About the author

My, dad, the author: Richard S. Funk was born on a farm in Ohio on January 20, 1922 about seven miles south of Lake Erie and 40 miles west of Cleveland near a town called Birmingham. During his formative years, the family worked on several farms (some without electricity or indoor plumbing) and ran a 5-cow dairy in Birmingham during the early depression years. In 1934, his father gave up farming for truck driving and moved the family to Elyria, Ohio, where Richard attended high school. It was there that a teacher interested him in journalism and helped him get a job on the local newspaper to earn funds for entering Ohio State University School of Journalism in 1941. There he became a news editor of the Ohio State Daily Lantern, president of the Arts College Council and a member of the Student Senate before being called to active duty as a U.S. Army volunteer in 1943.

After attending U.S. Army Signal Corps School to learn radio and electronic technology, he was assigned to an armored anti-aircraft unit that landed on Utah Beach in France in July, 1944 and became a part of General Patton's Third Army. The unit's biggest accomplishment was knocking down 12 enemy planes attacking the Third Army's first bridge across the river Seine north of Paris. After nine months of combat, the unit was in Bavaria when the war ended and he was transferred to Third Army Headquarters in Munich.

He received his Army discharge in Germany to accept civilian employment with the Army Exchange Service and later became manager of the Munich Photo Plant. One of the largest film processing plants of its day, it served the photo developing needs of soldiers stationed in Bavaria, Austria and Northern Italy. To help the GI's take better pictures, he also had a weekly radio show, Fun with Film, on the Armed Forces Network. During most of his two-year employment in Munich, his aide and interpreter was a young Munich native, Elizabeth Oeser, whom he married in 1948 shortly after his return to Ohio. They recently celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.

They had two two sons, Gary and Kevin. Their youngest son Kevin died in Sept. 2004 at the age of 49. Gary works for The Fresno Bee newspaper in Central California.

To finish his interrupted journalism studies, he enrolled in night school at Cleveland College of Western Reserve University. During the day he and his new bride ran a photo shop and he published a news letter and did some selling for a northern Ohio beer and wine distributor. Following his graduation in 1951 he went to work as chief copy writer for SuperVision, Inc., a direct mail advertising agency in Cleveland. It was here that he applied for a job as editor of the Metal Lath News, a construction industry publication of the Metal Lath Manufacturers Association. He didn't get the job. Subsequently, the Metal Lath association forwarded his resume to the Perlite Institute in New York. The rest, as they say, is history. His 40-year experience in the perlite industry as an executive of the Perlite Institute, Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, Grefco, Inc., and General Refractories Company are recounted in his personal narrative entitled "Chasing the Bubbles."