Bill Mahan, long-legged, lean and 77 years old, strides on ahead and waits atop a tombstone for 70 stragglers to catch up.
This is his classroom, the historic Sacramento City Cemetery, and these are his students, average citizens out on Saturday morning to learn something of the city's past from one of its most passionate teachers.
"Behind the American River Parkway, this is Sacramento's greatest asset, in terms of human and natural resources," Mahan says. "Look around. It represents the city at its best, with the trees, the geography, the old roses you won't see anywhere else.
"The cemetery lends itself to telling the history of Sacramento."
Mahan, who taught history at Sacramento High School and Sacramento City College, led his first tour through the city's oldest graveyard in 1979, when it was overgrown and largely abandoned.
It's now a pristine and well-tended garden, and he's still telling the same stories.
"It was very much like this tour, and I think, well, Bill, you could do some more research," he jokes.
Mahan leads two free tours a year. His next will be in the spring of 2009.
He almost certainly will again linger at the Crocker family plot because he loves to talk about Aimee Crocker Courad. (Her family's private art collection and gallery became the Crocker Art Museum.)
"There was nothing for a young woman to do in Sacramento in the late 19th century, so Aimee left, and she married, and she married again, and again and again. Some of her husbands and would-be husbands had duels over her. She wore trousers. She smoked cigars. She wrote. She was one of the first feminists," he says.
He talks about hardware store owner Mark Hopkins, one of the Big Four financiers of First Transcontinental Railroad fame – and the only one who remained in Sacramento after making his fortune.
Hopkins is buried in a cabin-sized tomb on the cemetery's rich man's hill.
He leads the way to the grave of William Stephen Hamilton, whose father, Alexander, was a Revolutionary War general and the first U.S. treasurer, and to a mass grave where, in 1852, cholera victims were laid to rest.
At the memorial to Spanish American War veterans, Mahan points out pieces of the U.S.S. Maine, the battleship that exploded in Havana's harbor in 1898.
At the grave of 12-year-old May Woolsey, he tells of the discovery of a trunk full of her favorite things 115 years after her death in 1879.
He likes to end his tours with a gong, ringing the big firehouse bell at the Fireman's Plot.
"This is just such a great place," Mahan says.
Call The Bee's Dixie Reid, (916) 321-1134.
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