You could hear him coming

My brother Kevin would have been 65 May 19.

He probably would have celebrated it like he did any other birthday: In Vegas, hanging with friends, drinking with his friends, blowing things up with friends, and talking trash about his friends, women, parents, me, sports, video games, etc.

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Kevin Funk, born May 1955.

To many, he had a charismatic personality. I never understood it because I was his older brother by 15 months and always seemed to be just outside his wave of influence unless he needed another glass of instant iced tea or more paper or ink for the mimeograph machine. We later switched to dittos.

He died in September 2004 of a stroke, technically. But he lived most of his life with complications of muscular dystrophy and scoliosis.

He lived with my parents his entire life. It was a situation he resented and yet accepted. My parents took their responsibility seriously and provided him with a home, meals, an office, physical therapy, surgeries, a van with a wheelchair lift, and a "ceiling crane" that lifted him from his wheelchair or bed to the bathroom.

They seemed to afford him every bit of independence they could while he lived in their home. The three of them preferred it that way.

Before he entered grammar school, he wore braces on his legs like the ones Forrest Gump wore as a kid. Which meant he could never sneak up on you.

As a teenager, he walked with a single crutch. He was too bent over to use two. It had a noise of its own. Eventually, he settled on motorized transportation.

Until I left home for college, he and I played or worked a lot with each other. As it turned out, our play became our livelihoods.

The staff of Wacky included, left to right, Bob Tajima, Gary Funk, Kevin Funk, and Steve Cline.

Kevin started a monthly humor magazine called Wacky Magazine when he was 13. A few of his friends and myself made up the staff. I was as much tech support as anything. Someone had to take care of the ditto fluid and crank the machine. We had 35 paying subscribers. MAD was trembling.

Wacky entered a "float" in Altadena's Old Fashioned Days Parade. We used our '68 VW Westfalia camper van. Kevin drew a mural, and we taped it to its side. He rode. I drove.

My brother used acrylic paint to depict Porky Pig waving with the salutation "That's All, Volks!". It should be hanging in a museum. I never saw another one like it.

When I left for college, my dad took over the printing and mailing of Wacky. But eventually, the magazine gave way to higher education.

By the time Kevin went to the University of Colorado Boulevard, a euphemism for Pasadena City College, he was already in a wheelchair most of the day. He later took art classes at Long Beach State, my mother wheeling him to his classes. His artistic schooling ended with a few classes at Pasadena Art Center. My mom would drop him off, and one of his classmates would help him get around.

During this time, he was drawing cartoons and getting paid for some of them. Many ran in a Los Angeles business magazine, and some found their way into a few Pasadena publications. Unfortunately, he didn't keep any clips. He did keep the originals.

What do you mean, “You didn’t know it was loaded?”

Do you serve crabs here?

I told you to another pen number when writing an exposé.

Of course, if you can convince the public that the company is above bribery and payoffs, there'll be a little "something" extra in your next paycheck.

The organic food platter is the same as the hash; only I don't pick the flies off it.

Waiting long?

He created a few menus for restaurants and worked on a couple of annual report publications for my dad's company.

He sold light bulbs over the phone. He hated that job because it identified him as having a handicap. And if that was a problem, it was more your problem than his.

More often than not, you saw that side of him if you went to lunch or dinner with him. A server would begin taking our orders and then say, "What do you think he'd like?" We all knew the routine. There would be a pause as the server explored our faces for an answer. Kevin would say loud enough for the next table to hear, "He'd like a steak, medium-rare, a baked potato, and a Jack straight up. And, an iced tea with a straw!"

In his 20s, he moved to Philadelphia with my parents and became a thorn in the side of the Bryn Mawr city council. He wanted the Playboy Channel on his cable TV and wheelchair access to civic buildings. Neither existed at the time in Bryn Mawr. They did before he came home to California.

The receptionist for his first Pennsylvania doctor's appointment had to meet him on the sidewalk because Kevin couldn't get into the building. She asked him, "What happened to you? Get hit by a truck?" He never met the doctor. He told my mom, "Get me the hell away from here."

