Joe Funk
Joe Funk was born in Dallas in 1922, the younger of two sons of Isaac and Fanny Funk, who came to the United States from Russia around 1911. After passing through Ellis Island and a stay in New York, the family settled in Dallas at 3705 Colonial Avenue in South Dallas. Isaac was a tailor whose first job began memorably when he ran a needle through his finger, but he became skilled at the trade and later opened Funk's Men Shop on Main Street, along with other ventures that came and went, including a shop that made clothing to fit and a shoeshine and pressing parlor. Joe's older brother, Leon, was a gifted academic who taught mathematics at SMU and, along with their father, encouraged Joe toward college.
Joe attended Forest Avenue High School, where he played on the tennis team, and studied civil engineering at SMU after being persuaded by an aptitude test and helped by a partial scholarship and NYA work. During World War II he served in the Navy construction corps, the Seabees, building airstrips and camp facilities at Midway, Hawaii, and Guam, where he was stationed when the atomic bombs were dropped. One month after returning to Dallas he married Berna, whom he had met at a gathering of young people at Temple Emanu-El. The couple began with very little, sharing a kitchen and bathroom, and Berna kept the books while raising their two children.
After working for the City of Dallas, an architectural firm, and the Robert E. McKee company, where he helped build projects including a veterans hospital in New Orleans, Joe struck out on his own in 1956, starting from the family dining room. His company built many churches and synagogues, structural work for the first Dallas Museum of Art, an addition to Temple Emanu-El, and Midway Hills Christian Church, and it remained in business for 50 years. Joe and Berna were married more than 60 years, and he belonged to both Temple Emanu-El and Temple Shalom. Deeply devoted to family, he took pride in his son Marshall, who joined him in construction and the marina business, his daughter Sandy, and his three granddaughters. He credited his good fortune above all to Berna and to the values passed on by his parents.
Full Transcript
today is september 24th 2007. we're here to take the oral history of joe funk my name is rosalind van gett and our videographer is ruth andres joe tell us about your family i am i had one brother and my father and mother were isaac funk and fanny funk they came to the this country probably 1911 from russia and i don't know what else you want to know about my family okay uh when they came to this country where did where did they settle they came through ellis island they were there a short time and they had a friend who got to the united states first who was in dallas who
said come on down here we got a lot of work so they came on down here there wasn't any work so they went back to new york city for i guess a couple of years and came back again and this time we found he found papa sound and lived in the house all the rest of our lives were you born in dallas or in new york in dallas in the year 1922 mm-hmm and what what did your parents do for a living well mom they both work when they first got here then mama quit working after a while my father was a tailor his first
job was a a harris and if you want to hear a story about that i'll tell you otherwise i'll go along we do uh the way he went down there to hey harris where he thought they had whatever he was told they were opening and they did they had an opening for a tailor so they asked him if he was a tailor and he said yeah but he'd never run a sewing machine in his life right off the bat he ran a needle from the sewing machine through his finger but another last one says okay we'll fix you up so they went to a doctor
that fixed him up he came back and he became a very good tailor then after i don't know how long a period of time he opened a men's store funk's men shop on uh main street i think it was 1511 or something like that right across from there's a gus roos across the street and it was a block down from neiman and they did okay there until the depression came along and put them out now the first store though was on elm street down by pearl pearling down and he there was a men's shop too that mainly cater to uh where they made the clothes
farm fit they uh they measured and made the clothes right in that shop and the but the depression finished that one off and after a while uh i think he had a shot at a groceries no he would in time we had a shoeshine parlor came after that on m street between the uh rialto theater and queen theater on elm street and the she shined shop and they did pressing and blocked hats in the back but uh then they got the thing after the shortly before the war he got in on this to go back to main and uh and started a store there and
was there i don't know things were tough and then i don't know about 1940 after the war at some point they was out of that business so but he was a clothing man is what what he was men's clothing and that's all he is really like to talk about where did you live when you were a child 3705 colonial avenue in south dallas can you tell us something about what the neighborhood was like when you were growing up there yeah i can tell you it was a very fine neighborhood of ordinary people the streetcar track ran in front of our house they called the irby
