Black Swan Moments

By Joseph Jackson

Black Swan Moments is the story of the Kennedy assassination and the man who would have solved it. Nuclear physicist Frank Jackson had a top secret security clearance. He knew there had been a conspiracy, and he was going to name names, but on December 13, 1963, he died under mysterious circumstances at the age of forty-nine. His death paved the way for the magic bullet theory.

This book explains the real reason that Chaim Richman and the Paines were introduced to Lee Harvey Oswald. It also reveals what really happened in Dealey Plaza, and it names the men who shot Kennedy. It features new information that explains how the assassination was financed. It was written to explain what happened to Frank Jackson and the measures taken to silence the author. It also includes shocking information about the events that led to the controversial removal of Frank Jackson as director of the Center for Naval Analyses in 1962.

In 1963, many people in the government were aware of Frank Jackson. Among them were Richard Bissell, Fred Korth, Bobby Kennedy, John McCone, John Connally, and John McCloy. The intelligence community couldn’t stop this book from being published because it includes rare photos, rare documents, and unimpeachable information from well-placed sources. Highly detailed, it answers questions that most people would be afraid to ask about the death of our thirty-fifth president.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781684567218

Joseph Jackson

The author, Joseph Jackson, is 58 year old Chicagoan. He has, among other things, been interested in poetry for many years. He has also won "Editor's Choice Award" in the online poetry contest for Poetry.com in 2008. In addition, the author who is an former professional musician, enjoys playing and listening to music, crossword puzzles, reading, tv, lifting weights, video games and just plain enjoying life as much as possible. The author attended catholic grammar and highschool graduating from a private institution. He suffered a traumatic childhood but managed to pass classes at school.The author has held a number of positions including postal mail handler and state child welfare worker. He considers all experiences in life, good or bad, as contributing to make a stronger person. He feels if you're having a bad time in life one should think positive and perhaps it won't be so bad.

Book preview

Chapter One

The First Forty Years

My grandfather was born in Greece near the Turkish coastline on November 17, 1884. He was born into a Greek shipping family and grew up on the Isle of Samos in the midst of various Greek architectural wonders. He grew up at a time when the Old World was migrating to the United States. America had an aura about it, and his dream was to own a restaurant there.

In 1899, he left his family behind and sailed to the United States on an ocean liner. After his ship docked, he passed through Ellis Island and discarded his birth name. For his new first name, he selected the biblical name of Joseph. He added the names Andrew and Jackson as a way of paying homage to national war hero Andrew Jackson.

With his new name, Joseph Andrew Jackson settled in Norfolk, Virginia, and became a naturalized US citizen. At that time, most Americans in his age group weren’t attending high school. Most of them had ended their formal education to go to work. However, Joseph did go to high school, and after he graduated, he invested all his money in a restaurant he started in Norfolk.

Joseph was capable and independent, but he didn’t understand the economics associated with running a business in the Navy town. After he lost the business, he was hired to work as a molder at Berkley Machine Works and Foundry, in the Berkley section of Norfolk.

While working there, he met a native of Tyrrell County, North Carolina, named Anne Annie Elizabeth Thomas (1887–1951).

After completing the eleventh grade, Annie dropped out of school and made plans to marry Joseph. They married in 1906, and after a brief honeymoon, they quickly took up residence at 221 Stafford Street.

While living on Stafford Street, they were blessed by a son named Paul Linwood. He was born on July 13, 1911, and was soon joined by a brother, named Francis Lloyd. Like his father, Francis had black hair. Francis was born on August 27, 1914. However, nobody ever called him Francis. He was always known as Frank.

On October 1, 1917, Annie Jackson gave birth to a daughter, whom the Jacksons named Ruth Anne. In September of 1920, Frank Jackson was enrolled at Robert Gatewood Elementary School. From 1925 until 1927, he attended George Washington Elementary School, where his grades were exceptional.

Frank was such an exceptional student that as a seventh grader, he received the American Legion Medal. This medal is usually awarded to a graduating high school senior, but it was awarded to Frank when he was only twelve years old.

