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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…
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Retail artifacts
That my grandparents lived in a funeral home was a slightly odd but mostly accepted piece of childhood. That the house had also contained a store about a decade before I was born was a piece of childhood fascination. My mother talked of minding the shop and slicing meat for customers, and that old meat slicer stood along the wall in a room that held musty old toys that we grandkids played with when we visited. The idea that an insignificant rural crossroads like Honey Grove, Pennsylvania, could be home to a grocery store seemed impossibly quaint and old-fashioned to my young mind. And like so many other stories I heard…