streetcar line went down i think as far as pine street they turned it around they put and go back up to downtown the neighborhood was uh hard-working people and they brought their children up to be hard-working honest people [Music] and what kind of games did the children what did what did you do to amuse yourself when you were a child i was i was into athletics quite a bit whenever i had a chance i'd play baseball football basketball i wasn't really a great student in my early days of grammar school but then about the sixth grade i figured out i better start learning something and
so i cut down on my athletics and started learning a few things and then i was a decent student in high school but the neighborhood was was really a great bunch of people and still we still the high school has still have an alumni association and i see a lot of my friends still there and that was forest avenue high school that ended his career with that name in 1956 when he became madison high that the that was uh while segregation was going along and the neighborhood had become majority were and all the white people were moving out um tell me about your your school
experiences what activities what interests did you have when you were in school well we'll have to go to high school there wasn't much activities in grammar and in high school i played on the tennis team for my last three years there i i followed my i had a brother who was a very good student all the teachers remembered him and my latin teacher was especially she was really fond of my brother and she expected me to be like he was but that didn't i took two years of latin and then i then the latin interfered with my playing tennis so i dropped the latin and
kept playing tennis and she she never forgave me for that there was no national honor society for me or anything else but i made decent grades and in the mathematics i've made 100 in algebra and all that good stuff now i think they teach algebra in the fifth or sixth grade in school but then it was it was a big deal and uh but but in mathematics i was good and i was we had wonderful teachers at forest avenue high school there was no discipline problem at all if you did something wrong a guy carrying a big stick would come over and tell you to
grab your ankles and he popped you one and you wouldn't go tell your parents about it either because they would hit you harder so there was no discipline problem with where i went to school and when i went to school it was just a great great bunch of teachers very dedicated and that was through grammar school too as far as the teachers were concerned my generation was very lucky as far as the uh as our young life was we work i worked on saturdays you know when i was going to school did you work um for your father or somebody else no there were three
clothing stores men's clothing stores right together and they were tremendous competitors but good friends so i went to work for one of the competitors but it was an experience i learned how look at people and talk to them and i think i'm naturally rather shy but you've got to get out i realize you got to get out of that at some point along the way and though i've never been really outgoing guy i don't think i'm shy anymore did your family attend the synagogue when you were a child yeah they attended as good as occam but they were not necessarily the pillars of the church
it's women weren't anything anyway good as often when they women didn't count too much and papa was not all of that into it but he would go to where he could talk you know outside he could get the holidays he could talk with all the rest of them and that was that was pretty much my family my mother and father's religion was not real powerful not real powerful as a matter of fact when it came time for me to go to sunday school it was a question of where to go next door a lady across the street from us sarah hart was teaching at temple
emanuel so she went controller so the natural for me just go across the street and go to temple emanuel for sunday school which i did and i was covering our men's foot and con and confirmed and i was bar mitzvahed at temple that was in the days they didn't happen so uh i was into religion a little bit when i was young but then so that's where that's where the religion came from right did your family celebrate any of the jewish holidays all of them we celebrated every jewish holiday and uh we weren't much on shabbos but uh but the high holidays including passover which
was a big deal what happened then uh there was a family called shane s-s-h-a-n-e i believe it was it would had a big group maybe 20 20 to 25 people in a long table and and it it was great food wonderful food but they went through the whole thing through the whole service without them so about a third the way through if eating got done and everything i'd go to sleep they put me on a couch and i went to sleep but i never will forget what a big deal passover was and in fact i even got to stay out a couple extra days besides
of one day which just because i could do it but it wasn't because of religion it was just it was very nice in the shanes and in time i'll think of who all the other people getters killers were over there and one of the gillers was married to an andrus girl and so that brought her family into it dave dave anderson so the killers were there and just a great time so that was a that was a big part of my religion and during the holidays but we always went to uh i always went to services on yom kippur and rosh hashanah and of course
while i was going to before i got confirmed at temple i go on saturday morning and i and i enjoyed i enjoyed my time at temple emmanuel religious school i had a great guy and rabbi i left always was there and rabbi named brav was was a guy out there when i got to bar mitzvah and uh and temple emanuel by the way didn't have anything to do with me but had some quite some outstanding rabbis that i was very fortunate to get to be with by olin jerry klein who was a great friend of ours and so that's kind of my temple thing i'm
not really strong anymore i go to the high holidays what interactions did your family have with other jewish families well if i was real young and i didn't get into it much like my brother did the scholar uh and a great guy by the way uh i had a place on forest avenue about a block west of colonial avenue that was called the arbiter ring it was a little masonry building seemed like a big building to me is probably very small that uh that the jewish people it was where they a lot of them learned english they learned hebrew that was it they taught and
arbitraring i think means a labor ring and uh that was where they had got a lot of social togetherness then somewhere before long before world war ii the arbiter disbanded they were they were politics took over as far as the communism thing and some thought that's the way ought to be ought to support russia more and some of them said no we're not going to do that we've been out we're out of russia and we don't think too much of that and they couldn't get together and it just totally broke up my father was one that was not for supporting russia and uh but there
were some good guys that did that they were that they stayed friends after the arbitrary talk about it i was in high school and they still met probably uh 30 30 people would meet maybe once a month and they'd sing songs and have a big meal and it was it was really wonderful and yeah and the children would come and enjoy themselves and that was pretty much their social life uh as far as that's concerned it went from the orbit to ring to the to the people and the people from both sides came on those meetings it wouldn't it wasn't just uh the far and
against group but there were some pretty there were some leanings towards communism certainly social well most of them were social people they wanted to do good things for people but there was a little rift there that it's probably other people know more about that history than i do who are a little older than me but i do know it broke up but my brother learned to write hebrew and everything is i said he was a scholar and he died when he was 52 years old after a massive heart attack at 42. he was not leon funk was nine years older than i and he said i had two fathers actually yeah and mama was a great woman did uh your family have any interactions with the gentile community well yeah the two the people on both yes the neighborhoods you know you walk down the street in those days and people sat on the porch in the summertime so you interact with the neighbors there weren't a whole lot of organizations that they were in they weren't mixed but and in business papa knew a lot of people he uh he was some of he when he was making clothing that
part of his business and all the way through he had some pretty high-powered customers including judges and so forth and i can remember one time when i was young enough to get on somebody's shoulder the ku klux klan coming down the street with their with their torches going at night and uh but i remember saying some of those judges said funk you're all right we'll take care of you and they take care took care of i mean we never had any problem from the ku klux klan but they never um bothered any jews in dallas did they i don't know the answer to that i
wouldn't they certainly didn't they certainly spread anti-semitism they didn't like blacks jews or catholics didn't care too much for catholics either i don't think as far as violence towards them i had to i have no way i don't know that i wouldn't be surprised if there were it was certainly plenty of slander but physical violence i do not do not know of it what did you do after high school well after high school i told you i like to play all athletics and i just i didn't my brother taught mathematics at smu for three or four years and so he knew the faculty there but
i didn't want to go to college i just wanted to get me a job go to work and play that's all i wanted to do so uh it sounded like a pretty big bum wasn't it huh but anyway that uh they tricked me they were having an aptitude test at smu one saturday and they checked me into going in and taking the aptitude test and i didn't want to go through an aptitude test or anything but anyway i took it and they came out and says i was strong in mathematics and i would make a good engineer well that's okay but then you got to
pay tuition if you go to college and we we didn't have that much money and uh but they got me partial scholarship and they got me a job after i think it was nya national youth administration so i got that and i worked in the laboratory after school and i cleaned up the civil engineering lab but people they would make test cylinders and break them and i'd put those concrete cylinders in the wheel bar and wheel it outside so anyway i went so i started college and i finished college did i say you started saying you finished it i said you just by the time
i finished the war was going on good and i i was then got into midshipmen school and went to went to the navy as a as a construction man construction corps the seabees they called them then the people never heard of her anymore but uh construction battalion and my schooling i did i did okay i was a decent student because i knew if we're spending that much money i had to make it worthwhile but so i did i studied what kind of engineering did you study civil engineering uh building things and designing things and that worked well for me when i was in the south
pacific in the navy we built the airstrips and facilities for the camps and can you tell us about your military experience well i was uh first thing they did too if i went to honolulu where they pretty well brought everybody first and then sent them out from there so i after that i they put me on a ship and i went to midway island there's no natives there's nobody on midway island except for birds gooney birds and it was a it was a submarine station where the submarines would refuel and so forth but it was kind of it was it was after the japanese had
tried to take midway and had taken midway and it was it was not very much happening there it was uh we get a few scares every now and then there was a japanese submarine off this coast and so forth i never saw a japanese submarine there so uh then i went back to after probably eight or ten months or went back to hawaii stayed there a couple of months doing nothing then they sent me to guam i made a few short stops at 10 in in south hand and then guam and there we i was with a unit that maintained a large naval air station
and we brought in in charge of the shipping as to how you can't believe the amount of ships that were in the harbor at guam you could look out and you couldn't see the end of them bringing supplies into guam and leaving guam with the supplies and so we we had charge of that too and then at that while i was still on guam we dropped the atom bomb but we were prepared to go over to japan we had people loaded on ships to go at that time they dropped that first atom by i and then the second one and that did it but i
i would always say anybody i couldn't i haven't found anybody who was in the south pacific who thinks truman did wrong with his atom bomb because it would it saved a lot of people's lives at that point now you know history has shown somebody was going to make to get out and bomb whether we had it it was going to happen so when people criticize truman take up for him the guy did he did the right thing according to i bet you everybody in the south pacific you see you around okinawa wherever you were you were glad to hear it uh so that's pretty much
my experience i didn't i didn't shoot any japanese uh but i did with one of the things that we did on guam was every night you could see the big b-17s and p-24s flying over to drop their bombs on japan and they were really wreaking havoc it was really must have been terrible i didn't feel sorry for him but it was terrible i'm sure yeah now what did you do when you came back to dallas after the war one month i was back here i got married in fact i told uh wrote my i had a i got engaged on my embarkation league and uh
so we wrote letters while we go email email email the email it was little thing you could fold up and sit how did you meet your wife i met my wife at a social of young people at the in the gymnasium of temple emanuel and uh i didn't know her then but she was with a friend of mine that i knew a lady friend that i knew and i just saw her i don't even know whether i said talk to her or not but she looked nice she really looked pretty to me and i thought i'd like to know her better well you know i
got to know her now you might talk too much here then no not at all anyway i i thought i'd like to know her better and so i called this lady friend that brought her was dating age for me so i was thinking now how am i gonna not hurt her feelings and find out the address of the girl i want to know know better but i didn't have a good answer for that i just called her and asked her and she told me and it was very nice wish everybody stayed friends and i had a date with her first date was on uh halloween
night during the movie and she was staying with a sister on belt claire in university park and uh and i liked her and apparently she liked me and we we came we became friends and i was here another well it i think on that night no shortly after that she said well you go to my father's funeral so i'm well yeah okay so i went to fort worth to the funeral she was from fort worth okay she was from fort worth no she was from cisco texas that's where she graduated high school she was born in dallas also but uh they were for work that
was where the burial place of the family was so i went over there so that was the second time i saw her it was at the funeral and then we just saw each other and got to know each other and liked each other and i guess and i but i didn't know of it for about two or three months before i know it was longer than that eight or ten months before i went to midshipmen school came back on embarkation leave and decided you know maybe maybe this would be a good idea to marry this girl and that was a good decision because she was
a wonderful person we lived together for over 60 years mary lived together and so she was she was really great and uh and she brought up two good kids and she was where she was a hard-working girl because we didn't have anything to start with so you got married right when you when you returned absolutely i really wanted to get married by proxy so i could get home quicker on the points i'd get more points if i was married she didn't go for that she made me wait another four or five months see this was the right decision you got married here in dallas yes
uh-huh melrose hotel and then the good deal was our honeymoon i had to go to new orleans to get discharged from the navy so we had a honeymoon in new orleans the government paid for it you know we started out good then we had to go then we had to make a living after that where did you live when you were first married we had a one room we had a bedroom we shared the kitchen and bathroom with a grandmother and her about a 17 year old daughter no air conditioning right outside our bedroom window was a big compressor for a cooler that was in
the grocery store right next door with the heat coming in we did have a little fan but it was uh it was not really uptown it was kind of a tough beginning but we made a live and it was okay where was it on a street called llano street in the belmont streetcar line went down that that street and it was called belmont there and it was every same car that you could have caught in front of our house in south dallas it came with all the way out to smu in fact i drove that car to smu many a time and that's where we
lived that it wasn't much i was in that's in the greenville area off of greenville and uh and then i got a job working for the city designing sewer systems and water systems and uh made 190 a month which we could live on and they raised me to 230 a month when i said this isn't enough i can't stay here for that but i couldn't stay for that either so i got a job uh with a with an architectural firm and i did the structural design form for about two years they were very nice people and i enjoyed working for them but after a while
the checks started bouncing my paychecks and and and that wasn't a good idea that was not a good thing so after a while i had to leave and find something else but when i was looking for somebody else i went to a smu football game smu baylor burning idea and uh at the end of the game a guy turns around to me and he says is your name joe phone i said yeah that's what my name is i didn't know who he was but when i first came back and started looking for work before i took the job with the city i'd gone around to
every construction every large construction company because i wanted to be going to being a builder and not not a design guy which i did and he said my name is robert e mckee junior which that was a big company they're no longer around but they was a good big company and he said you still looking for a job and said well i got a job now but uh he said would you be interested in talking about a job i said yeah and he said well this is my phone address come to my house tomorrow morning i said well tomorrow morning sunday and he says that's
okay would you come on i said yeah i did so they hired me i went into the estimating office here i am at a desk again which i didn't want a desk job so i worked in that desk job for i guess a year or two every now and then they send me out in the field which have made me happy that we're building a fondren science building at smu so i thought that was kind of fun i hope they left me there six or eight months then i was back in the estimating we figured a job in new orleans a veterans administration job in
new orleans and we were low and mr mckee senior was in town and we were way low you don't want to be low like that we were all the estimating department figure they're going to fire the whole bunch of us he came in the next morning he said i looked over our bed i'm happy we've got a good job anybody here want to go and build this building well i always knew not to volunteer for anything i knew that but it was so exciting to me to go build a 17-story building i said yeah i'll go so sure enough i did they said they took
me up on it sent me new orleans we were there from 49 to 52. my daughter was born in new orleans we had a three-year-old son and uh i mean it was we i felt it was hard work down there we i had a hard super guy in charge of me was tough and the guy that ran the division for mckee was tough and we work from sun up sun down and later six days a week sometimes i take a flashlight in the morning to get ready for the construction to keep going you've got concrete to keep going up hard work hard work tough on burnham but she learned a lot in new orleans she learned all about fish and
cook and shrimp she next door neighbor to us this area we lived and found living were all out of town people i mean there was no new orleans person lived in that bunch they were all and they so they bounded together and they would cook she learned how to be a great cook more so than before we left and the next door neighbor was really she knew everything she was a navy wife who had moved all around the world but they were probably 10 or 15 years older than we and it was a tough life and new orleans came back to dallas and i went
to i worked on the the federal reserve building in dallas which is torn down by now and uh statler hilton hotel i was on that one which you probably never heard the statler hilton hotel anyway it's down there on uh on main street it's being remodeled now i understand it was it was quite it was at the hotel here for a while and uh and i worked for mckee here in dallas for maybe maybe his four years here in dallas and finally uh i i thought i could build a building myself at that point i thought i knew how to estimate the cost and i
knew how to build a building so berna and i though we didn't have much money we decided we'd go in business for ourselves so we did i told mr mckee that i was going to leave and he says joe you're a good man you're making a mistake this construction business is hard it's tough i said yeah i know it is because i've been working in it it's hard i know but we're gonna do it i'm gonna leave so we left set up an office in our dining room and uh that was my office for oh maybe six months people s people subcontractors come to figure
come through the living room sit down in the dining room and roll the plants out and where did you live then where did we live we lived uh on the clover lane uh it was between marsh and midway between northwest highway and walnut hill lane it was kind of a development house but it was a pretty nice house for us it was nice compared to anything we'd ever had it was great and so that's where we were i did everything in the world i visited all the lumber yards and talked to the people trying to get get a job finally i got to put a
what they call a dharma which is an opening on the second story for looking for a guy named irby mays which ran a clothing store or irby maze was so happening they are the people that wanted it and i think i probably did that for less than 300 hundred dollars and then i added a little uh 12 by 18 room onto somebody's house and that probably was 1500 and then i put a bathroom in for somebody did all the level of foundation uh i did everything for and then finally i hit a job that a little warehouse job work office retail in a warehouse for
the gillers by the way and the schnitzer the doctor well they're both anyway for them and fellow in-law from barton texas and uh that was about a sixty thousand dollar job and that got me and that came about because i went around every architect's office too just to get on their bid list and one of them let me do it george edwards and i was they did the job they were happy when we finished and i was happy by that time i got another job and and then i just then i started getting work and and we did okay after about uh it took about
maybe a year and a half about six months we moved into one a one room in a warehouse as our office but at least we were not in the house anymore verna could breathe a little bit better and but burno was the she did the books and uh vernon worked on the books and as a secretary to answer the phone kids come out of school see home go home and take care of the kids berna had it a lot rougher than i did she's the one that made it but uh so then we started getting work and we'd get the churches were being built along
that time all kinds of churches jewish churches christian churches everything we're just building so i built a lot of churches and uh i guess i guess i built the uh all of the structure for the first museum of art we did we did all the foundation work structural steel everything that you cannot see today except the basement floor that they didn't put floor covering on we did it and uh and that was about that that time that was getting pretty good that was pretty good-sized job but uh from then on we got enough work now there's tough times in the in the late seventies were
the boom time but in the early eighties construction was tough a lot of my competitors went out of business and i never have built i only built one house in my career we built one apartment in one house but that one house was when i had no work and i had oh six or eight people who had worked for me since i've been in business so we bought a piece of property got some plans and we built a house all everybody worked on that house and there was only one guy that had ever been on a done a job for a house who was a
superintendent on building houses so we had one guy who knew how to build houses and we all got in there and we did everything ourselves by the time we got that job finished we hit work gotten commercial work again and we stayed in business where a lot of my good competitors went out uh then it's been kind of it's been a lot easier the last uh where we were in business 50 years in in may of 06 from the 50 years we'd gone into business in 56 so the last 10 years or 15 people knew who we were and they knew we were going to
give them their money's worth do what we're supposed to do to the best of our ability and we just got work we didn't i didn't have to go visit architects anymore in lumber yards because people came to us at that time and it was an easier life what projects were your favorites i don't know i liked them all i didn't have any favorites so i like the museum of art we i think we did a pretty good size remodel for sheriff israel we built a addition on the temple emmanuel we did a midway hills christian church which was i guess my favorite because the architect
and i just blended together he did a lot of innovative things in that church and i was really random really i was ran that job personally which i didn't always able to do but uh it was a fun it was a fun job now there's a story that goes with that one too there's i can keep on going for you know days but anyway this this you could cut out what you want but uh there was a big cross on top of right up on the top of this roof that had it was not a straight roof a oddball roof but anyways across up on
top and we put that cross up there and waterproofed it in and we couldn't stop it from leaking it would leak and we try again it would leak and finally we tried it for the they were going to have the openings dedicating services on the sunday and we worked on that thing and the saturday night saturday afternoon we did a final we hope it works and then we put the hose on it and it leaked so here we so now all we could do is pray for dry weather on the services but sure enough we were sitting there i was sitting down in the pew
and it started a rainstorm and it came a rain but that roof did not leak that morning he or she was on our side god was with i don't know how that root stopped leaking but it stopped leaking and uh so that was an interesting thing i thought i mean just just luck i mean and everything you got to have a little bit of luck as you go along so i was lucky too in in many ways through my i was really lucky when i found berna at that get that get-together of young because she stayed with it she i think she got to quit
about 20 years ago after 30 years she could retire from the construction but she uh she was a wonderful lady and that's that's the best thing that ever happened to me more than the construction job but but i enjoyed making the way i made a living i've always enjoyed it i mean it was never drudgery i found you get through you can look up and see what you did you know and then it's very i've had a very very lucky life very very fortunate and happy i'm i'm good why your children were growing up um did you belong to a synagogue yeah we always belong
to temple emmanuel now i belong to temple emmanuel and temple shalom because my children went over to temple shalom but and i got a little disenchanted sometime from time to time with my temples which it's okay everybody does yeah but that's uh yes we've always belonged we we got as soon as we came back we we in dallas we belong temple emmanuelle very solidly and how what would you say how has the jewish community changed in dallas well of course the city of dallas has changed so much when i used to go to temple i knew everybody now i know nobody maybe i might see
half a dozen or a dozen people that i know that's the biggest change to me as far as the temple emanuel it's not a part of the any change except that dallas has gotten to be not like dallas was and it's a lot of us old people like it way it was but we can't have it the way it was so it's uh you know we used to have a date and it was a long drive from south dallas out to a place called lobellos on northwest highway and preston road that was way out and we'd take our dates and drive out there as a
big deal you'd have a ice cream soda maybe you could hold the girl's hands you never know you'd do the best you could so you know that's uh that's the big change dallas just grew up and so did the jewish community grow up so you know and it's we got a lot of wonderful people that came into dallas and it's great it's just not the same but i still go to temple and uh and it had a great guy a great friend of ours rabbi klein he's a great friend of everybody i think and i that's another story i told him that he needed to
keep living because if he wasn't around when we died nobody knows we didn't know the rabbis that much he's he agreed to that but he died less than a week before bernard did and here we were so but that's a he was how he was our might tied to temple emmanuel although late rally viola and i i thought it was great also just different one was and then one was they were totally different but jerry klein was just just a friend of ours so that's that's my temple tell us about your family today my family today yeah well uh you have a daughter and a
son i have a daughter and a son you know about when they were born so you could probably figure out they're up in their 50s up in their 50s uh daughter didn't get married happy happy lady uh son married uh the uh married in 73 has uh two daughters uh three daughters three daughters and a very nice wife named michelle and these three daughters three granddaughters and now the son speaking of the family the son always when he was 10 or 12 years old i'd get him on the construction job he may host down something pull nails in the garage i had him pull nails
out of two by fours and i paid him so much a nail so he grew up in the construction and he knew he wasn't any question in his mind what he was going to do you know go be a civil engineer and bill construction man and he did and he's a good construction man and the daughter stayed in college a long time she's pretty sharp gal and she we bought some boat marinas one in lewis flake lewis fell in the grapevine to where you put your boats and she for the first three years of that thing we thought it in 84 or 85. she really ran them because marshall and i were in the construction business and then she now is with the marinas but she is kind of a oh in the management she keeps them looking right and keeps them up to date and tries to keep the people with the yes attitude so there's several marinas to look after and that's mainly her first thing and marshall the son marshall that her name's sandy and the son's name is marshall and marshall has done very well he's expanded into the marina business with a partner his partner who they went to grammar school together uh stan johnson and uh they've
done pretty good they've expanded marinas instead of just in this dallas area they're in they have marinas all over the united states which i don't know how many there is maybe six or eight of them i'm a part owner of but i don't really know what i got but uh anyway they've uh marshall has been a pretty astute businessman and i and i do believe that he believes in my philosophy is to give the guy what they got coming do the best job you can and his reputation is a businessman is is a good reputation and uh so now they they have three i have