From 1927 until 1929, Frank attended Ruffner Junior High School, where he continued to get good grades. In September of 1929, Frank entered the tenth grade at Maury High School, which was named after Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury of the Confederate Navy.

At Maury High School, Frank took technical preparatory courses that were offered to college-bound students. He also served as assistant business manager for the school newspaper and was a member of the Cannon Mathematics Club. In June of 1932, Frank received his high school sheepskin and began looking for a job.

During the Great Depression, everyone was scrapping to make ends meet. Jobs were scarce, and with few marketable skills and no work history, Frank couldn’t get hired. He remained unemployed until early 1933, when he had a long talk with his father. Joseph wanted Frank to gain work experience by learning a trade.

At that time, Joseph was employed at 703 Pearl Street as the superintendent of Berkley Machine Works and Foundry, where Paul worked as a molder. Joseph advised Frank to consider working with Paul at the foundry.

Frank was hired to work at the foundry as an apprentice molder. While gaining design and machine shop experience, Frank spent the next two years wearing uniform jersey no. 29 as the starting left guard for the Hustlers of the Madison Ward Community High Football League. It was during that time that he learned how to execute a whirling tackle. He also spent two winters playing basketball for the Berkley Boys Club.

During those years, Ruth was a student at Maury High School, where she served as a typist for the school newspaper. Annie and Joseph were members of the First Nazarene Church of Berkley. Frank used to refer to them as holy rollers because the congregation sang and danced in the aisles as if they were in an exalted state.

The Jacksons were living at 719 Pine Street in those days. They regularly attended church in an era when only the most devout Christians tithed 10 percent of their income. In the absence of surplus funds, Joseph always offered 20 percent of his gross income to the church. He was a good Christian and a teetotaler who never drank anything stronger than High Rock ginger ale.

Joseph never fully appreciated Frank’s intelligence. He completely underestimated his son’s potential, and as a Greek immigrant, he couldn’t understand why Frank would want to go to college.

From 1934 until 1935, while employed at the foundry, Frank took night school courses at the University of Virginia’s Portsmouth campus. Shortly after his twenty-first birthday, he quit his job at the foundry and enrolled at the Norfolk Division of the College of William and Mary as a freshman. The two-year extension campus was located on Hampton Boulevard, directly across the street from the extension campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

The Norfolk Division campus of the College of William and Mary opened in 1930 as a result of efforts made by A. Herbert Foreman, a prominent member of both the Norfolk School Board and the college’s Board of Visitors. William and Mary football was played on the Norfolk Division campus at Larchmont Field from 1930 until 1935, when ground was broken for an eighteen-thousand-seat stadium known as Foreman Field.

Larchmont Field was originally part of the campus of Larchmont Elementary School. In 1930, the property was purchased by the City of Norfolk and given to the College of William and Mary’s new two-year extension campus. The varsity teams at William and Mary’s Williamsburg campus had always been known as the Indians.

In September of 1930, the varsity teams of the Norfolk Division campus became known as the Braves.

In September of 1935, Frank Jackson tried out for the varsity football team at William and Mary. At five foot eight and 138 pounds, Frank surprised everybody by beating out Edwin Barsell, John Hodges, John Spencer, and Ira Jake Richardson for the starting left guard position. Frank’s teammates were so impressed that the little guy could play football that they nicknamed him Tom Thumb.

College football was a big-time sport in 1935, and in Norfolk, football was the only game in town. College football had a longer history than professional football, and because of this, it was more popular than professional football. Paul Jackson played right tackle for a Norfolk-based minor league football team in 1935 called the Berkley Bears. Although he was the best football player in the family, the popularity of college football afforded the William and Mary Braves more press coverage than the minor-league Bears.

A preseason team photo of the entire Braves football team in their home white jerseys appeared in the October 11, 1935, edition of the Norfolk Division campus’s school newspaper, The High Hat. In that picture, Frank Jackson is wearing a numberless jersey and is seated in the front row, fifth from the left.

Frank was the smallest player on the Braves roster. Although the Braves were a physical team, most of their players weren’t big. Roger Denny (210 pounds) and Johnny Davis (195 pounds) were the only players on the team who weighed more than 175 pounds.