Back in California, he sold model rockets over the internet under the name "Discount Rocketry, Buy Low, Fly High." It's still in business: https://www.discountrocketry.com and little has changed. He sold to hobbyists and schools.

He produced a magazine for the San Diego rocket club DART (Diego Area Rocket Team). It was an acronym looking for a meaning. Not his idea, but that put him contact with all kinds of people in the (San) Diego area including miliatry personnel.

The rocketeer

In Bryn Mawr, PA.

He built rockets. He attended rocket launches at Fiesta Island at Mission Bay, where he sold his wares and launched a few missiles. The more spectacular events took place at Lake Lucerne, Calif, just east of Barstow. It's the place made famous recently when "Mad" Mike Hughes died trying to prove the world is flat. My son and I would travel with Kevin.

Moapa Paiute Travel Plaza, North of Las Vegas on I-15.

When Kevin wasn't planning a launch, he was planning an explosion. He loved fireworks and was always looking for a safe place to blow them up.

His favorite was 40 minutes north of Las Vegas at the Moapa Paiute Travel Plaza, where I-15 meets The Valley of Fire Highway. I don't know how he found these places, but I am glad he did.

On more than one occasion, we visited the plaza with my son Alex or later with my stepson Stephan. Back in the 90s, the building was the size of a suburban grocery store. The only difference is that it sold mostly fireworks (the insane kind), alcohol, and tobacco.

Kevin would buy the fireworks he wanted to see. We'd go outside to one of several launch pads near the building and proceed to launch rockets, mortars, and strings of 500 to 1000 firecrackers. We'd launch till there was no more to launch.

On the 4th fo July, he would bring his arsenal to Bakersfield.

Alex Funk watches from on top of The Gladiator as his uncle Kevin sells model rocket parts to club members.

I'm not sure what his politics were. We rarely talked about it. If I had to guess, he was a contrarian. If you loved Ronald Reagan, he'd have 100 reasons why you shouldn't. If you hated Ronald Reagan, he'd have another 100 reasons why you should love him. Around women, he would make it clear he hated Oprah Winfrey. Around men, you weren't so sure.

I think he just liked to piss people off. It was entertainment. Maybe he thought it was funny. He probably meant the offense.

As for my relationship with him, it never seemed to change. I was his older brother. I don't recall being mad at him or having a knockdown argument like brothers do in the movies.

Maybe it's because I always heard him coming.

Kevin on the road in Pennsylvania in the early 1980s.

Remembering moms

Before catalytic converters and unleaded gasoline, there was Regular or Ethyl.

If you were a child of the 60s, you probably amused yourself with the question, “Who’s Ethyl?" I thought it was a character on the "Honeymooners" or "I Love Lucy.” And, I wondered why gas station attendants (remember them?) kept asking my parents that question. I learned the answer later in life, but by the time I could pay for my gas, Ethyl had gone from the pumps in California.

Those were the good old days when air pollution in Los Angeles felt like something. By that, I mean, the air was so stinking and noxious it made my eyes water and my lungs burn. When the weather got warm, you were likely to find me in one of two places at Altadena Elementary School: either playing kickball on the asphalt playground or in the nurse’s office gasping for breath. One led to the other. If you want to experience the feeling for yourself, light a match and inhale the fumes. But don’t. Really. Don’t.

 I vaguely remember the mayor of Los Angeles, Sam Yorty, making what today I would call a Trump recommendation – to put giant gasoline-powered fans on top of the San Gabriel Mountains to blow the smog into the desert! Politicians played scientists even then.

In San Francisco

My grandmother visited us in California in 1965.

 In 1965, my German grandmother came to visit. We flew to San Francisco to meet her. My dad rented a Chevy Impala ragtop and drove us back to Altadena via Yosemite. If you look closely at the photograph taken in front of Yosemite Falls (above), you can tell that eight 1960s adults could easily fit in that car. Today, maybe five.

