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The faces of the mourners are shown on monitors in the funeral home so the family and friends gathered inside can see the mobile-mourners as they pay their respects. The business owner said that he decided to offer this service when an elderly widow was not able to attend the funeral of her husband. The director said that care is given to make sure that only real mourners utilize the service. When it comes to viewing the bodies of the dearly departed, few American cities can hold a candle to the convenience and ease offered by Compton’s drive-thru mortuary. The general consensus of the citizens of this south central Los Angeles community is astonishment that their city is one of the few in the country to offer a drive-thru funeral parlor.
Some funeral directors across the country have decided to distinguish themselves from their competitors. Several Compton residents said they would like to see a fast food restaurant combined with the drive-thru experience. That way they could view the body of a loved one while waiting for their food order. Sam Clampton, a Compton postal worker, said if he had his way, along with fast food the funeral home could install video rental machines. An AP video posted back in 2014 from Saginaw, Michigan features Paradise Funeral president Ivan Phillips, an early adopter of the drive-thru funeral.
ABC News Live
Peggy's late husband Robert, a local politician, came up with the idea for a drive-thru display. The popularity of the drive-thru funeral home blossomed in the mid-eighties when gang violence escalated in south central Los Angeles. For many gang members, attending a funeral provided the perfect setting for rival gangs to gun them down. Drive-thru casket viewing became an overnight success because it allowed gang members to pay their respects to fallen comrades without fear of being slaughtered. The convenience was also embraced by the families of the dearly departed.
Sara is the Editor in Chief for US Funerals Online and has been researching and writing about the death care industry in the US for the last 10 years. Needless to say, in a culture where being able to view a deceased to pay those final respects is important and symbolic, this drive-thru option is surely a way to enable a more shared and accessible service. Adams Mortuary in Compton introduced the glass-encased viewing chamber as a means to enable their community to view those they had lost en masse, and believed it was a step forward from the webcam view of a viewing. Flo Watson, 61, and her daughter Nina Watson, 34, view Flo's late postal service co-worker Robert Sanders, 58, at the Robert L. Adams drive-through funeral parlor in Compton, Los Angeles, February 8, 2012.
Bizarre, or just a sign of the culture of our times: Drive-thru Viewing at Funeral Homes
“As you enter into the drive-thru you are going to see a memorial box where you can drop a memorial card or monetary contribution,” says Phillips, explaining just how the process works. Mourners drive on and push a button which opens a box that has a register book inside. Here people can sign their name and write messages of condolence to the family. Some may like the convenience that they offer, while others feel that the practice of driving up to view a body may not be for them.
With these car-centric traditions in mind, the drive-thru funeral actually seems like a deeply American tradition and one not so far-off from our norms. The facility has been operating for three years, but since the coronavirus pandemic began business has grown by 50 percent. In Buffalo, New York, last week the residential real estate matriarch Joni Stoyroff received a drive-thru funeral.
Meadows Mortuary
This funeral home in Michigan has a drive-through “viewing” option. Once you pull up to the window, the curtains open to reveal the open casket. During a typical funeral, mourners are surrounded by family and friends. Music is performed, prayers are recited, and a eulogy is read. That’s not what happens when someone goes through a drive-thru at a participating funeral home.
But Gorny points out that even in 2014 the concept was not entirely novel. She cites an early adopter of drive-thru funerals at the now-closed Junior Funeral Home in Pensacola, Florida. The facility started offering drive-thru services as early as 1986. Adam’s Funeral Home, located in Los Angeles’ Compton neighborhood, has also been offering drive-thru options for many years.
ABC News
Junior has since pleaded no contest to 11 charges and is awaiting sentencing. The Junior Drive-Thru Funeral Home is still there and still appears to be "out of business". The window is still there, except there is a curtain across it. There is a trailer-mounted bar-b-que pit blocking the driveway. The former funeral home is a now the home of the Mission Anglican Church.
By placing their loved ones’ bodies in a display case that enables drive-by viewing, families are spared the extra expense of floral arrangements and providing coffee and donuts. There is another more sinister reason behind the glass chamber viewing room. The gang shoot-outs at funerals in the 1980’s led to a fear by many of attending graveside services to pay their last respects. And the glass at Adams Mortuary is reported to be bullet-proof, not that the mortuary claim this is relevant to their community viewings today. Peggy Scott Adams is a Grammy-nominated gospel singer and owner of the Robert L. Adams Mortuary in Compton, California, one of the few funeral homes in America that offers drive-thru open-casket displays. The Los Angeles Times profiled Adams this weekend and made a strangely entrancing video about her business.
The Paradise Funeral Chapel isn’t the first to offer a drive-thru window. There are similar services in California, South Carolina and Virginia. But there may be more to the drive-thru funeral than meets the eye. In a nation long obsessed with the automobile, striped with roadways, and famous for its roaring interstates and “blue highways” too, a drive-thru funeral makes some degree of sense.
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