During tryouts, the Braves’ head coach saw in Frank an ability that transcended size. Frank had a talent for moving quickly through the offensive line and tackling the ballcarrier. His initial quickness was good, and his running speed was excellent.

Frank was a wiry little package of dynamite, but some questioned if he was big enough. The head coach was five foot eight and 165 pounds, and as a former football player, he believed in Frank’s ability.

The head coach of the football team was Tommy Scott, who had been a college football star at Virginia Military Institute. As left end on the varsity football team, Tommy Scott won All-State honors twice. In 1929, he was named left end on the All-Southern Conference team and received honorable mention on the All-American team. He finished his college football career by playing in the first North-South All-Star game in Atlanta.

In 1930, Tommy Scott graduated from Virginia Military Institute and became a member of the faculty at the Norfolk Division campus of the College of William and Mary. In September of that year, Tommy Scott became the athletic director at the new school. In addition to coaching the football team, he taught math and coached the varsity baseball and basketball teams.

During his first five years as head football coach, the football team was not successful. The low point came in 1934, when the William and Mary Braves lost 44–0 to the varsity football team of Louisburg College. During those years, he was often ridiculed as the butt of a cruel joke that went like this:

College Student: Hey, did you hear that William and Mary’s football coach is a descendent of US Army major general Winfield Scott?

Football Fan: Oh, really? What’s his name?

College Student: Winless Scott.

An infusion of talented incoming freshmen improved the football team dramatically in 1935. Among them were Frank Jackson (left guard), Johnny Doyle (right guard), Earl Jackson (center), Tom Hogan (fullback), Woody Barnes (right end), and Elmo Barnes (left halfback). Sophomores on the team included Fred Kyle (left end), Singleton Garrett (right halfback), Roger Denny (right tackle), and Johnny Davis (left tackle). The captain and star quarterback of the team was a sophomore named Dick Dozier.

The team’s 1935 regular-season record is listed below:

On opening day, the William and Mary Braves took a short ride down Hampton Boulevard for a game against the Recruits at Naval Base Stadium, where 3,500 fans attended the game, which the Braves won on a fourth-quarter touchdown pass from Dick Dozier to Fred Kyle.

Their next game was played on campus at Larchmont Field. The Braves scored two first-half touchdowns and coasted to victory in a revenge game against Louisburg College. It was the last game played on campus before Foreman Field was completed, and there was a lot of fan interest in this game.

After the Braves won their next two games, the October 25, 1935, issue of The High Hat featured a photo titled The Powerful Forward Wall of the 1935 Norfolk Division Braves. Frank Jackson appears in this photo with other linemen who started on opening day.

Around that time, Charles Borjes of The Virginian-Pilot snapped a team photo of the Braves in their green road jerseys for the 1936 school yearbook. At that time, the Braves were regarded as the best football team that the Norfolk Division campus had ever had.

On the night of October 25, the Gallaudet College football team sailed out of Washington, DC, on a steamboat that docked in Norfolk the following morning. On the afternoon of October 26, they traveled down Twentieth Street to Bain Field, where the Braves completely demolished them. The game featured reverse laterals, forward passes, interceptions, power plays, and the outstanding defense of William and Mary. The Braves scored five touchdowns that day, and after the game ended, the visitors left the stadium disillusioned and banged up.

When the Braves took the field against the William and Mary Papooses, William and Mary football was the hottest thing in Norfolk. The football team from William and Mary’s Williamsburg campus lost to the Braves that day, and the winning touchdown was tallied in the third quarter when Tom Hogan carried the pigskin into the end zone from the five-yard line.

Winless Scott wasn’t winless anymore! All of a sudden, Tommy Scott’s Braves were the best junior college football team in Virginia. The Braves had a six-game winning streak, and football fans were talking about the possibility of an undefeated season for the Norfolk Division team. After several years of watching the Braves lose, football fans in Norfolk finally had a good college team to root for.

On November 15, 1935, the Braves played East Carolina Teachers College in Portsmouth. The East Carolina Pirates were a lousy football team. In most of their games, their final point total was in the single digits. Their record in 1935 included a 13–0 loss to Louisburg College, a 6–0 loss to Wingate College, and a 6–2 loss to a high school team.

