When my daughter in law owned the funeral home, embalming has not been done since the fifties. Some of the equipment is from the thirties, when the Granthams opened. 

In the newspaper clipping next to the head, this is a friend of mine who died way too young in her forties. She was the first licensed woman mortician in the state of Oklahoma. Morticians do training on such a head to mold back a face which had a lot a damage to it, like from a car accident.

Once an auctioneer came in here to look around. He really liked the prints on the doors at each side of the cabinet and said: “These would sell for so much in Dallas. You have no idea what you have here.”
I said: “Well, it’s gonna stay like this until I’m gone.”
The next person that owns all this probably will feel different about it, but I did not move anything in this cabinet, in this room. I tried to respect everything about the building and its history.

One side of the cabinet is to make you look pretty, the other side is to disinfect and preserve the body for a certain amount of time.

This thing with the rubber tubes looks like a churn to me. I asked my daughter in law what it is for. She laughed: “ I have no clue. To take fluids out or put something into a body.”

See the house from the Back Alley to get an idea of the location of the embalming room and elevator above the back door.