Born in Fort Towson, Oklahoma, Frank moved with his family as a small child to Vivian, Louisiana, where his father worked as a barber. By age eleven Frank was working twelve-hour shifts at Dixie Drug as a carhop and delivery boy, earning fifty cents per day. He also shot game with a twenty-two rifle, adding meat to the family dining table. "Almost everything we killed we'd cook it," he recalls.When his mother and father separated, he lived with his maternal grandparents. He left Vivian in 1939 when he was fourteen, going with his mother to Alexandria where she rented a large boarding house. They later moved on to Monroe, and then to Shreveport in 1940, where he worked at drugstores and a grocery store, and dropped out of school in the ninth grade. Frank worked at United Gas Pipeline as a messenger before joining the U.S. Navy and sailing to Pearl Harbor aboard a seaplane tender, the USS Mackinac (AVP-13). As a seaman, second-class, he worked on deck but soon became a yeoman striker, doing office work such as typing. He also taught himself typewriter repair and kept the ship's log. His ship came under fire several times, including strafing attacks by Japanese fighter planes. His ship was near some of the largest battles in the Pacific. "At night you could almost always see Saipan, Okinawa, Iwo Jima," he says. "You could see tracers all night long like fireworks." Frank sailed back to San Francisco, and was discharged on January 16, 1946 in San Francisco as a yeoman. He enrolled at Centenary College and held down drafting and typing jobs for an engineer and architect, while working every other night at Osmond Funeral Home. Frank was later employed at National Cylinder Gas in Bossier City, and then for Ohio Medical Products Division where he worked as a salesman for twenty-four years, retiring in 1987.