Prior to the William and Mary game, East Carolina had only one victory, which had come at the expense of the hapless varsity football team of Chowan College. The Pirates were the underdogs when they arrived in Portsmouth, but after the game began, everything went wrong for the Braves.

Early in the first quarter, Captain Dick Dozier left the game with back pain and a shoulder injury. Elmo Barnes replaced him as quarterback before leaving the game with an elbow injury in the second quarter. With the score tied 6–6, Singleton Garrett became William and Mary’s third quarterback of the game.

Garrett failed to complete a pass that afternoon, and late in the second quarter, he dropped a bad snap, which resulted in a safety when the Pirates’ right guard recovered the ball in the end zone. After taking the lead, East Carolina scored another safety in the fourth quarter en route to a 10–6 victory.

The game ended with the Braves in a state of disbelief. Their offense had failed to click because they went through most of the game with a third-string quarterback. It was one of the greatest upsets in the history of college football! After leaving the locker room, the Braves left Portsmouth knowing that the best team didn’t win.

Their most exciting game was a 13–7 victory over Potomac State College. Late in the fourth quarter, with seconds on the clock and no time-outs remaining, the score was tied and the Braves had the ball on the one-yard line. After the snap, Dozier handed the ball off to Tom Hogan. With Frank Jackson blocking, Hogan ran past the left guard and carried the pigskin into the end zone and scored the game-winning touchdown on the final play of the game.

After the last game of the season, Tommy Scott had nothing but praise for the defensive line. Frank had been part of a defense that allowed opposing teams only three touchdowns and one field goal during the entire eight-game season.

Frank’s popularity and his value to the Braves were summed up in the November 29, 1935, issue of The High Hat, in an article titled In the Wigwam:

He is very fast and one of the scrappiest linesman we have ever seen on the Larchmont gridiron. He teams up with Johnny Doyle to form a great guard combination. His chief stock in trade is the ability to knife through an opponent’s line and smear enemy backs behind the line. Off the field, Frank is a swell fellow. At Maury he was an honor graduate and seems headed for the same honor at the Division. He is popular on and off the playing field as a real fellow.

On November 23, 1935, Norfolk Naval Air Station finished their season by playing a scoreless game against the University of Virginia Reserves. Two days later, Tommy Scott announced that the Braves would be playing the Recruits in a postseason football game on Saturday, December 7, 1935, at Naval Base Stadium. Proceeds from the game’s ticket sales would be turned over to Associated Charities of Norfolk and the Naval Relief Society.

Tickets went on sale on the day of the announcement, and it quickly became necessary to erect additional bleachers at the Naval Base gridiron. It was anticipated that six thousand tickets would be sold, but by Sunday, ten thousand tickets had been sold.

On December 5, a team photo of the Recruits appeared in the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, and the next day, a team photo of the green-jerseyed Braves appeared in the Virginian-Pilot. In that photo, Frank Jackson is seated in the second row, third from the right.

The Recruits wanted to win the exhibition game in the worst way.

On opening day, late in the fourth quarter, the Braves were leading 13–10 when the Recruits thought that they had scored the game-winning touchdown. The play was called back because one of their players was offside, and the Braves went on to win the game. The Recruits wanted another shot at the Braves, and the December 7 game would pit Norfolk’s best amateur football teams against each other.

On the day of the big game, some fans drove to Naval Base Stadium, while others took public transportation. Because of cold weather, many of the ticket holders failed to show up for one of the greatest games in the history of William and Mary football.

The 2,500 fans in attendance witnessed the magnificent spectacle of a dress parade that began at 1:30 p.m. EST. The bands of Fort Monroe, Fork Union Military Academy, and Norfolk Naval Air Station played songs and marched in military solidarity. After the pregame ceremonies ended, the game began at 2:00 p.m. EST, with Frank Jackson starting at the right guard position.

The fans at Naval Base Stadium witnessed a spectacular game. The Braves intercepted three passes and scored three touchdowns, beating the Recruits 21–7. Among the fans with seats on the fifty-yard line were Paul Jackson and several members of the Berkley Bears. They were all impressed with the speed and agility of Frank Jackson.

