With the amount of time that it takes to engrave 4 perfect numbers into a tombstone, there is ample time to realize that the date you are engraving is off by eighteen years. Unfortunately for Tommy Flynn, he needed more time.
Many of us would love to turn back the clock and be 18 years younger, but it doesn’t help when it’s done postmortem. The former New York City Mayor, Ed Koch, had his tombstone engraved with the wrong birthdate. Tommy Flynn was the engraver assigned to the project and works at Flynn Funeral and Cremation Memorial Services. Flynn told the press it was “an inadvertent error” and that he feels “terrible” and will soon fix the small oversight.
The burial stone will be placed at the Trinity Church cemetery in Washington Heights where Koch was laid to rest after dying from a congestive heart failure. He was 88 at the time. We would like to think that our former Mayor would have had a laugh at the error.
