In life we make bad choices and good. We must live with the decisions we make, and our choices follow us for the rest of our lives. A string of choices I made two years ago affected not only the course of my life, but my entire perspective about good luck, bad luck, and personal decisions.
In the spring of 2001, I was working for a cemetery business where we were creating autobiographies to preserve the memories of the deceased. I worked with two brothers, Bret and Tyler Cassidy, who grew up in Saint Louis. Their father owned two major cemeteries in the Mid-west. One day, Tyler, age sixteen and the younger of the two brothers, found an old tape recording of his grandparents who had passed away. Tyler sprinted downstairs to share this recording with his parents and older brother Bret. The recording was played and an idea was spawned. Tyler had come up with this idea of preserving memories - every person that had purchased property at one of the two cemeteries would get an autobiography of their life. .
Bret and Tyler would go into the homes of their new plot owners and record their memories on videotape. Once recorded, they would take the raw footage and edit the material into a documentary-style movie. Their idea became a phenomenal success in the Mid-west. People from all over Saint Louis were buying property from the Cassidy Cemetery, excited about the idea of having their life stories recorded for posterity. Twelve years later, Tyler, now twenty-eight years old, read an article about the Hollywood Cemetery, being closed down. He discussed it with his father and older brother, and they felt that this would be a good opportunity to expand. .
Hollywood Cemetery was once the biggest cemetery in Southern California, residing right behind Paramount Studios, one of the major Hollywood studios in Tinseltown. The Cassidys bought the property and their business skyrocketed in a matter of months.
