By Bob Arnold
When he looks back over almost six decades of helping folk memorialize the lives of people they want to be remembered into the future, Dave Pace recalls the many conversations with them -- listening to sorrowful and joyful people, speaking seriously or humorously about loved ones or friends they have lost or others who weren’t necessarily close, but rather admired or influential persons whom they wanted to thank. The variety is awesome.
Since he sold his first monument at 14 years old when he worked for his father’s Jackson-based business, Pace has been making recommendations on appropriate memorials and crafting them into long-lasting stonework for a wide spectrum of people and organizations, including the likes of monument builders for rock music legends Lynyrd Skynyrd and Jerry Lee Lewis and less celebrated people like the mother who wanted her son remembered at his gravesite as someone who “loved his mama as much as a fat boy loves cake.”
Since 1977, Pace’s venue has been Brookhaven Monument Company, which he operates and manages along with its McComb and Natchez branches.
Born in 1955 at Canton, Mississippi, Pace grew up in Jackson’s Manhattan area playing and riding his bike on trails in Parham Bridges Park. As a teenager, he travelled with the Jackson First Baptist Church youth group on mission trips to Europe and Canada. He also enjoyed monthly camping trips as part of Jackson Boy Scout Troop 8 in which he earned Scouting’s highest rank as an Eagle. He also came to the monument business early.
“My family got into it in 1956 when a Gluckstadt, Mississippi, cemetery hired my father, who sold sports equipment, including life belt boating straps that could hold down tombstones,” Pace recounts. “At age 10, I was hanging out the cemetery and cutting the grass there. By age 14, I was selling monuments for my father, who had gone beyond supplying and working with tombstone strapping at a cemetery to providing the tombstones themselves as a Jackson retailer.”
After studying marketing at Mississippi State University from 1973 to 1977, Pace joined the business, which had expanded into Louisiana and throughout Mississippi, including Brookhaven and Mendenhall, where he started working as the manager under his father’s guidance.
Led by Pace for more than 40 years, Brookhaven Monument’s workforce has grown from three to 15 persons. At one time, it had eight Mississippi branches, but now just serves customers at Natchez and McComb locations as well as Brookhaven. In the process, Pace has earned the respect of his industry peers, who chose him to serve as president of the Monument Builders of North America and invited him to serve on the exclusive 40-member American Institute of Commemorative Arts, where he has consulted on monuments for celebrities and other notable persons.
At Brookhaven Monument, Pace has also built a reputation for quality work. “Mississippi is not a source of durable stone in which you cut letters or images,” he explains. “We go to the 600 to 700 quarries in the 20 U.S. states where there is useable granite, and others in China, India, Venezuela, Uruguay and Italy.” The company also employs advanced technology. “Eighty percent of the work is done by computers,” Pace points out. “Artificial intelligence generates design from which other computer applications produce stencils used in hand-cutting.”
Pace and his wife LilAnn Hollingsworth Pace have four grown children and seven grandchildren. They split their time between a camp on Lake Saint John at Natchez and a second floor downtown Brookhaven apartment across from the Haven Theater, the home of Brookhaven Little Theater on West Cherokee Street. Their apartment features an outdoor balcony, indoor brick walls, flooring that survived an historic Brookhaven fire that destroyed a Masonic lodge and a pharmacy and antique doors from a Methodist Church and the Johnson Institute, now Mississippi School of the Arts, where Pace’s uncle served as president.
What are your hobbies?
I visit cemeteries to see monuments, follow Mississippi State baseball and ride my tri-toon pontoon boat on Lake Saint John, regional rivers and on the Gulf Coast. I am the longest tenured member of the Brookhaven Lions Club, with a 43-year pin.
Are you a reader?
I read periodicals and listen to Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and Tom Clancy fiction and podcasts with conservative political commentary.
Do you have a special interest in music.
I like Reba McEntyre and 1970s rock. I liked Lynyrd Skynyrd, Blue Man Group and Three Dog Night in performance.
How about movies or theater?
Winnie Holzman’s Wicked about the witches of Oz before Dorothy dropped in is a favorite musical.
What would you do with the winnings if you won the lottery?
I would pay my children’s bills, keep enough to live comfortably, give to the church, endow the Lions Club and scholarships and buy box seats for Mississippi State baseball games.
How would you change the world?
If people lived according to the Ten Commandments, it would make a huge difference.
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