It was generally agreed that Frank should play for the Berkley Bears after his college days were over. Later that day, a decision was made to change the team’s name from Bears to Braves as an inducement to sign Frank to a professional contract.

On December 8, 1935, game-action photos of the postseason game appeared in The Virginian-Pilot. One of these photos appeared on the front page under the title Galloping Action in Charity Football Game at Naval Base Stadium. The picture shows the Recruits’ left halfback carrying the football across the scrimmage line for a yardage gain. Frank Jackson is prominently visible in the center of the photo, running toward the ballcarrier.

Two photos taken by Charles Borjes were published on the front page of the newspaper’s sports section under the title Two of the 40 Passes Tried Yesterday. The top photo shows Fred Kyle catching a pass near the sideline while a Recruits player is reaching for the football. Frank Jackson is the player on the left side of the photograph.

On December 8, 1935, after his parents came home from church, Paul Jackson showed these photos to his father and said, Now there are two football stars in the family!

On January 1, 1936, the Berkley Bears became the Berkley Braves.

At that time, Paul was looking forward to the day when he and Frank would be teammates on the Berkley Braves.

Paul was the original Bobby Layne. He’d party on Saturday night, wake up with a hangover, and play a great game of football at St. Helena Field. If he had graduated from high school, he could have been a varsity first-string tackle on virtually any college football team in the country.

In contrast to Frank’s studious bent, Paul was a boisterous, self-indulgent good-time Charlie. He was a fun-loving party animal who enjoyed being the center of attention. He was also a talented artist who specialized in cartooning.

Paul was the alpha male. He was tall and lean and built like a circus strongman. He wasn’t mean, but if there was an argument, he would ask you if you’d like to step outside and fight him. His fatal flaw was that he thought of beer and cigarettes as essential food groups.

In 1936, there were roughly 1,500 colleges in the United States. Most of them were nowhere near Norfolk. There was no commercial air travel in 1936, and because of this, the Norfolk Division Braves mostly played baseball against teams located in their geographic region.

The Braves played baseball against a mixed bag of opponents in 1936. They played against Navy-affiliated teams, college teams, and some of Virginia’s best high school teams.

Frank Jackson batted seventh as an outfielder for the Braves. Sometimes, he put on a catcher’s mask and went behind the plate. Although he was a seldom-used catcher, the other catchers on the team were sophomores and were destined to transfer to other schools after the semester ended. This meant that Frank would probably be the Braves’ first-string catcher in 1937.

The Braves scored 107 runs in a seventeen-game season. Although they were a good-hitting team, they lost their first five games in 1936. They then won six of their next eight games before going on a road trip to North Carolina. After losing to Louisburg College and East Carolina Teachers College, they lost a ten-inning game in Williamsburg to the William and Mary Papooses.

On May 13, the Braves finished the 1936 season at Larchmont Field with a 14–5 loss to Norfolk Naval Air Station. After watching his starting catcher commit two errors and a passed ball, Coach Tommy Scott removed him from the game and put Frank Jackson behind the plate.

The Braves finished the season with Frank as their catcher, and by the end of the day, Tommy Scott had decided that Frank would be his starting catcher in 1937. The Braves were a run-of-the-mill junior college baseball team in 1936, and Tommy Scott needed a catcher who could excel both offensively and defensively. The surprising emergence of Frank Jackson as the heir apparent to the starting catcher position was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise-dismal season.

A close examination of the team’s record reveals that the Braves defeated both Louisburg College and the William and Mary Papooses at Larchmont Field. On average, they scored six runs per game and played seventeen afternoon games in a span of thirty-three days. Their record of six wins and eleven losses included four wins and three losses against high school teams. They were beaten twice by Maury High School, East Carolina Teachers College, Norfolk Naval Air Station, and the Apprentice School of Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company. In several games, they were ahead after seven innings, but they ended up losing in the ninth inning.

In 1936, the first yearbook of the Norfolk Division of the College of William and Mary was published. A photograph of the Braves baseball team appears on page 57 of The Cauldron. In the photo, Frank Jackson is the fourth man from the right in the back row.

