Making the Cut San Mateo Times 06/12/00 by Tim Simmers
		Mark Fontana may be between a rock and a hard place, but there's no place he'd rather be. He's running the 79-year-old family owned tombstone making business there, just like his father Elio did and his grandfather Valerio, the founder of V. Fontana & Co., who emigrated here from Italy in 1915. The family makes monuments out of granite rock, marble and other stones, in what is one of the last remaining stonecutting manufacturing plants on the West Coast. "Nobody gets 10-ton blocks of rock like us and cuts and polishes them into a finished products," said Mark Fontana, whose father and grandfather came from a time when craftsmen with hammers and chisels carved the names on gravestones. The sandblasters and engraving machines that V. Fontana uses to do that work now are still powered by a second-hand air compressor Valerio put in when the company opened in 1921 across from the Italian cemetery. The sweating, splitting metal machine from another era has never broken down.		With cremation growing increasingly popular in California, Mark Fontana, 48, has pushed to diversify beyond tombstones and it turned out to be a great move. The company's massive saws with diamond blades now also fashion stone kitchen counter tops, public memorials, and signage. The company's monuments are still designed by Elio, 80, a draftsman who painstakingly draws the designs on a drafting board. Many families spend about $1,200 on a small monument. But it is not uncommon for ethnic groups like the Chinese and Japanese to spend between $10,000 and $30,000 on a completely hand-crafted monument, Fontana said. Those gravestones account for about half of the business at V. Fontana. Some of the company's other local rock memorials include the dedication at the entry to Golden Gate Park, the new firehouse and library dedications in Redwood City, and Skyline College's Go to Page 2