Mac Funderburk: What about all those names I went by...

Mac Funderburk with his Corvette

Hi Dru,

Gal, you didn't let any grass grow under your feet. You must not have been home long before you were at it again sending out information about the wonderful 70th birthday bash that we had. I sincerely thank you and all the rest of the committee that worked so hard to make the event a wonderful success. I have been looking forward to the event for almost a year and my wife Evelyn and I had a most wonderful time celebrating our birthdays together.

Now, I must have had several dozen people ask me about the names "Mac and Thomas",  and the story behind it, and they all wanted to hear about it. I had the delusion of maybe telling it one time to the entire group, but that occasion never materialized. So with your help Dru, here it is 59ers.

My legal name is now and has always been Ervin Medlin Funderburk, Jr. That is what is on my birth certificate. Well if that is true, where did all the other names like "Thomas" and "Mac" and  "Fundy" come from? Well my brief answer is, if you had a name like Ervin Medlin Funderburk, Jr., what the heck would you want to be called. Needless to say, even though my father blessed me with that name, I rarely ever told anyone. I mean, who wants to be called "Ervin"? As a young boy, I didn't. It was bad enough getting kidded as a skinny freckled face kid with bright red hair. So the first deviation that came up was "Mac", which interesting enough is the nickname I go by today. You see, I can thank my mother for that tag. Her maiden name was McDaniel and she wanted to have some claim to me, so as a small child I was known as "Little Mac". No, I do not want to be known as "Big Mac" now! Most of you who saw me know that I might qualify for that name since I am no longer the skinny 135 pound weakling that I was at City when you knew me with the red flat top hair. I often joke about how I was the model for the advertisement that use to be on the backs of comic books back in the day where skinny boys like me could buy the Charles Atlas muscle development equipment and be suddenly turned into a muscle bound hunk that all the girls would die for. Yeah,, right! Well, Mac is less bothersome than Ervin is so that is the name I go by now.

But what about "Tom" you ask. OK, now this a true story, no fiction to it as to how that happened. In the sixth grade I read the book "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and was fascinated by it. That guy was always into something and getting his friend Huck Finn into trouble in the process. I just thought that was a highly desirable life, far different from the one I had at the time. So one day I told Mrs. Bratcher, our sixth grade school teacher, that I liked the name "Tom" and wished that were my name. The next thing you know, Mrs. Bratcher got the attention of all the class and told them that I wanted to be known as "Tom" in the future. Funny, nobody seemed to question it and I started signing my name as Tom or Thomas and it felt good. Now as an aside, my parents had divorced just before I started the first grade and my father had moved to North Carolina, by the time I was in the sixth grade so he had no knowledge this was happening. My mother, didn't like the name Ervin either so she didn't stop the process that was starting. So when I enrolled in the 7th grade at Northside the next year, I gave my name as Thomas Mac Funderburk and it went into the school record from that point on. When I enrolled at City I did the same thing, never thinking anything about it. There had been no problem thus far, and I doubt I gave it a moments thought at the time as to what I was doing. In fact when I applied for my social security card when I went to work at the drug store on the mountain I again gave my name as "Thomas Funderburk". So that is how it got started. Now along the way, when I joined the band at City another name popped up. The band members started calling me "Fundy" as a nickname which was a lot more fun than "Funderburk". But that name disappeared when I finished high school at City.

Mac Funderburk

Now to be sure some of you have been wondering about whether the use of the name on official records every was a problem. Well the first time it happened, I had moved to Charlotte to live with my father, when I went to college. So when I applied to colleges they all wanted transcripts of my grades from City. I will never forget the day when my father asked me "Who is Thomas?" You see the registrar at City wrote back and said, "We don't have a record of "Ervin Medlin Funderburk, Jr." as being a student here. We did have a Thomas Mac Funderburk. Would that be him?" Now my father was not a person who tended to get real angry, but that day he was plenty angry. Imagine me trying to tell my father that I changed my name to Tom because I didn't like the name I was given as his junior. It took him a while to get over that, and he told me to straighten it out with the school which I did and I honestly don't know what name now exists in the records at City on me. Later the issue came up again as I went to work after finishing college at Wake Forest as I had forgotten that I had given "Thomas" as my name on the social security records. I am still a little surprised that I didn't have to have a birth certificate when I registered for Social Security back in 59.

Other names I have answered to? Well you can imagine what people do with "Funderburk". I have even spelled it to people to get it correct and they say something like, "Oh, Thunderbird, I got it."  So over the last fifty years or more I have answered to just about anything if it didn't sound too off the wall. My first wife had a few names for me too, but we won't go there. LOL 

So that is the story, so help me Ervin Medlin "Thomas" "Mac" "Fundy" Funderburk, Jr. 

Thank you for sharing this with the class Dru.


Send Mac a note at macflcsw@yahoo.com