As one of the team’s starting outfielders, Frank usually played left field. Other members of the team included center fielder Edwin Holland, right fielder Johnny Davis, shortstop H. P. Hardy, utility player Cliff Robertson, third baseman Earl Jackson, second baseman Dick Dozier, first baseman Heywood Mercer, infielder Billy McMillan, and outfielder Walter Godfrey.

The catching duties were shared by the weak-hitting Henry Miles and first-stringer Thomas Kelley, a good-hitting, error-prone catcher who occasionally played first base.

The team’s starting pitchers included Lonnie Seay, Freddie Edmonds, and their ace, Woody Barnes. When he was a senior in high school, Woody pitched his team to the Tidewater Interscholastic League pennant. He was a hard-throwing right hander with excellent control, but he couldn’t win with the Braves. The infield was a comedy of errors, and the bullpen was a disaster.

On Saturday, April 11, 1936, William and Mary opened their season against Norfolk Naval Air Station at Naval Base Stadium. Woody Barnes started for the Braves and gave up two runs in six innings. After he left the game, Braves pitchers gave up eight more runs and the Recruits won 10–3.

While this game was in progress, another game started at East End Park in Newport News. That afternoon, the Apprentice School Maroons of Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company played an exhibition game against the Buffalo Bisons of the International League. The Maroons were one of the best amateur baseball teams in the Tidewater area.

Although they lost this game, the Maroons managed to hit four singles and a double off a couple of former major-league pitchers named Bob Kline (ex-Philadelphia Athletics) and Hod Lisenbee (ex-Washington Senators). Relief pitcher Bill Helmer pitched effectively for the Maroons in this game, giving up four hits in the last four innings.

Two days later, Helmer started for the Maroons at East End Park in a seven-inning game against the Braves. The 8–0 rout ended with center fielder Frank Jackson in the on-deck circle.

On April 15, 1936, the Braves played their home opener against Woodrow Wilson High School at Larchmont Field. With the score tied 5–5, Woodrow Wilson had runners on first and second when their leadoff man stepped into the batter’s box in the ninth inning. The batter hit what appeared to be a single to left field. Under normal circumstances, left fielder Frank Jackson would have fielded the ball and thrown the lead runner out at home plate.

However, on this occasion, Frank got caught on an in-between hop when the ball hit a rock, bounced past his outstretched glove, and rolled all the way to the left field fence. The batter was credited with hitting a game-winning three-run home run.

On April 16, 1936, the varsity baseball team of Maury High School lost an exhibition game to the Norfolk Tars of the Piedmont League. Professional teams don’t normally play baseball against high school teams, but the Maury High School Commodores were no ordinary baseball team. In 1935 and 1936, the Commodores were the best high school baseball team in the state of Virginia. Their coach was the legendary Dick Fletcher.

In 1989, Dick Fletcher was inducted into the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame, along with Gene Alley (ex-Pittsburgh Pirates), Earl Faison (ex-San Diego Chargers), Lou Creekmur (ex-Detroit Lions), Olympic gold medalist Melissa Belote, and Tommy Scott.

In 1928, Dick Fletcher began coaching the varsity football team at Maury High School. One of his starting tackles that year was Paul Jackson. On the first day of practice, Coach Fletcher began calling Paul Horse because Paul reminded him of one of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. The nickname was later changed to Hoss, as in Hoss Cartwright, and Paul went on to become one of Coach Fletcher’s favorite players.

Fletcher preferred large athletes (i.e., Paul Jackson) as opposed to medium-size athletes on his sports teams. In 1932, Frank Jackson decided to try out for the Maury High School baseball team. The team needed a catcher, and Frank wanted to be the team’s starting catcher. However, Coach Fletcher had other ideas.

Before holding tryouts, Coach Fletcher called a meeting for all the students who wanted to play baseball. The meeting was held in an empty classroom, and during the meeting, Fletcher spotted Frank, who was seated in the front row. All the students were asked what position they wanted to play. When Frank told Fletcher that he wanted to be the catcher, the coach gave him a quizzical look. He thought that Frank wanted to be the batboy, and he couldn’t picture Frank as a catcher.

