Born: 1897 in Greece
Died: November 28, 1924
Married: yes
Children: A son, Jim
Cornelia Panos was a patient whose home was at 1797 Washington Avenue, New York City. In 1920, age 23, she was staying at 15 Jenkins Street.
Her family also had evidence that she stayed at 4 Riverside Drive. Her son Jim came looking for her grave in 1974. At that time, Andrew Fortune, Sr., identified the address for Jim as the yellow frame building at the south end of Main Street, today's 4 Kiwassa Road. An article Jim wrote about his search, published in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in early summer of 1974, was kindly provided by Ron Schroll in August 2014.
Cornelia Panos was buried in Pine Ridge Cemetery in 1924.
Manhasset man's search for his mother's grave ends at Saranac Lake
Adirondack Daily Enterprise, May 7, 1981
By JIM PANOS
My mother died in 1924, of tuberculosis, in Saranac Lake, N.Y., where she was buried.
I was four at the time. I remember almost nothing about her. I have a few snapshots of her, of a young woman with smiling eyes and long, straight black hair, done in an old-fashioned bun at the back, and that's all. Her image in my mind is far more photograph than memory.
All my life, I've wanted to go to Saranac Lake, to see where she lived out the last days of her life, to visit her grave, to bridge the gap between us with something more tangible than a handful of fading photographs, but the routine of living always intervened. Finally, half a century after her death, I managed it.
Locating her grave site needed some detective work. How, where to begin? I knew only her name and approximate year of death. My facts were sparse indeed. My father, who would have known more, was long since gone, too.
I contacted a friend, a funeral director in Manhasset, who in turn contacted the Fortune Funeral Home in Saranac Lake, and, amazingly, I had the name of the cemetery and the number of my mother's grave in a matter of days.
My wife and I made the trip over a summer weekend. We flew to Adirondack Airport, hired a car and drove to Saranac Lake. We drove about town for a while, somehow always winding up on Main Street. The town seemed dreary and depressed on that rainy summer Saturday. Main Street dead-ended, beyond the Saranac River, in front of a large yellow frame building, where we made a U-turn each time. We visited the Robert Louis Stevenson cottage, where the frail writer spent almost two years in search of the elusive cure of tuberculosis that racked him to the end of his life. Finally, we made our way to the Fortune Funeral Home.
"Let me call the cemetery caretaker for a map," Mr. Fortune, the proprietor said. "This grave number is in an old section I'm not too familiar with."
He made his call. "Charlie's gone fishing for the day," he said. "But let's go over to Pine Ridge, The door to the gatehouse may be open."
Pine Ridge Cemetery was in the very center of town, completely encircled by it, without so much as a proper entrance of its own. We followed Mr. Fortune's car over a bumpy dirt road that led to a lumber yard — and there it was, hemmed in by the grim back sides of clapboard houses and an abandoned railroad track. It was relatively small, sloping down the side of a low hill, serene, peaceful and strewn with uncrowded tombstones.
Mr. Fortune tried the gatehouse door. It was locked. "I guess we'll have to try again tomorrow," he said, and our hearts sank. "I'll call Charlie about the keys tonight." He must have seen the disappointment in our eyes, for he hastened to add, "If you want to look around for yourselves, feel free. It should be somewhere in there." He made a broad sweep with his arm that took in three quarters of the cemetery. "Don't bother with that section — that's mostly new. And don't expect too much. Some of these old graves have only markers — no tombstones."
It was a chilly, overcast morning with a fine, penetrating mist. It had been raining most of the summer in the Adirondacks. The cemetery was alive with gnats. We kept moving at a pace, swishing the pesky things away, as we searched for the marker of my mother's grave. We covered a good part of the cemetery, looking at markers that, more often than not, were out of sequence. In less than half an hour, we were ready to give up, our determination sapped by the vanity of the search and the persistence of the gnats.
By the time we reached our motel, the mist had turned to rain. Frustrated and disheartened, our weekend a shambles, we slumped into a couch and turned on the TV. Presently there came a knock on the door. I opened it. A beaming Mr. Fortune stood framed in it.
"I found it!" he cried triumphantly. "I got the keys from Charlie's wife and went and found the records.
He handed me two documents: my mother's death certificate and the record of her funeral. Her death certificate indicated that she had been born in Greece in 1897, that she had lived in the United States for eight years, that she had resided at 4 Riverside Drive, Saranac Lake, N. Y., and that she had died on Nov. 28,1924 — at age 27. Cause of death: pulmonary tuberculosis.
The record of her funeral, dated the next day, gave the number of her plot as NR-84, the cost of her embalming as $68, and the opening of her grave as $15. It was marked paid.
"It has a substantial stone too," Mr. Fortune said.
"How come they give her residence as 4 Riverside Drive?" I said. "Wasn't she in the sanatorium?"
"Apparently not," Mr. Fortune said. "It wasn't easy to get into Trudeau Sanatorium, which you probably heard of. It was always crowded. Besides, it was expensive. In those days, many local families took in tuberculars as boarders."
"Wasn't that risky for them?" my wife said.
"No, not really. Tuberculosis is not all that contagious. It can only be transmitted by direct contact. Matter of fact, taking in tuberculars was something of a local industry at the time."
"Where is 4 Riverside Drive?" I said.
"You can't miss it," Mr. Fortune said. "Do you know where Main Street is? " I nodded. "Do you know where the Saranac River is?" I nodded. "Well, Riverside Drive runs into the end of Main Street on the other side of the river. Number 4 is that big, yellow frame apartment house."
The yellow frame house? My spine tingled.
We followed Mr. Fortune back to Pine Ridge Cemetery. He surprised us by driving to the section he had asked us not to search that morning. We got out of our cars and walked with him to a cluster of graves on level ground. He pointed to one of them. He' didn't have to. My mother's name reached out to me from her headstone.
"I'll leave you alone now," Mr. Fortune said.
We thanked him.
It was a small stone, about a foot and a half high, a foot wide and six inches thick, gently arched at the top and slanting forward in a humble, prayerful stance. A simple cross, carved on the upper half of the stone, cast its silent blessing on my mother's name beneath it. Beneath that, her landmark years on this earth, carved generously as "1867-1924" by a careless stone mason, who had inverted the 9 in the year of her birth. The small stone stood in a quiet corner of the cemetery, facing a tight row of tall, strong pines and the broad meadows of eternity beyond.
I had found my mother. She was here, at my feet, neglected and alone. In this distant-burial place, she may never have had a visitor in the 50 years since her death. My visit had been long overdue.
My wife had brought a sampling tree from our garden at home. We planted it lovingly by my mother's graveside.
As we stood in a moment of prayer afterwards, the closing lines of Rudyard Kipling's poem with its haunting refrain rang through my mind:
"If I were damned of body and soul/I know whose prayer would make me whole,/Mother o'mine, 0 mother o'mine. . . ."
Jim Panos of Port Washington is the owner of Travelscope Inc. in Manhasset. He has been a columnist and contributing editor for various travel publications.
