Woodmen

This stone from Woodland, its logo is clear. Many are thinly inscribed, or badly incised and barely legible.

Now, you walk through a few established cemeteries (graveyards) and you will see some things again in grave monuments and markers: masonic symbols, tree stones, zinkers, lambs, angels, crosses. Woodmen memorial insignia is one.

It has a skyscraper in Omaha. The other well known insurance company in Omaha used to have a television show with Marlon Perkins, an old, thin man with white moustaches. He ran the St. Louis Zoo. Years before he used to be their snake man, and before that laborer. In between he ran Buffalo's, and then Chicago's zoos.

All those years on television, he had the much younger (27 years) Jim Fowler wrestling gators, and being chased on the savannah. He would introduce the segments and break into a commercial, "While Jim is counting his fingers after being badgered by a surprised badger who was still in his burrow, you can count easy and contentedly while Mutual of O**** protects your burrow..."

Woodmen of the World began in 1890, an earlier Modern Woodmen of America began by the same man in 1883. Things happened, and he left the first one. They were fraternal benefit societies. They were life insurance outfits with burial benefits.

Before the Depression they provided gravestones of various designs. Some were tree stones, some carried just the logo. The logo had variety: some had the ancient tools of wood cutters (the founder had been a free mason), maul (combination sledge and axe), wedge, axe, beetle (heavy hammer); sometimes a dove of peace; sometimes the latin phrase, 'Dum Tacet Clamat, (though silent he speaks loudly). Woodmen Circle was the women's auxiliary.

For a time they had a radio, and television stations with the call letters WOW. They once employed Johnny Carson on air.

at St. Joseph Cleveland, cross substitutes for the tools; several others in Catholic graveyards with only the scripted circle, and bare cross
one face of a family monument at Woodland, inside of WOW circle almost gone; this is also a cenotaph (monument without corpse)