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Family home
The funeral home in Honey Grove wasn’t anything odd when I was a kid visiting my grandparents there. It was big and old. Maybe a little musty and certainly boring. But when I was visiting the place growing up, I never gave much thought to just how it came into the family. After all, grandparents are always old to a kid, and the house was old–so a big, old house in the family seemed just about right. I learned the family history little by little over the years–that the funeral home had once also had a store attached, that there had been a post office there, that it had belonged to my great…
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Drawings on the last page
My grandfather, John P. Henry Jr., undertaker by training and trade, attended Philadelphia’s Eckels College of Mortuary Science in the 1940s. The contents of his mortuary school notebook are fascinating in their own right, covering such topics as embalming, record keeping, and obituary writing. The book will be the subject of future exploration. But first, I’ll share this: a page of drawings of popular cartoon characters, on the last page of the notebook. I don’t know if he sketched these freely or traced them. I will never know if he drew these while bored in class, or after hours while studying, or at Kimmel’s Funeral Home, where he first worked. Those details are…