He was born in Ruston, Louisiana, to Mary Moore Price and Mark A. Price, Jr., a graduate of Louisiana College and World War I veteran. The family, fortunate to own a Model A, soon moved to Bernice. There, he recalls, "about eighty per cent of the people traveled by wagon or horse, or walked. It wasn't uncommon for people to walk seven, eight miles to town." They walked those distances, he says, to rest the animals from farm work. Fred worked at his uncle's dairy farm in summer. He sold candy and newspapers to soldiers bivouacking in the area during the Louisiana Maneuvers in 1941. After one semester at LSU, Fred volunteered for the U.S. Navy. He was sent to boot camp near Memphis, and later to aircraft radio training in Norman, Oklahoma, and to gunnery school in Jacksonville, Florida aboard a Curtis Helldiver (SB2C). There in Florida he saw his first jet, a P80. Discharged in June of 1946, Fred returned to school, this time in pre-med at Louisiana Tech, where he graduated in 1950. After medical school at LSU-New Orleans he came to Shreveport, where he remained as a surgeon for thirty-nine years.