Story Archive

Hog Heaven

“He lived to ride,” said Bill Standley’s son Roy. Bill left home at 13 to learn rodeo, but it was his Harley he rode into his grave — not by crashing it (he died of cancer), but by arranging to be buried on it. The Champaign County, Ohio, Board of Health insisted that the motorcycle be drained of fluids and encased in a vault, so Standley, whose language had won him the moniker “Toilet Mouth,” got a modified septic tank to line his grave. He and his sons designed a casket with bright green sides to evoke the fields and, of course, a black floor between them with a single white stripe. Eighteen years after he began planning his funeral, a crowd watched as a crane lowered him and his bike into the grave beside his wife’s. (AC/Columbus Dispatch) ...And the last thing they saw was his heart, still beating. Still beating.