 My grandmother spent the summer with us in Altadena. My brother and I didn’t speak a lick of German and my grandmother was equally talented in English. So to entertain her we would perform pratfalls, magic tricks, and my favorite, seemingly banging my head on an open door (you make the noise by kicking the door with your foot). It always got a hearty “Um Gottes willen!” from my Grossmutti. My brother got the same result whenever he would throw himself up against the dashboard of the car while my mom pulled up to a red light. At least I think he was pretending. Maybe he’s the reason seatbelts were invented.

 Between shows, my mom and grandmother would put on shows of their own. The dining room table became their stage. 

They took turns standing on it. Whoever was standing was being measured by the other with a cloth measuring tape in preparation for a new blouse or suit. When the logistics were finished, the table was covered with the pattern my grandmother brought from Germany and a bolt of cloth that my mother picked up somewhere in Pasadena. In the middle, they placed a fabric tomato bristling with straight pins. And you thought clothes came from a store. 

There were other days when the table became a staging area for an assault on tarnish. You see, the components of the Los Angeles smog at the time were hydrogen sulfite and sulfur dioxide. Not only did the smog burn my lungs, but the sulfur in it was blackening my parent’s wedding gifts.

 Who knew?

Well, my high school chemistry teacher and my grandmother did. And she thought it unacceptable. 

All the tarnished items she could find in our house were arranged on a newspaper at one end of the table. At the other end, she placed a few other sheets of newspaper. Then she and my mother would arrange themselves across from each other in the middle with some rags and homemade cleaning solutions and begin the assembly-line task of polishing. 

The process probably took an hour, but because there was afternoon coffee to be had with a piece of homemade Apfelstrudel or a piece of Zwetschgendatschi (plum cake) with homemade whipped cream, the hour lasted maybe three. That was the part my brother and I enjoyed the most.

It was also where I started learning German, or at least Bavarian. Watching my Grossmutti and my Mutti enjoying each other’s company over a pot o’ joe (drip, not percolated) and a nice piece of kuchen is a great way to learn anything.

Family reunion

This photo was taken in the 1950s in New York City. My grandmother came to America on a ship.

In the moment

In 1963, my father took a picture of his dad and mom on top of the Chrysler Building. They had come from Elyria, Ohio, to New York City to the second tallest building in the world to look at the tallest building in the world. 

They also came to New York City to visit the expecting Funk “kids.” None of the pictures taken that day show my mother, which makes me suspect my dad was doing the good-husband-thing by giving his parents a tour of the big city so that his wife could take a break from the doting relatives. 

I was born in February 1954 in Flushing Hospital in Queens. 

At the time, my parents lived in an upstairs apartment in a house across the water from LaGuardia Airport. The family who owned the home was The Slocums. They became lifelong friends of my parents. Babies have a way of bonding families. 

I didn’t know my dad’s parents well. My grandmother died of a heart attack when I was still a toddler. In 1959 we moved to California from Nyack, New York. My grandfather stayed in Elyria.

My grandfather, Louis W. Funk, left, is given a gold watch at his retirement.

My brother Kevin was hellbent on shoveling something, even if it was bits of ice and gravel from the driveway.

He worked for a local trucking firm as a driver, and when he retired from the trucking business, he was feted in the local newspaper — the good old days for working stiffs.

The only time I remember being in his house was in 1968. The California Funks went there for Christmas. My brother and I were hoping, praying even, that it would snow. Growing up in Altadena meant it never snowed. We wanted one Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby white Christmas. But not this year. First time in years, according to my grandpa. Undeterred, my brother went out one morning with a giant snow shovel to try to shovel the ice off the drive. He made a lot of noise and probably woke the neighbors.

We did see Santa deliver the milk one morning. He drove a white truck and stopped at several houses on the block, including my grandpa’s and brought “the white stuff” to the front porch.

You could say we had a white Christmas after all – Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby all rolled into one.

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Santa makes deliveries in a Bauer Dairy delivery truck in Elyria, Ohio.