After the meeting ended, Coach Fletcher rook Frank aside. Frank was told that he would not be allowed to try out for the baseball team. Fletcher told Frank that he wasn’t big enough to play baseball and that if he tried to make the team as a catcher, he would probably get hurt.

Frank was infuriated that Fletcher would deprive him of a chance to play high school baseball. He knew that Fletcher had made a foolish mistake.

Throughout the 1935 football season, Tommy Scott and Dick Fletcher received kudos from the Norfolk sportswriters. While Tommy Scott was coaching the successful William and Mary team, Dick Fletcher was coaching the undefeated Maury High School team. Fletcher and Scott were big names in Norfolk, and when Scott found out about Frank’s experience with Fletcher, he decided to do something about it. Scott never liked Fletcher, and it was time to make a fool out of him.

On the afternoon of April 27, 1936, the Braves traveled across town to City Park to play baseball against the Commodores. Before most baseball games, the coaches walk from the dugout to the home plate umpire and present him with the starting lineup cards. However, on this day, when Dick Fletcher brought the lineup card to home plate, he was surprised to see Frank Jackson wearing a William and Mary baseball uniform. Coach Scott had decided to let Frank present the lineup card as a way of sending a message to Fletcher.

The high school coach was speechless when he met with Frank and the umpire. Most college baseball players played high school baseball. One rarely hears about a college player who didn’t play baseball in high school.

Frank had a lot of fun at Fletcher’s expense, but Fletcher had the last laugh. The Commodores won the game on an unearned run in the ninth inning.

After the game, Frank returned to 719 Pine Street, where he enjoyed an early-evening dinner with his family. At the dinner table, Paul needled Frank about losing to a high school team. Frank responded by saying that the Braves would win on Saturday. Woody Barnes of South Norfolk would be pitching against East Carolina Teachers College, so Frank invited the entire family to watch the afternoon baseball game at Larchmont Field.

Joseph thought that was a wonderful idea. He had already developed the habit of watching the Norfolk Tars play baseball, but he had never seen a college baseball game.

On the night of Friday, April 17, 1936, Paul Jackson and his good friends John Custus and Wilbur Ellis invited Frank to attend a dance party with them. Frank could have tagged along, but he declined. He was planning on playing left field on Saturday, and he wanted to be well rested for the game.

At the party, Paul, John, and Wilbur met and danced with young Berkley women and drank alcohol. A fun time was had by all, and by the end of the party, Paul was very, very drunk. Sometime after 2:00 a.m. EST, the three men got into John’s car. Instead of going home, they elected to drive into the bordering borough of South Norfolk. John was driving, and Wilbur was sitting on the front seat. Paul was sitting behind John on the back seat, next to a gasoline can.

Around 3:30 a.m. EST, the car was on Barnes Road when Paul decided to smoke a cigarette. He struck a match and accidently ignited the gasoline can. Within seconds, the car was on fire, and after John stopped the car, he and Wilbur exited the car and ran away from it.

After they had run about two hundred feet, they realized that Paul was still in the car. He was passed-out drunk on the back seat.

Wilbur realized that they were going to have to run back to the car and pull Paul out of the vehicle. John was already in enough trouble. He had been drinking and driving, and he was too scared to save Paul. Two men were needed to pull Paul out of the car and carry him to safety. Wilbur tried to reason with John, but John wouldn’t go near the car.

After a brief argument, Wilbur ran back to the car. He opened the door and was burned while pulling Paul out of the burning vehicle. South Norfolk police cars arrived on the scene and took Paul and Wilbur to St. Vincent’s Hospital. Wilbur was treated for his burns in the emergency room and was released. Paul wasn’t so lucky.

Paul was admitted to the hospital with fourth-degree burns over 90 percent of his body.

There was sorrow in Berkley that day. Instead of going to Larchmont Field, the Jacksons rushed to Paul’s bedside as soon as they heard the news. It was a hopeless situation. If Paul survived the tragedy, he wouldn’t be able to live a normal life. Nobody wants to survive such a tragedy, and he quickly lost the will to live. On Sunday morning, twenty-four-year-old Paul Jackson passed away, twenty-four hours after he struck the match.

