March 1, 1963

HE WAS HONEST, AND STOOD ON HIS OWN FEET

By Bob Barnet

They buried Frank Funk Monday, on a grassy knoll in a tree-shaded cemetery in Winchester, Indiana.

They also buried an era.

No more in this country will a farmer of moderate means mark out an automobile racing-strip with a clam-shell scoop and his own two-horse team, then see it become, under the same frugal ownership and management, a major-league plant at which throngs of 10,000 -- and world records -- are commonplace.

            They do things in a big way now, and when a man wants to build a race track he hunts up a covey of millionaires, and they build a multi-million-dollar plant.

            Duke Dinsmore, the hard-driving, hard-playing Dayton kid who used to hang a wheel over the upper rim of the high-banked Winchester half-miler and stay there all day, was among the mourners who crowded the funeral home for the service.  His hair is graying now, and his hand shook a little as he tried to console members of the family.

            Frank died only Saturday and some the racing folks may not have known of his passing.  Some of them preceded him into the land over yonder, and among these were many of the great ones of the sport.  Some of them died at Funk’s Winchester Speedway, but race drivers die at all tracks.

Not many men in automobile racing were as well known.  Not many were as well respected.  He was a man who worked hard and said little, a man whose word was his bond.  If he told a gang of rough-neck dirt-track drivers that he would pay a purse of $1,000 they came to his track with their machines and raced, because they knew that when it was over, no matter how many or how few paying guests had been in the stands, Frank Funk would pay a purse of $1,000.  It wasn’t that way everywhere.

And Always a Battle Against the Dust

Frank got into the racing business purely by accident and when he slashed a half-mile track out of the dirt of one of his meadow fields it was for motorcycle race riders, not automobiles at all.

Frank had a little lake and amusement park on his farm west of Winchester and back in the early 1900’s it was quite a thing for the young sports to get on the interurban car at Muncie or Selma or Parker City or Farmland or Union City and ride to Funk’s Lake.

There was a skating rink there, and Frank had some carnival rides in the warm months and man could rent a rowboat or a canoe and take his girl on a ride on the peaceful little lake.

Along in 1919 some motorcycle race riders asked Frank if they could hold a race in the field east and south of the lake.  Frank said he guessed it was all right and those who know the man will agree that the slow-spoken Funk probably needed several minutes even to say that much.

Some men are born with the knack of promoting sporting events and allied entertainment.  Others lose money faster than other people can hand it to them.

Frank was a born promoter and always was alert for attractions to bring to bring people to his modest amusement park.  He saw a Sunday afternoon motorcycle event as such that wouldn’t do any harm and might bring in some people.  It did and Frank held some more motorcycle races.  Then some automobile racing people asked about the possibility of a race and Frank got out his team and marked out a half-mile track with some banks at the corners.

When the first race was held, the dust didn’t settle for a week and Frank embarked on a lifetime career of seeking a way to keep from driving his spectators right off the premises.  He tried all kinds of oil and kept shoving the loose dirt up the banks, with the result that the Winchester banks were soon the highest in the world for a track of that type.

As fast as Frank got the track oiled down the cars dug it up and his battle was an endless and often discouraging one.  Finally, only a few years ago, the track was paved like a modern asphalt road.  Now owned by Dayton racing figure Pete Wales, the strip is among the nation’s best.

But it always was good—so good that the bigtimers who came to Winchester broke one world mark after another.

Frank remained in the sport more than 40 years and knew all the great and near-great in American automobile racing.

And do you know something, neighbor?  Frank Funk didn’t give a nickel about auto racing as a sport!

He was a shrewd businessman who was promoting a sporting event because it brought people to his race track.

Harold (Dutch) Hurst, who knew and loved the quiet Winchester man and who worked for and with him as co-promoter and racing announcer, tells it best.

“There was this day at Winchester when Frank called me out back of the stands to talk about something and the people were screaming and it was right at the end of the feature and I knew somebody had to be charging at the leader.

“I was about to have a fit because I wanted to get back there and see it and Frank just kept talking and didn’t even raise his voice when the cars went by.  I think he would have turned his back on the greatest auto racing in the history of the world.  It wasn’t that he had anything against racing.  He just wasn’t interested in it as a sport.  It was a business to him, and he approached it like a business.  He never got to be a fan.

He treated drivers fine and you never could find one who would say a word against him.  His grandstand sometimes was held together with baling wire and rusty nails, driven there by Frank himself, but he never cut corners with the drivers and the racing strip.  He always told me that the way to run a race track was to get the good drivers, no matter what they cost, because the good drivers would bring in the crowds. It worked that way, too.”

A man who sometimes went half a day without saying a word, Frank turned the job of business manager, public relations counselor, and finder of the parents of lost children over to his patient, loving, and lovely wife, Mrs. Etta Funk.  She worked shoulder to shoulder with him through the years and these two, along with Dutch and a few other capable people ran a track that was the envy of the race business.

When a man wanted to find Frank Funk he walked over to the race track. Usually Frank was nailing up some loose boards in the grandstand or tamping some kind of asphalt mixture into a hole in the tracing strip.  In any case, he wore bib overalls.  If he were replacing boards in the grandstand he wore a nail apron over the bib overalls.  That was the only change in his working outfit.  And he owned the place!

Frank worked at promoting automobile races as calmly and efficiently as a man works at a lathe on a factory production line.  He never got emotional about racing and never got too friendly with drivers, car owners, or any of the other individuals who moved by the thousands through his gates.  They all looked alike to him and he treated them all alike – honestly and fairly.

Reading the above, one might get the idea that Frank was a cold man and a hard one.

That wasn’t true at all. He was just a man who attended to his own business and tried to treat everybody right and didn’t put on a big show.

Just east of the speedway property line there is an orphans’ home.  When he was active as a promoter Frank climbed the fence each year and built the youngsters tree platforms to make it possible for them to sit up there and watch the race cars slam around the track.  It is a measure of the man that he didn’t send somebody else with the boards and nails.  He built the platforms personally and never even told anybody about it.

He was a stalwart representative of an all-but-vanished race of sports promoters who stood on their own feet and operated without the help of banks, flush investors, or the Mafia.

Like Tex Rickard, he endured and prospered because, being naturally honest, he gave the talent and the customers a fair shake.

Maybe somewhere up there in Valhalla Frank Funk and Tex Rickard will meet and shake hands.

Ted Horn will be there, too, and little Pat O’Connor, and Jimmy Snyder, and Bettenhausen, and Sweikert, and Wilbur Shaw, and Bryan, and Wild Bill Cummings, and Bob Carey, and Hepburn, and Crockett…