In Watertown, within the Mt. Auburn Cemetery, is this grave for R. Buckminster Fuller.
Mt. Auburn Cemetery is located at the Watertown-Cambridge line, along Mt. Auburn Street. From there, it is best to get a map at the chapel-information office by the entrance. There are two sizes - I believe the grave is marked on both maps, but, I can be sure that he is marked as number 23. It is located on Bellwort Path, a walking path on a hill between Spruce Street and Walnut Avenue. Parking is challenging here. Both roads are narrow and are not parkable. We parked on a circle at Laural Street. The grave is on the north side of the path, a little northeast of the monument for Charles Bulfinch.
There are two markers at this location - one flat to the ground and one about a foot high - both made of grey granite.
The flat marker has the following on it:
"R. Buckminster Fuller
'Call me Trimtab'
July 12, 1895 - July 1, 1983
Married
Anne Hewlett Fuller
January 9, 1896 - July 3, 1983"
Engraved in the lower left corner is a rose and in the upper right is a geometric shaped object in the form of a sphere.
The taller object has this simple statement engraved: "Call me trimtab."
R. Buckminster Fuller was born in Milton, MA. He is the grand-nephew of noted Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller Ossoli. As a child the family spent of their time in Bear Island in Maine where he learned about nature and boat maintenance. He did attend Harvard University, but was expelled for over socializing and missing mid-term exams. He entered the Navy and, while there, he invented a type of winch on rescue boats to tug planes downed in the water. He was then admitted into the Naval Academy. Later, he collaborated with his father in-law, James Monroe Hewlett on a way to build concrete buildings. The company they formed failed. Later, he developed a kind of modular home, called the 4D and Dymaxion home. Later came the Dymaxion car, which had three wheels. In 1951, he received a patent for a geodesic dome, which was a sphere type structure that has supports that has no need for internal supports like columns. One of the most famous structures is the headquarters for Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, MI. The U.S. military became interested and used these domes to cover Arctic radar installations. He also invented the Dymaxion Map, which is projection where all the continents are displayed with minimal distortion. His intent was to show the continents relative to one another and to get people to solve the world's problems together.
There is much more about Fuller that is on the Buckminister Fuller Institute web site, from which, most of the above was taken.
About the statement.
The following I found about the statement, "Call me trimtab":
Source:
Examiner (Call Me Trimtab - A most important concept for humans to make a difference):
(
visit link)
"“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab.
It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab.
Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.
So I said, call me Trimtab.” - R. Buckminster Fuller"