The City of Charlotte maintains six municipal cemeteries, and for more than 30 years Mike Shroyer was in charge of them. He retired at the end of 2014 as supervisor of those cemeteries, which altogether he says average about 450 burials a year.
It’s a career we don’t hear about often. “People would ask me, ‘what do you do, who you work for?'" says Shroyer. "And I'd say 'I work for the city of Charlotte.' And I kind of left it at that until they said 'Well, what do you do?' And I'd say, 'Well, I'm over the city cemeteries,' and you'd get these strange looks. 'Over the city cemeteries, how can you do that?'"
We caught up Shroyer at one of his old “offices” – Elmwood cemetery on the edge of uptown.