Ethel Funches
golfer (1913-2010)
Ethel Funches (1913–2010) was a champion amateur golfer from 1950 to 1980 who won a number of local, regional and national titles, including seven titles at the United Golfers Association National Women's Open, fourteen wins at the Wake-Robin Golf Club Championships and over 100 local and regional titles and trophies.
Early life
Funches was born on August 29, 1913, in Owens, South Carolina. She moved to Washington, D.C., during the Great Depression in 1932. Funches husband, Eugene Funches, taught her to play golf after the couple moved to Washington, D.C. Golf provided a social and competitive outlet for Funches and she devoted much of her free time honing her skills. During the day Funches was a cafeteria manager at Dunbar High School in the District of Columbia area until her retirement in 1970.
Career
Funches joined the Wake-Robin Golf Club (WRGC) in 1943. The club was formed seven years earlier in the home of Helen Webb Harris along with 13 other founding members and is the oldest black women's golf club in the United States.
At the time there was only one public, nine-hole course that was not segregated. The members of the club along with their husbands were able to convince the Federal Department of the Interior to create the Langston Golf Course, the second racially desegregated golf course in the District. The courses were not the only segregated aspect of golfing, the Professional Golfers' Association of America (PGA) had a standing by-law until the 1960s that prohibited African Americans from joining.
The public source identifies “Ethel Funches” as golfer (1913-2010). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Ethel, Funches and golfer.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20737504. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1913, 2010, 1950 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ethel Funches” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.