Although Better Business Bureaus and other agencies have issued many warnings, the racketeers always seem to find plenty of victims. High-pressure sales crews travel from state to state. One promoter tapped 25 states for victims whose average loss was $3,000.
A pathetic aspect of the racket is that thousands of elderly people are bilked of their life savings. Here is a typical story, told in a recent letter to the Portland (Maine) "Press-Herald:" "I am a widow 66 years old, no children. I have worked as a housekeeper for 35 years. Cemetery promoters came to me and told me if I would invest money in their scheme I could have it back any time I wanted it, and that it would double itself. I gave them $3,000 which I had saved by scrimping and denying myself so that I could care for myself in my last years. This mistake has made me the subject of charity. Please print this letter as a warning to other poor people so that they may guard themselves, against any similar misfortune—Amy Taylor."
For the Amy Taylors scattered over the United States there is a final irony. They own burial plots in what they were told would become carefully tended places in which tired bodies might rest eternally. The probabilities are that they own instead a tiny piece of an abandoned farm, gone back to brush and weeds.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.