Birthday girl recalls
the good old days

By Jon Campisi
Times Staff Writer

It’s hard to fathom that Elizabeth Funk is 102 years old.
After all, this is the centenarian who strides around the Wesley Enhanced Living at Pilgrim Gardens retirement community — with her walker only when she feels like it — almost as gracefully as she traversed the stage during her performing days.
But the Northeast resident is indeed more than a century old. And while time has taken its toll on her body, her mind seems to be just as young as the Wesley staffers who care for her daily.
Funk is witty, and she loves to talk about days of old. Like the time she befriended the mother of the famous Marx Brothers, whom she lived next to while briefly living in Chicago. Or her many trysts with other famous folks.
She also doesn’t shy away from discussing her deceased husbands. Funk is a widow three times over.
She never had children, although she pointedly notes that that can be blamed on her men. As Funk reminisced during a March 12 interview at the Lawncrest retirement community, Wesley staffers sat back and chuckled as she questioned aloud whether she could be to blame for her husbands’ early departures.
"Did I kill them? I don’t mean literally," she pondered, drawing smiles from her admirers.
Funk is well-liked, and well-respected, at Wesley, said Kathy Baptiste, the personal care director there who spent much of Funk’s meeting with the Times standing behind the spunky woman, who would rather carry her walker than use it.
Funk was born in New York City in 1906 to parents who spent time performing with the British Symphony. When she was 5, Funk’s parents decided to relocate the family to their native England.
"My father said, ‘Look, we’ve got to get this kid in school somewhere,’" Funk recalled, still speaking with the English accent that defines her among her peers.
The family settled in the city of Leicester, a locale Funk has an affinity for to this day.
"There’s no place like England," she said. "Honey, I can tell you, it was nice."
While Elizabeth Funk certainly is prim and proper, the woman who once went by the stage names Dorothy Byrne and Dolly Delmonte during an entertainment and singing career doesn’t think twice about discussing the taboos of yesteryear.
"Sure, I drank everything available," she said of her partying days, some of which took place during the era of Prohibition in the 1920s and early ’30s. "It didn’t hurt me any because I was careful."
Funk was 9 the first time she went onstage. Throughout her youth, she performed in Shakespearean plays presented at various schools. At age 17, she decided to venture back to the United States, which she has called her home ever since, although she had done quite a bit of traveling over the years.
Not only does longevity run in her family — her father died at 98, her mother at 99 — but it seems that stage talent did, too. Her father played the saxophone, (a relatively new instrument at that time, she claims) and her brother Andrew was a concert violinist. He died in 1939 while serving in the U.S. Army.
Impressively, her grandmother sang opera until she was more or less forced into retirement at age 70, Funk said.
Philadelphia became home when the Funks moved back to the States, beating out cities like Chicago and New York. Her father ran a music school here to teach saxophone, his passion, she recalled.
Funk’s days pursuing an acting career enabled her to cross paths with some of the big names of the 1930s and ’40s, including Jimmy Durante, Milton Berle and Cab Calloway, although it took a bit of coaxing to get her to recall the times she’d spent with the entertainers. All these years later, her memory isn’t what it used to be. Once she gets going, though, it can be hard to get Elizabeth Funk to step on the brakes.
"Cab Calloway, my goodness, he was a wonderful gentleman. Everyone loved him," she recalled of the famous jazz singer and bandleader who died in 1994. "He was as gentle as the day was long. He could sit at his mother’s table and write the most wonderful music."
When she looks back on those days, Funk still has a distaste for the way black performers often were treated by those who employed and promoted them, she said. Some were even made to wear white makeup to make them appear Caucasian onstage, she explained.
Funk also worked a pair of 40-week tours across the country with Jimmy Durante, the beloved singer and comic who rode one particular trademark — his rather large nose — to a long and productive career.
Funk still remembers Durante’s fondness for his Italian heritage, although the entertainer, who was born in New York City and died 28 years ago, never got to fulfill his desire to venture to Italy for a visit, she said.
"They all did wonderful work, wonderful singing and wonderful entertaining," Funk said of the performers she had a chance to know.
As Funk traversed the country, doing what she loved best, it never occurred to her that she was doing something out of the norm. Sure, family was important, but to be part of the entertainment world was something special, she explained.
"The theatrical world is the greatest mystery that there is because you cannot understand it," Funk said.
While she never had children, she did have those three husbands to keep her somewhat occupied when she was back home between jobs. However, each marriage never seemed to last that long. Her last husband died when Lyndon B. Johnson was the nation’s president.
"I’ve been widowed forty-three years," she said. "When I was eighteen or twenty, I thought to be a widow was almost a crime, but now I know better."
These days, Funk, or "Liz" as she’s called around the retirement community, enjoys telling her stories to anyone who will listen. Sometimes she’ll use visuals to get her points across; a wall in her apartment is decorated with framed photographs of family members and also show-business stars she has known in her lifetime.
The stories, she said, are really all she has left. Elizabeth Funk may have lost most of her hearing and eyesight in recent years, but she has those memories to hold on to.
"Now," she said, "I just talk because I have nothing else to do." ••
Reporter Jon Campisi can be reached at 215-354-3038 or jcampisi@phillynews.com