To do list: 1. Order tombstone 2: Die
ELKINS PARK, Pennsylvania — The founder of the Dead Poets Society of America suffered a fatal heart attack little more than a month after commissioning his own tombstone.
Walter Skold enlisted the son of novelist John Updike to carve a tombstone that will be topped with a dancing skeleton and a quill. Michael Updike, who received the poet’s deposit last month, said he never expected to be carving the monument so soon.
There was no indication of any premonition of an untimely death before Skold’s passing at age 57 on Jan. 20, in York, Pennsylvania, Updike said Friday.
“He was a sweet soul,” said Updike, of Newbury, Massachusetts. “He was a kind person with this quirky predilection to poets’ graves and death and the macabre.”
Known as the “Dead Poets Guy,” Skold visited the final resting places of more than 600 poets after launching the Dead Poets Society in 2008 in Maine, drawing inspiration from the 1989 Robin Williams movie.
Skold produced a massive repository of information on poets’ final resting places, travelling in a cargo van he dubbed the “Dedgar the Poemobile,” sometimes embellishing the dashboard with an Edgar Allan Poe bobblehead.
He launched a movement to create Dead Poets Remembrance Day on the Sunday closest to Oct. 7, the date Poe died.
Skold was living in Freeport, Maine, when he left his job as a public school technology teacher to pursue his passions of poetry and photography and to launch the society.