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By Lee Habeeb
Newsweek Columnist, Vice President of Content at Salem Media Group and host of "Our American Stories"
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It’s a name you’ll bump into when you walk the halls of one of America’s finest museums, and it’s no accident the exhibit this man funded at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City is called “Prosperity Junction.” Bob Funk Sr.’s life had everything to do with finding work—and pathways to prosperity—for more than 7 million Americans through the employment agency he founded.
None of it was possible without the values he learned growing up in Duvall, Washington, a small farming community of 300 people. And the hardships he endured in his remarkable life.
Born in 1940 as America was easing out of the Great Depression, Funk’s home life was anything but prosperous.
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"My mother had a nervous breakdown when I was 2 and my sister took care of me until my mom got well," Funk told Our American Stories in 2020.
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What he didn't know until his mother passed was the cause of her breakdown.
"I looked at the family farm checkbook and we were going broke," he lamented.
It took five years before his mom was back to her old self, and it was a job that did it.
"She went to work at a grocery store, free of charge, for our groceries," Funk explained. "I had four shirts through high school and three pair of Levi's. That's all I had."
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Hard work was something Funk knew from an early age at his cousin Adolf's farm.
"I worked from 6 in the morning till 10 at night every day of the week,” Funk said. “God proscribed a six-day workweek for mankind: My cousin Adolf required seven.”
Hard work was expected in his German family.
"It was a bother," Funk recalled. "It was always a privilege to work."
When he was 11, Funk had an encounter with an unknown traveling evangelist that changed his life.
"I didn't know Billy Graham from Adam, and the pastor we had encouraged us to go to his crusade in Seattle," Funk explained. "His style was to invite people to make a commitment spiritually in their lives. And so, I thought, 'If I don't make a commitment, chances are our bus is going to turn over and I'm going to die, so I'd better make the commitment tonight,'" Funk laughed. "It changed a lot of lives."
Funk went off to college, completed his master's, and tried his hand in the pulpit.
"I was a terrible preacher," he confessed.
Then came the career he didn't plan for.
"I was fortunate to get with a Christian company that was in the staffing business," Funk said. "I was trying to help people spiritually as well and, consequently, I couldn't interview as many people as the others. After a year, my boss, a fine Christian man, came to me and said, 'Bob, I understand you're trying to help them spiritually, but we do have to make a profit in this business," Funk recalled, laughing. "So I would bring them in after hours if they were looking for spiritual help."
Funk soon found himself heading east, transferred by the company that employed him to run their office in Oklahoma City. Not long after, he would face more hardship: The office was shut down, leaving Funk and his wife—and those local office workers— without work.
“So he turned to these people and said, ‘I'm going to start a company. And I don't know how I'm going to do this, but I'm going to hire you and I'm going to pay you and we're gonna make it work,’” explained Cathy Keating, former first lady of Oklahoma, board member of the museum and longtime Funk friend. “Bob told me the first two years of the company, he took a second mortgage on his house, borrowed money on a handshake with a local banker and built his company one person at a time, one job at a time.”
Funk, Keating added, brought his work ethic and never-give-up attitude along with him to Oklahoma City: “The Code of the West, which he lived every day of his life, he believed in fully.”
Though Funk failed at his first attempt at ministry, and his arrival in his adopted city started poorly, the staffing business he built from scratch, Express Employment Professionals, would turn into a bigger ministry than he could have dreamed, with nearly 800 franchises around the world.
Was it luck or providence that Funk failed in the pulpit?
"Well, had I stayed in the pulpit, I probably would not have had the opportunity to minister to so many people, and we're in the 7 million range now," Funk said.
One of Funk’s political heroes understood the value of work.
"President Reagan once said that the best social program is a job because it gives people pride and purpose," he said. "It gives them self-esteem, no matter what level the job happens to be."
Funk's faith played a central role in his success.
"Every person that comes in looking for a job is insecure," Funk said, choking up. "They need encouragement, hope and compassion. And that's what ministry is about."
Funk, who died in July 2025, was a man of many talents and interests, including economics—serving as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Kansas City.
Funk was also an active philanthropist in Oklahoma.
"The rewards of giving are much more meaningful than making money," Funk noted. "Money has never been my motivator, and when I interviewed people, I asked them what their motivator was. Usually, people motivated by money will rip your organization apart because of jealousy and not caring about the other person."
One of Funk’s great loves was the cattle business. He established Express Ranches in 1991, and it would become the largest seedstock cattle operation in the nation.
Last but not least was his passion for the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, where he served as chairman of the board, and was also one of its largest donors.
“It’s a museum that focuses on family, friends, faith—all part of the Code of the West,” Keating described. “Pull yourselves up by your boots, live each day with courage, and ride for the brand. Bob was so proud to be a part of that.”
Funk attributed all his happiness and success to one thing: "Life is about other people, not ourselves, and that's an old biblical principal."
The Bible is filled with passages about work, too, this from Colossians 3:23: "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters."
Funk worked—and played—with all his heart, always with an extended hand, a hearty greeting and his cowboy hat in tow. Serving the people around him and his community until his final days. And the God he served, too.
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