Marvin Breed

Marvin Breed was the owner of Avram Breed and Sons, a tombstone and stone monument business in Ilium, New York founded by his great-grandfather. His brother was Dr. Asa Breed, Vice-president of the Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company.

Biography

At Ilium High School he was co-chairman of the Class Colors Committee with the future Emily Hoenikker and said her beauty was such that "[t]here wasn't a man in Ilium County who wasn't in love with her." The two dated for a while, and because she was a musician, he gave up football to learn the violin. However, his older brother Asa came home for spring vacation at M.I.T. and ultimately got engaged to Emily. In response, Marvin smashed his own $75 violin and sent the remains to her. She would then later leave Asa to marry Felix Hoenikker. Even after the death of both Emily and Felix, Marvin remained bitter at the latter, whom he saw as having ignored his wife while she “was dying for lack of love and understanding.”

Marvin became the fourth generation family owner of Avram Breed and Sons, carvers of tombstones and monuments. As such, he retained ownership of a stone angel carved by his great-grandfather as a tombstone for the wife of a German immigrant with land in Indiana who never returned to pay for it. He also sold the three Hoenikker children—Angela, Frank, and Newt—a grave marker, "an alabaster phallus twenty feet high and three feet thick," for their mother and his former girlfriend, Emily. He kept up with news of the Hoenikker children, both in their youth and after their father’s death. When Asa’s son quit the Research Laboratory after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Marvin gave him a job as a stone cutter. He became as skilled as his great-great-grandfather Avram and became a sculptor in Rome.

Quotes

"Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead."