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.
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.
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.