He was born in Fisher, Louisiana, a company sawmill town. Finishing high school in nearby Many in 1939, Frank went into the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) where he did farm work and planted trees. In 1941 he enrolled at Grambling University, but left school and enlisted after Pearl Harbor was attacked. Frank made sergeant, and sailed into the Pacific on the SS Meares, a converted freighter. "I stayed seasick the whole time," he recalls. Stationed first at Finchafen, New Guinea and then in the Philippines, he supervised pier work in unloading supplies. Frank went into the occupation of Japan, first at Kobe, and then in Osaka. As an African-American, Frank had mixed experiences in the military. "We had some good Southern officers over us and then we had some bad ones," Frank recalls. When he came home in 1946 he saw segregation still ruled in the South. Traveling by train from the west coast, he found he could no longer eat in the dining car once the train reached Brownwood, Texas. "When we got to Fort Worth, we got our food. They went in the dining room. They handed us sandwiches outside," he says. Frank was discharged at Camp Fannin near Tyler, Texas. He finished college and taught school, retiring after twenty years.