Insight North Millbrae Recorder 03/05/88 by Bill Hurschmann
		You would think that after more than a century in the granite and marble tombstone businesses, the Fontana family might be growing a bit weary of it. However, quite the opposite is the case. Thirty-five-year-old Mark Fontana, following in the footsteps of his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather and great-great-geat-grandfather, is running the Colma monument company today with the enthusiasm one would associate with a fledgling new business. And part of the reason is that V. Fontana and Co., a Colma tradition since before the Great Depression, is entering new fields and breaking new ground in that very same granite and marble business that has been traditionally reserved to memorialize the dead. "Less than 50 percent of our business today is monuments," says Fontana, a former Colma policeman who gave up the uniform, badge and gun in 1979 when his father, Elio Fontana, now 69, announced he wanted to go into semi-retirement, giving him more time to devote to such outside interests as accordian-playing.		"IN THE LAST COUPLE of years, we've gone more commercial. Everything in construction that is made out of granite, we'll do it," says Fontana, whose uniform today is of the big Ben variety that doesn't belie his six-day, 12-hours-a-day work week. He's not your three-piece-suit kinda guy. As a youngster, Fontana says he was never pushed into the monument business, although he learned it from the ground up, sweeping granite and marble dust from warehouses as a teen-ager or carting 100-pound sacks of cement and sand from one end of the plant to the other. And Fontana says he isn't pushing his son, David, 8-1/2, to become the seventh generation to follow in great-great-great-granddad's footsteps that began in Italy's Amilia province, the home of much of the world's fine marble. "I'm doing like my dad did with me," he says. "I bring him down (to the shop), and if he's interested, fine. He never pushed me, and that's probably why I'm in the business today." Go to Page 2