About

Frank was born in the depth of the Depression in the northern Flint Hills of Kansas and grew up on a series of small farms. He attended one-room country schools, the last of which closed the year he graduated from eighth grade.  Admire High School also closed the year he graduated.  Despite ranking third in his class of five students at Admire High, Frank was admitted to Kansas State Teachers College (now Emporia State University), where his studies were interrupted by the Korean War.  He began service in the United States Army at age twenty, spending  most of his time at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.  He earned a B.S. in English in 1956 and went into teaching. He taught at Derby High School for six years and received my M.A. from Emporia State in 1962. He taught English at Wichita High School Southeast for twenty-eight years.

Frank was always interested in art and liked to compare the literature of a period to the art of the accompanying time when possible, but it was the unusual influences of Southeast High School that stirred him to try his hand so to speak. Southeast had excellent art teachers – Don Weddle chiefly.  Among the contemporary artists that graduated from Southeast at that time were painter David Salle and sculptor Tom Otterness.

In the late 1970s, Frank’s parents died and at the farm auction he bought several junk pieces of old horse-drawn machinery. He had always admired the embossed designs in the cast iron that the manufacturers used then. Having to do something with his purchases, he tried the “found art” avenue. Gradually, he moved away from the “found art” because often the pieces didn’t seem to fit the sculpture that he had in mind.

In 1986, Frank purchased “the Hill” with its barn and trailer house so he could have a place to work without disturbing neighbors. He named it Henry's Sculpture Hill in homage to Henry David Thoreau who wrote in Walden: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer."  

His love of literature and poetry directed him to literary subjects, and his early life experiences of growing up and working on farms influenced many other works.  His creativity and wit are evident in all his creations.  As they say, the rest is history.