Andy Warhol's Grave And The Road To Hell Poem by gershon hepner

Andy Warhol's Grave And The Road To Hell



ANDY WARHOL'S GRAVE AND THE ROAD TO HELL


Pilgrims visiting the grave
of Andy Warhol leave a soup can or a Brillo pad.
When I am gone I hope they'll pave
my grave with poems I have written-some of them aren't bad.

They needn't pave them with the best:
the bad ones come from good intentions that the road to hell
is paved with-all the rest
are like bad poems, fresh apples missed by William Tell.

William Grimes (NYT,12/29/10) writes an obituary of John Warhola, brother of Andy Warhol:

Although Mr. Warhola was only three years older than Andy, the youngest of three brothers, he assumed a parental role after the death of their father in 1942. With Paul, the oldest brother, about to get married, their father, Andrej Warhola, called his middle son to his bedside and instructed him to take charge of Andy and make sure Andy attended college, for which he had set aside postal savings bonds sufficient to cover two years of education.Victor Bockris, in his book "Warhol: The Biography, " quoted Mr. Warhola as recalling that his father had said, "You're going to be real proud of him, he's going to be highly educated, he's going to college." John Warhola scraped together money to help Andy finish his education at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) . After his younger brother left for New York in 1949, he called him every Sunday for the next 38 years to keep tabs on him.
Andy Warhol, who dropped the final "a" from the family name, died in 1987 and left instructions that his estate be used to create a foundation for the support of the visual arts and that his brother John be made a trustee. Mr. Warhola served as a vice president of the foundation for 20 years, playing an important role in establishing the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and creating a Warhol museum near the village in Slovakia where their parents were born.
In addition to his duties as a trustee, Mr. Warhola took on the role of personal curator of his brother's pre-Manhattan years. Visiting art-world dignitaries and reporters could count on him for a tour of South Oakland, the neighborhood where the brothers grew up, and a visit to St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Bethel Park, where Andy Warhol is buried and where pilgrims often leave a soup can or Brillo pad on his gravestone.

12/30/10 #10407

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