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THE UTAH NEWSPAPER HALL OF FAME earned a scholarship to Cal/Berkeley. Which is where he was when his father asked him to return to the paper. Like all members of the family, he'd worked at the Chronicle as a youngster and had both mechanical and business sense. Frank (his family called him "Boyd" for vague reasons and he was later known as "Fuzz") also had card sense. He augmented his college spending money by extracting poker winnings from his Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers. His return to the Chronicle was probably the newspaper's salvation. Within two years after he became mechanical foreman and business manager, both Delta banks failed. Soon the nation plunged into the Depression of the '30s. But the family-operated Chronicle survived. In fact, thrived. "We were swamped with legals, paid for at the legal rate," Frank remembered. And, typically finding something humorous in the situation, he added, "These bank failures did not hurt us in any way, because we had no money to put in banks." Even his family didn't escape his light-hearted jesting. Reminiscing in a 1953 article, he wrote, "Between fishing trips, I married Wanda Peterson in 1939 and we have four children. Susan, 9, who can do a fair job on the folder and a poor job of sweeping; Mary Jane, 6, Deborah, 3 and the last one, Collins, 9 months, who up to now has done nothing around the Chronicle but keep the humidity high." The father-and-son publishing team guided the Chronicle through the depression and World War II, with its shortages of materials and help. Frank S., unlike his father, moved through the officer structure of the Utah State Press Association and became its president in 1942. Later he served six added years (1950-56) as a director. It was after a state press meeting that he wrote, tongue in cheek, of newspaper people: "Reading their papers, one would get the (mis)impression that they are almost human; a kind of deluded but harmless set of cusses so befuddled that they stick by preference to a slim picking instead of getting into some respectable business where an honest dollar might be won at half the work. But, no, once in the rut, there they stick." 429 |
