George “Twitter” William Johnston
March 29, 1889 – April 29, 1962
See?? Isn’t that creepy? Unfortunately, I have no tale of terror to add to the myth of the clown grave. Our friends beeped the horn and we ran back to the car giggling after only a few minutes. It was a cemetery at night, after all. What gets me about the grave itself is not the clown but the epitaph penned by Twitter Johnston:
“To talk beneath the moon
To sleep beneath the sun
To live in a land of going to do
And die with nothing done.”
Why was he focused on regret at the end? What was left undone? I could only find one little blurb about the man who wrote the verse, but to an onlooker it seems like he led an interesting life. He was an acrobat, a sleight of hand artist, a circus performer, a tumbler, he was a part of a vaudeville troupe and traveled fairly extensively. Sounds like someone who was following his passion – and yet at the end he’s still looking over his list of things to do and lamenting that so much was left unchecked.
He maybe didn’t think he got much done while he was here, but his nickname has become pretty influential in the past couple of years. We’ve been talking about him everyday and didn’t even know it.
I’m trying to put a positive spin on his message, but it’s not coming together. Maybe he was trying to leave us, like the audience at his performances, wanting more. In the end it sounds like he procrastinated on what he wanted his life to be about and was disappointed in himself. I dunno… what do you get out of it?
After reading about Twitter and listening to an interview with him from the CBC Archives, the clown grave feels less creepy. He was just a guy who made his living entertaining people during a tumultuous time in history. It’s still sad, but in the end this is how he wanted to be memorialized. Weird to us now, but I guess it made sense to him.
*You can see in one of the old photos that the umbrella there now was originally a bouquet of flowers. Wonder why they changed it?
