Thursday, January 10, 2007

Funk reminisces in 'Roads of Yesterday'

by Kenneth Lassiter

The stories that comprise the new book, “Roads of Yesterday,” were culled from the lifetime of a rural Nortonville resident and written over many years. It took one conversation, however, to spur that resident, Linda Funk, to put the stories together into book form.

Photo by Kenneth Lassiter

Linda Funk and her new book, "Roads of Yesterday."

Funk, a Topeka native who has lived just east of Nortonville for 39 years,
had 1,000 copies of the book
printed by Hall’s Commercial
Printing in Topeka and the bound
copies arrived in late November.
Since then, they have been spread
out for purchase at Hastings on
21st Street in Topeka and Western Hardware and Steve’s Thriftway in Valley Falls. Funk is in talks with a couple places in Lawrence and the
state historical society about selling t
he books there, and she said she
may try to find an outlet in Atchison.
The price on the book is $20.

The book compiles 16 short
non-fiction stories from Funk’s youth
as one of nine children in a central
Topeka family to her courtship with
Nortonville native Al Funk to family
life in Jefferson County. Funk graduated from Hayden High School and attended Washburn University before meeting and marrying Al and settling down in rural Nortonville. They have four grown children and 11 grandchildren with another grandchild on the way. Funk has held down various jobs over the years, including some substitute teaching and at one time writing a Nortonville news column for the Independent. Al has worked for Select Sires for 25 years.

Funk said ever since she was young she felt inspired to write, but kept the inspiration to herself for the most part.

“I knew since first grade when I sat down with the Dick and Jane reader that I wanted to write and eventually would write,” she said. “I also knew it would be years and years before I did and I didn’t want to tell anyone about it. I look back now and think I should have taken classes in journalism or writing back then (after she got out of school) but I didn’t until later.”

Stories in the book range from childhood memories of life as Linda Colvin on Clay Street in Topeka to teenage friendships and from early life with Al as a young married couple to adventures in motherhood. Funk said the collected stories were amassed, one by one, over the years since she came to Nortonville, but she never really planned on them being any more than handed down stories.

“The stories have been written throughout the years,” she said. “I remember standing at the window and watching the kids get on the school bus in, probably, 1984, and thinking to myself, ‘I’ve gotta go write this story now.’ It took me two weeks to finish but it’s ‘The Snake Hunters of Beer Bottoms’ in the book now. I found that you’ve got to do it when the inspiration strikes you.”

As the four Funk children grew into adults and another generation of the family began, one conversation changed the fate of Linda’s collection of stories. She said her son, Louis, put it to her bluntly.

“We were talking about it and he said, ‘Mom, either you get this published now or we’ll do it for you after you’re dead,’ ” Linda said with a laugh. “I decided to do it. It took a year to get things edited and re-edited.”

Another one of her children, Amy, studied journalism in college and told her to contact the University of Kansas Writing Center for help. Linda spent six months using the people at the writing center to help polish up the stories and then used the lessons instilled during her Catholic education during the final steps of the process.

“Working with the writing center was the most wonderful experience,” she said. “I’m really very pleased with the job they did. I think I kinda drove the people at Hall’s crazy. I kept going in with corrections to the manuscript. But I learned from the Sisters of Charity in Leavenworth that, if you’re gonna do something, you do it right. I also went kind of the expensive route with the books but I’d heard too many bad things about how books fall apart.”

The book was made complete with the addition of family photos from Funk’s youth and some photos taken by Al of their family and surroundings. The four now grown kids – Tony, Louis, Amy and Laura – who all live in northeast Kansas, received their copy of the book, as did Al. Linda said she doesn’t see a second book in the works, as she is satisfied with how the first one turned out.

“Sometimes you read an author, even an established one, and think, ‘They should have just stopped after the first one,’ ” she said with a laugh. “I want people who want to buy the book to be able to afford it. It was really a labor of love. It took me 40 years to write the first one – who knows how long it would take for another one. My teacher in a writing class I took at Benedictine College in the 1970s told me you have to live in order to write, and that’s really true.”