In the 1960s, Mr. Eddie Funk opened several tattoo shops on Race Street in Chinatown, Philadelphia. Deemed as urban blight by city planners, this cityscape was home to bums sleeping on the streets where prostitutes worked, despondent drunks dwelling in flophouses, and industrious grifters and downtrodden–yet honest–characters hustling and gambling for easy fortunes. Amongst the handful of tattooers in this neighborhood, Eddie hung his flash on the wall, unpacked his stencils, mixed his inks, started tattooing, and joined the fray.
Bringing his Coney Island charm to Chinatown, Crazy Eddie made interesting friends, enjoyed drinks as several bars, found himself entangled in marital bliss, established himself as a tattooer in a new city, and cemented the permanence of his legendary moniker: Crazy Philadelphia Eddie.
$30/$50 with CD
Please listen to the four excerpts below taken from from Tattooing: The Life and Times of Crazy Philadelphia Eddie; My Vida Loca, Vol 2. Each audio disk comes with eight forty-minute tracks of Eddie telling the stories for each book. These are the raw files ghostwriter, Eric Foemmel used to write Eddie’s books. The disks have many large files, so it meant to be played on your computer or loaded onto your itunes.
In this first excerpt from Tattooing: The Life and Times of Crazy Philadelphia Eddie; My Vida Loca, Vol 2, Eddie describes what Chinatown looked like in the 1960s. From this location, he built his tattoo business and legacy.
Eddie describes what would happen when he tattooed minors. As a tattooer in the 1950s and 1960s, he was prepared to be arrested and jailed at least every two years.
Jack Dracula, who had worked for Eddie in Coney Island and in Chinatown, was beginning to become an aggravation for Eddie. After Eddie drove his car through Dracula’s shop, he wanted to punctuate the message with a brick.
Eddie traveled to many cities for fun or business. Regardless of the reason of his excursions, Eddie was always found himself in the center of the action. Las Vegas was no exception for Eddie.