Illinois Tollway worker honors veterans by tending their graves
Illinois Tollway roadway electrician Jon Cveticanin spends a lot of his free time walking through suburban cemeteries searching for the graves of military veterans.
When he finds those graves, he doesn’t pay his respects to the fallen veterans with flowers, but with a weed whip and other lawn tools he uses to remove the overgrown grass and weeds that often obscure their headstones.
He and his family, who have a history of military service, view their work as a way to honor the veterans for their service by keeping their graves tidy so relatives and other visitors can easily see and read their headstones.
“I’m highly respectful. There’s nothing higher than serving the country,” said Cveticanin, who has worked for the Tollway for 28 years. “We took it on ourselves to do this with our time, effort and money.”
Cveticanin started doing his volunteer work about 8 years ago after talking with his father, James, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who mentioned that he often saw veterans’ graves that were so overgrown they were nearly unreadable.
“My father noticed a lot of the headstones were in need of serious attention. We started talking about it and said ‘we’ve got to take care of this, we’ve got to take care of our own,’” said Cveticanin, who enlisted in the Marines after high school but was declined for health issues. He has a son and daughter serving in the military, and other relatives also did stints in the military.
So Cveticanin started visiting suburban cemeteries on weekends or after he finished working, walking along the rows of graves to find overgrown headstones that mark the graves of veterans.
“I just walk a section, go back and forth, and find them and clean them up,” said Cveticanin, who is based at the M-1 maintenance site in Alsip. “It’s all my own equipment and it’s on my time.”
While cemeteries mow grass between rows of graves, workers there typically don’t check individual graves to make sure the headstones are cleared of weeds. Many veterans’ headstone are nearly flush with the ground, making it easier for grass and weeds to cover them, he said.
Beginning in the spring and continuing into autumn, he’ll venture out to the cemeteries three or four times a week, spending three or four hours at a time and clearing as many as 100 graves. If a veteran’s family members are buried nearby, he’ll clear those headstones, too
And if he comes across the overgrown headstone of a civilian, he’ll clear that as well, “out of respect for that person.”
Sometimes, a headstone “breaks your heart” because the information on it and the condition of the headstone tells a grim story, Cveticanin said. He recalls clearing the headstone of teenage soldier who died in Vietnam more than 50 years ago that was covered in such thick vegetation that it was obvious no one had visited the grave in decades.
“It’s overgrown and no one has been there in years,” he said. “It’s sad.”
Sometimes, though, he encounters relatives of the fallen vets, who he said often offer to pay him for his work—which he refuses to accept.
“I really appreciate it, though,” Cveticanin said.
But when he finishes clearing the graves, his work still isn’t done.
He takes a picture of every headstone he clears, then when he gets home he uploads the photos to a public website that can used to search for graves nationwide. That helps veterans’ descendants locate the graves of their deceased relatives.
His teenage son, Emilio, sometimes works with him. He also at times runs across several other volunteers who are doing the same work.
Cveticanin plans to retire from his Tollway job in the next few years, but doesn’t plan to stop his volunteer work. Instead, he figures he’ll have more time for it—and he and his family have talked about setting up a non-profit group to help ensure their work continues.
“I want to keep doing this,” he said. “It’s my hobby, I like doing it, it just feels great to me.”