Anthony Bascilli

Anthony Bascilli

What’s Next is Coming

Thurber miner Anthony Bascilli’s rugged wooden cross has fallen to the ground at Thurber Cemetery, a victim of old age. It stood over six feet, one of the more notable landmarks on Graveyard Hill. By the time you read this, God-willing, it will have been repaired. It will again be standing.

Bascilli may have worked the mines as late as 1926. After that, he probably did odd jobs around Thurber while the place was shutting down. He was Hungarian.

Anthony Bascilli was a man who thought things through. Four mortared brick walls line the six foot deep insides of his grave, from ground level to buried floor of casket. Like an elevator shaft. These Thurber bricks were laid by Luigi “Gi Gi” Biondini and his son Johnny. Bascilli’s casket was also made by Gi Gi. Mr. Bascilli slept alive in the wooden coffin before being buried in it later. Eternity is a long time. One wants to be comfortable.

Bascilli instructed that two steel doors be placed over his casket with several feet of dirt separating the two. This was carried out. He then wanted a key to the casket to be dropped down a vent or air pipe to his casket. This pipe was also indeed installed at his request. The key is available to him.

The year 1927 is etched into the front of the wooden cross, though this is thought to be the year of construction, not the later 1932 year of his death from pneumonia at age 77 according to Church records. The large square piece of sheet metal visible on the cross was to frame the photograph of Bascilli’s friend Louis Piontek. A practical joke, one has to believe.

Gino Solignanni says Bascilli sometimes got drunk and would walk down the Back Road to Thurber (going north to 108 out of Thurber, first road east) and every couple hundred yards set off a half stick of dynamite. There couldn’t have been more than two or three blasts. There’s only about a half mile stretch where no houses then were.

Ka-boom.

Palo Pinto County backroads guard many stories of strange burial practices – phone lines to coffins, glass-topped see-into caskets and some other richer stories best not told in polite society. Though life was said to be cheap back then, apparently what happened next was very much on these folks’ minds.

Bascilli left directions that a new suit and new shoes be folded inside the foot of his casket. When it was time to rise from his grave as the Bible promised, he wanted to look good. With the doors and keys and brick-lined hole, the man wanted a head start.

Anthony Bascilli’s grave makes me smile when I walk past. He believed certain things a little outside the norm and he had the courage to act. Visibly, out loud, the hell with what people might think. More importantly, it appears the man kept his sense of humor in a time when life was hard.

And getting harder by the day.

He was waiting for something. Or someone. But he was ready to make the first three moves. He wasn’t afraid to give the destiny he hoped for a little nudge to move it along. Whether he was born like that or first circled around life or books or whatever, I don’t know. But he got there by the end.

Words from the past, for the future.