three from the from marshall and michelle one of them is in showing the peace corps and she's in ecuador living with an indigenous tribe that that has their own language they live in the rainforest of the amazons and it's a tough life i told her she ought to quit and come home but she'll probably stick it out because she's been there about eight months now and you know there's no running water and she's the only american within two hours of her uh she's having it but she's i think she's gonna stick with it she's a special kind of gal as much as i urge her
to come on home she hasn't come yet she says she's a smart little girl and the other two uh one of them works for the marinas they've all gotten out of college the youngest one the one that's in ecuador's 23 23 26 28 is our ages i think but anyway that's the middle one shannon now the sadie is the one in ecuador and shannon's the next one up and shannon works for the marinas and her big activity was to put on a charity uh concert they call it a concert rock and roll thing out at the marinas for the heart association and they raised about
60 000 last year it was good thing and then she works for the marinas in general uh the oldest daughter is a teacher of third grade grammar school in the grammar school that she went to when she went when she was a child so and then she worked they all work they're all diligent work hard uh people so i'm uh berna did good raising marshall marshall did good with his with his married and the way he brought the kids up they've uh here again i'm a lucky guy you know what are you most proud of most proud of i'm not one to be real proud
i mean i just uh i don't know that the word satisfied okay i'm not a not a proud guy i'm satisfied overall i've been very lucky i had good parents i always had something to eat and a room bed to go to sleep on i met a wonderful woman and lived with her for 60 years that's my biggest success that's the one that i am really satisfied with she did a good job on my children i had wonderful parents my mother and father were great uh so i'm not really a proud guy i'm just satisfied with the way i worked hard we all worked hard
but i don't think i have a whole lot of enemies and i don't think there's a whole lot of people that'll say much against me i think that's what my father told me that you need to live good don't do anything to shame the jewish and uh and i tried to do that so i'm satisfied with with my life is there anything that we didn't cover that you would like to add well i think i probably i didn't say enough about my older brother okay i'd like to say something he's a leon funk was a very as i say very he was an academic guy
and a good guy and i owe a lot to him i do not believe that my father alone could have gotten me to go to college but the two of them together managed and he has a nice family he had a son and a daughter that we keep up with very much one lives in washington one in las vegas and he just had the wrong genes i had the the good genes and he had the bad genes although he didn't want much of an athlete either he he was he was an academic and maybe he get enough people didn't know you had to exercise in
those days so maybe he just had a tough break but i miss him very much and he's been gone a long time and he was old enough to go to the arbiter ring he met a whole bunch of addresses at the arbitrary and andrews something else i mean that was quite a family and that and we would eat we would eat dinners a lot of time at uh dave andres's family's two-story house it was upstairs harry rahel's place and uh i really didn't remember dave that much because he was way younger than me or it seemed like he was you know way younger than me
when we were doing that lived out he's a little bitty boy and so then he got to be almost as old as me but in later years but he's uh he was a night he was a nice guy too but that was the andrus family my folks when they first came here they lived uh on pearl street too which is probably a block away from where sanders has lived and uh people took would take care of me i don't know i just don't remember my brother that much in those days but people would take care of me during the day there was a woman i
need to mention her to we called her mama king her name was helen king she was old and she had a place on flora her house i was on floor and i'd stay there a lot and then it's over the weekend i'd stay there sometime and we'd go to church at the sacred heart it was called sacred heart cathedral in those days anyway i go to church in the catholic church very often in the midnight mass and all that stuff anyway her her husband worked for the railroad company and he got killed so she was alone and after a while thank goodness my folks said
won't you come live with us so mama king came live with us on colonial avenue and i guess uh she had got free that's another part of my life she got free tickets to go wherever she wanted to on the railroad and we went all over the united states including uh we went over to cuba with on her passes and she was everybody loved mama king in fact we had a statue of virgin mary in the hallway i mean it was she was that was part of the house and uh she was a great lady and great part of my life she she also added
to my way of looking at things morally not that i'm all that great i'm not talking about it but i tried to live right and she had a lot to do with it and we went all over she had relatives all over in monroe louisiana and shreveport and new jersey california and it was a great life and i've had a great i mean ever all the way through my life i've been extremely lucky and i had burner for 60 years i could have taken a few more years of burning but uh it's the way it is that's the life thank you very much i could
i could kept on going you know you