Lakewood Lore

Hard work still the keystone for monument business

One might say that Lakewood’s stocky, likable, energetic Stan Troy, owner of Troy Memorials Co. on Madison Avenue at Waterbury, has never taken his granite business for granted.

Starting out 33 years ago, he and his late wife Doris diligently teamed together and worked hard to make the headstone sales and service venture a success.

But Doris died in 1990, and now, with Stan’s 76th birthday imminent and a doctor’s “take-it-easy” advice to heed, he has opted to sell the company.

The new owner will be Charles J. Nagy, who has been in the field for 25 years as head of Nagy Monument Co. on Cleveland’s East Side on Waterloo Road.

Nagy, 59, a native of Hungary who lives in Chesterland, will retain the Lakewood location and operate it as a branch of his own firm.

Meanwhile, Troy, despite several operations in recent years, including heart surgery, plans to “stay on for awhile” to assist the new owner in getting started here.

“Also, I will lend my name,” he said. “Henceforth, our Lakewood store will be known by the combined designation of ‘Nagy-Troy Memorials.’

“It should be note, too, that Mr. Nagy and I are not strangers. For the past four years, Nagy’s organization has done most of my head-marker carvings and deliveries.

“Furthermore, his way of doing business is predicated on the same fundamentals of honesty and fair and uniform pricing that I have adhered to through the years,” Troy said.

“In addition, the ‘Reasonable-Reliable’ slogan will remain on our calling cards under the new ownership.”

Stan was born Stanley J. Troy on May 6, 1920, in southeast Cleveland, the fourth of 10 children. A child of the Great Depression of the 1930s, he had to quit school in the 10th grade to help support his family when his father became unemployed.

With private-sector job openings practically nonexistent at the time, Stan joined one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “alphabet soup” agencies known as the Civilian Conservation Corps. It was one of several federal emergency make-work programs designed to stave off starvation that threatened the families of millions of jobless men.

The corps sent Stan to a camp at Lewistown, Mont., that was assigned to preventing soil erosion in the area. He received free room and board and was paid $1 a day.

“I sent $25 home each month and kept $5 for myself,” he remembered.

After 3 1/2 years, Stan returned to Cleveland only to be drafted for service in World War II. He earned five bronze stars with the U.S. Army’s Second Armored Division under Gen. George Patton in the North African theater and the Normandy invasion.

“I had met my Doris while in Montana with the CCC, and she remained my pen-pal sweetheart during all of my four years with the Army,” Stan recalled.

Upon mustering out of the military in 1945, he returned to Montana, where he received at long last the high-school diploma he had missed getting here, and where he and Doris were married.

After the wedding, Stan brought his bride to Cleveland. They lived on the East Side until moving to Lakewood in 1953. The Troys had two children -- a daughter, Holly Brandes, who teaches school in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, and a son, Scott J. Troy, an archaeologist who lives in Columbus.

Before opening his store here, Stan was employed as a salesman for Armour & Co. at Cleveland’s Northern Ohio Food Terminal. He was area manager when Armour closed its outlet there and then, middle-aged, Stan had to seek a new career.

He had some prior knowledge of the monument business. A great uncle had founded the former Cuyahoga Monument Co. at Miles Avenue and East 99th Street. At one point in the lean Depression years, Stan’s father, armed only with a streetcar pass, was a salesman for the company.

Stan described his current sphere of work as a serious and sensitive one through which he has always strived to be compassionate and understanding.

He is proud that he has never solicited business by what he refers to as “untimely phone calls” to homes of deceased immediately following deaths.

“That practice, which is prevalent among some firms, gives us all a black eye,” he commented.

Also, he has always taken a thumbs-down attitude toward the carving of slang or off-beat epitaphs on headstones, such as “Gone Fishing” or “I Told You I Was Sick.”

“Today, that Mickey Mouse stuff is disallowed by most cemeteries, and I will help try to keep it that way,” he said.

This article by Dan Chabek appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post April 18, 1996. Reprinted with permission.

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