COVER STORY
FINAL RESTING SPOT FOR ‘BRAVEST
WOMAN’ AN UNMARKED GRAVE?
BY GREGORY ENNS
In life, she was celebrated as the “bravest woman in the
18
world,” riding around a circus ring on the trunk of an
elephant or entering a steel cage with deadly lions and
tigers. Her feats were celebrated in newspapers across the
country and in her autobiography, “Sawdust and Solitude.”
But in death, Lucia Zora almost certainly lies in an unmarked
grave in the Riverview Memorial Park cemetery in Fort Pierce,
virtually unnoticed since her passing in 1936.
The burial spot believed to be Zora’s is in the family plot
along with two other graves thought to be those of her parents,
Milton and Myra Card. No memorial stones mark any of
the graves, though cemetery officials confirm that three burial
vaults are beneath the ground.
“It was just the three of them — she was an only child,” says
Linda Bailey, a genealogist who has researched and written
about the woman whose stage name was Lucia Zora but who
came into the world as Zora Lucia Card. “I assumed nobody
took care of it and for whatever reason didn’t do anything. It’s
a mystery.”
SOLVING THE MYSTERY
Riverview cemetery records show that Mr. and Mrs. M.E.
Card bought six burial plots in 1923. Milton Card, who established
a sprawling pineapple plantation on South Indian River
Drive south of Fort Pierce, died in 1927 at age 83, and Myra
Card died in 1932 at 77, according to Bailey’s
research. Zora, who had retired to
Fort Pierce with her husband, elephant
trainer Fred Alispaw, after their circus
careers and an earlier retirement in
Colorado, died just four years later
at the age of 59. Her newspaper
obituary says simply that she was
buried “in the local cemetery.”
Bill Yates, whose family has been
in the funeral business in Fort Pierce
since the 1930s, says the “local cemetery”
reference was to the Fort Pierce
Cemetery, now known as Riverview Memorial Park.
Sonya-Elizabeth Trachtman, Riverview’s general manager,
says the Card plot in Section O, Block 22 of the cemetery was
thought to be vacant until the 1992 and 2004 burials of Bill
and Marion Greenwood, when the three vaults were discovered.
As a circus performer, Zora became best known for bringing lions and tigers,
natural enemies, together in her act.
Mrs. Greenwood was a niece of Mary Esther Alispaw, the
second wife of Fred Alispaw, who inherited the Card estate.
“According to cemetery custom, the man is buried on the
left and the woman on the right — like a marriage ceremony
— and the children are put at the feet,” Trachtman says. The
Card burial plot shows three graves arranged according to that
custom, Trachtman says. “I don’t know who
else it could be.”
The names of the Cards and Zora are
not in any burial records at Riverview.
Both Trachtman and Yates explained
that in the early days of the cemetery,
which was run by volunteers,
detailed records were not kept and
burial permits were not required.
WHY NO MONUMENT?
It’s anybody’s guess why no
monument was erected. Zora
would have had nine years before
her own death to arrange for her parents’ gravestones. “They
had that big house, and why they didn’t put a monument there
I don’t know,” Yates says.
Zora had no children and was survived only by Alispaw. He
married Mary Esther Hoeflich several years after Zora’s death
and they lived in the sprawling house Milton and Myra Card
built on South Indian River Drive. Fred died in 1957 and Mary
Esther sold the house in 1964.
Mari-Lynn Herringshaw, Mary Esther’s great-niece, says the
three vaults can only be those of Milton and Myra Card and
Zora. “If there were three vaults there she’s got to be there,”
Herringshaw says. “I can’t see Fred buying another plot for
Zora when they already had six up there.”
Herringshaw dismisses any notion that the lack of a gravestone
might have been intentional on Zora’s part in an effort to
achieve the solitude she so desperately sought after her life in
the circus.
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Zora’s autobiography, “Sawdust and Solitude,” recalled her life
in the circus and her retreat to a solitary life in Colorado.
A cemetery plot chart shows question marks in the Card family burial plot.
The identity of three graves in the plot have not been confirmed, though they
are believed to be those of Zora and her parents.