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buildings.In order to be closer to his market, he built shop to carve headstones and tombs in Colma, where the buried residents outnumber the living 2,000 to one.Stone-cutting has changed dramatically--for the better--since Valerio's days, said Mark. He gives much of the credit for this to his father.Until 20 years ago, stones were cut mostly by hand, but Elio brought the craft into the 20th century with the introduction of cutting machines.The granite still arrives in 10-ton blocks from the Sierra, Texas, Minnesota and Norway, but it's cut with diamond-bladed saws that can trace a pattern to perfection.Stone-cutting machines can do in half an hour what it once took someone working by hand to do in five hours, Mark said.Other machines use water, chemicals and heat to put a polish on the stone that will never fade. Lettering and other artwork is usually sand-blasted into the granite.Thanks in part to Elio, the business is also much safer than in his father's day. Elio helped introduce dust collectors that have virtually eliminated silicosis, a lung disease that was to stone-cutters what black-lung disease is to coal miners.During his early days in the business, Elio remembers cutters wearing damp sponges in their noses to keep the silicon dust out. In most cases, though, it didn't work."When you became a stone-cutter, you knew you were going to die of silicosis," Elio said. "It was a foregone conclusion. You expected it."His father, he said, died of a silicosis-induced heart attack."I'll wager you that every single worker who carved the granite for the old City of Paris building died of it," he said. "It was too common."When the family business moved into the new shop in 1950, Elio installed specially built collectors to keep the dust down. They seem to be working. Elio says he shows no sign of the disease at an age where symptoms should have occurred.The business Mark is inheriting has changed in other ways, too. The
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