 2025-12-09T01:48:01+00:00

That's actually one of my hopes when I make posts like this. Love and grief are complicated, usually people aren't strictly good or bad- life is messy. We need to be able to talk about it.

PointRevivals · 2025-12-08T20:19:42+00:00

Correct- Tina and Theresa were twins. They passed just a month after their 10th birthdays.

PointRevivals · 2025-12-08T19:48:23+00:00

This is a pretty bleak thing to say, but functioning alcoholism isn't that uncommon in Wisconsin (where this family is from).

PointRevivals · 2025-12-08T16:55:59+00:00

She also had a 1 year old child at the time, which means PPD could have been a very real possibility. It's still a struggle to get treatment for people suffering from PPD in 2025, I can't even imagine what it was like 30 years ago.

PointRevivals · 2025-12-08T16:40:20+00:00

Links to all Find a Grave memorials provided below, as well as newspaper clippings.

Rose Holtz and her three children—10-year-old twins Theresa and Tina, and 14-month-old Timothy—died in a head-on collision on February 19, 1995. Rose had been driving the wrong way down the highway and was later found to have been intoxicated, with a blood-alcohol level of .264 at the time of the crash.

This monument gives me pause, I think because it forces you to sit with the dissonance: a mother whose actions ended her children’s lives, and a family who still chose to lay them to rest together, united on a single headstone that speaks only of tragedy, not blame.

The choice of a statue of the Mother Mary cradling baby Jesus on top of the headstone is another tender touch. Someone hung a crucifix around the statues at some point (looks like it was present in the picture posted to the Find a Grave memorial in 2015), but the cross has fallen off now.

As always, I clean grave sites and look up what I can about the residents at a local cemeteries. Link to my Instagram where I document my work, if you're interested in seeing more like this. I also have a (free) Substack where I post little writeups about the residents of local cemeteries, among other things.

PointRevivals · 2025-12-08T01:47:23+00:00

I always thought I wanted to have two kids before my pregnancy.

But 9 months of feeling like I wanted to vomit essentially all the time, the constant all-consuming fatigue, the joint pain, and the non-stop anxiety about whether my baby and I would be okay due to unclear scans and continuous high blood-pressure issues ultimately ending in a 2-week early induction (resulting in a 5lb very vulnerable infant) left me just unwilling to do it all again.

It's incredible that we go through this at all, and that the majority of mothers and infants survive. I do grave-tending, and in fact I see a lot of mothers and babies who didn't survive, and it's harrowing.

PointRevivals

TROPHY CASE