Day 1 - Houston

After an uneventful flight (my favorite kind) we got the rental car and headed north to the National Museum of Funeral History, 415 Barren Springs Drive, Houston   281-876-3063

We first toured this museum some 25 years ago, so naturally there were some changes.

Embalming in Early American Times was replaced by Embalming:  Egyptian Style.

There was a separate exhibit on papal funerals plus one of Pope John Paul's Pope-Mobiles.  The Pope didn't wear a seatbelt but his driver and his aide did.

Caribbean coffins still had their own exhibit and I enjoyed imagining how the bodies had to have been placed to accomodate such as being buried in an airplane -- arms flung out inside the wings?

The triple-wide casket had a story -- long, long ago, a couple's young child (boy or girl never specified) died.  So grief-stricken were the parents that they decided that the man would kill the wife and then commit suicide.  All three would then be buried in the same coffin.  So they ordered it.

Time passed, the couple changed their minds and moved away.

Nearly 20 years after their special order, the wife wrote to the funeral home, wanting delivery of this casket.  The undertaker wrote back that since they'd never paid for it, he had sold it and it was no longer available.

There is a room set aside for Presidential funeral memorabilia where previously a mock-up Abraham Lincoldn't funeral cortege stood alone.  A duplicate of Ronald Reagan's casket takes pride of place.

The twin, glass-sided carriages from the Victorian ear are made 3/4 scale and were for children.  The white one was for girls; the black one for boys.