"He [Digger O'Dell] said 'I will be buried, six feet underground, with a stovepipe running down to where I am so people can talk to me.' I [Cas Walker] said, 'What do you get for that kind of work?'"





He said "I get $100 a day.'





"I said 'I was thinking about offering you $25 a day, but I am going to offer you $50.' His wife was a Jewish woman and she was shaking her head yes so I knew I was going to start burying a man and I had never had that experience before.





"We dug our hole, and I got ready to bury him. Of course, I advertised that I was going to bury him at a certain time. You never seen a crowd like we had."





Digger had a telephone, and Walker remembers that he "talked with women all night. You have never experienced a ladies man such as this one was."





Walker put up a tent over Odell's grave to accommodate the crowd, which one night numbered 1,500 at 2 a.m.





But Digger wanted to be dug up before he had fulfilled his 30-day contract. Walker was having none of it, since daily receipts at the Chapman Highway store had increased from $3,500 to $8,000.





"I told him that was too much money to dig up," Walker said in a 1990 interview with the Knoxville Journal.





Digger started faking heart attacks and calling the newspapers and the health department to complain that Walker was denying him medical care.





Walker's solution was to dress two women who worked for him in "nurse suits" and station them above the grave, selling barbecued chicken sandwiches.