My grandparents lived in a small town where the funeral home hearse doubled as the ambulance. They live next door to the funeral home, and one Sunday an emergency call came in during a funeral, just as the were loading the casket into the hearse.
They pulled out the casket, and the hearse/ambulance went off to the call. This was late morning, and by Noon we'd learned that it was a very bad car accident and the ambulance would have to make multiple trips and wouldn't be back for another 2-3 hours.
Funerals in a small town are very much a social event, and some of the people had come a long way to be there. They weren't going to leave until the funeral was properly concluded, but they couldn't very well go back home for lunch. Grandma's big dining room table was carried out to the front yard, all the spare leaves put in, and all the chairs brought out. Grandma and 2-3 other women got busy in the kitchen, and people who lived nearby went home and soon came back with various food items and we had lunch for everybody right there in the front yard.
A fascinating vignette! Indeed, it was a very different time from today. A few weeks ago, we had an evening graduation party for the daughter (HS, she's going into the local nursing program) in our carport. We didn't know it until that evening, but there were two others on our street who were graduating, and each was also having a graduation party in their respective carports. If this were a real neighborhood, we would all be in each other's business, we would have known there were three graduates on the street, and we could have had a combined block party.