Paul’s death resulted from his reckless lifestyle. If Paul had not died, he would have eventually outgrown his immaturity and become a successful artist. His tragic death was seen as a freak accident by people in the neighborhood, but Joseph knew better. He had been warning Paul about the dangers of alcohol for a long time.

On the afternoon of April 20, 1936, Paul was buried at Riverside Memorial Park after a brief funeral at the First Nazarene Church of Berkley. If Wilbur and John hadn’t wasted valuable time running away from the car, they could have saved Paul’s life.

Frank finished his freshman year at William and Mary by making the dean’s list. After the semester ended, Frank signed up for a three-year hitch in the US Naval Reserves. His tour of duty with the Naval Reserves would take him on summer cruises to Bermuda and Cuba.

Frank had just started his sophomore year at William and Mary when Monday-night football came to Norfolk. On Monday, October 12, 1936, Frank was at Foreman Field when the William and Mary Braves defeated Louisburg College. Frank wasn’t in uniform that night. He watched the game from the bleachers.

Frank didn’t play football in 1936. He wanted to finish his sophomore year and transfer to the Williamsburg campus. Frank was preoccupied with his schoolwork and his part-time employment. He was focused on earning enough money to pay his tuition.

At that time, Annie Jackson was suffering from rheumatic fever, and her husband was struggling to take care of her medical needs. Joseph always put money in the church collection plate, but he never had money for Frank’s education. Pell Grants weren’t available to college students of the 1930s. Unless your parents assisted you financially, you had to work your way through college.

As a varsity letter-winner in football and baseball, Frank joined the Monogram Club in the fall of 1936. In December, he became the starting right guard on the Braves’ varsity basketball team. By this time, Frank was becoming Coach Tommy Scott’s favorite scholar-athlete.

Tommy Scott had been a good athlete in his younger days, but he was never much of a student. In February of 1921, he entered the tenth grade at Maury High School. After five years of high school, he graduated in the bottom quarter of his class in June of 1926. Frank was the student that Tommy had never been, and the coach held him in high esteem.

In early 1937, one of Frank’s college buddies invited Frank and two other students to accompany him on a car trip to the western part of Virginia. It was an opportunity to visit parts of the state that they had never seen before.

The four men got into the car, which was owned by the driver.

The car left Norfolk on a two-day trip shortly before the start of the spring semester. Frank had his tuition money with him on this trip, and he was planning on paying his tuition after they returned to Norfolk.

The next day, the car broke down in a remote area about two hundred miles from Norfolk. The four men were stranded in a small town, and the driver didn’t have enough money to get his car fixed.

They were stranded, with no means of transportation back to Norfolk.

The world was different in 1937. College students didn’t have credit cards in those days. If you were stranded with a car that didn’t run and you were far from home, you were screwed.

After the car was towed to an auto shop, it quickly became apparent that the only man in their traveling party with enough cash to pay the car repair bill was Frank. If he didn’t pay to get the car fixed, they were going to be stuck in the small town for a long time.

Frank hated to part with his hard-earned tuition money, but unless the car was fixed, they had no other way of returning to Norfolk. There were no bus or train stations nearby, and they were tired. They needed to go home. Reluctantly, Frank paid the repair bill with his tuition money, and they drove back to Norfolk.

As the car drove into Berkley, Frank mulled over his predicament. He had bailed his friend out, and it had taken virtually every last cent he had. Frank had no money to pay his tuition for the spring semester, and he was going to have to seek financial assistance.

After he arrived at 719 Pine Street, Frank realized that his best option was to contact Tommy Scott. When they spoke, Coach Scott realized that it would be a shame if Frank had to drop out of school. Besides, he needed Frank as his first-string catcher on the baseball team. Coach Scott decided that he would do whatever he could to help Frank.

Tommy Scott contacted A. Herbert Foreman and asked him what to do. Foreman had raised funds to build the classroom/gymnasium building where the varsity basketball team played their home games. Foreman liked sports, and he was aware of Frank Jackson.

Foreman told Scott to speak to the school’s president. A sweet deal was worked out for Frank. He would receive an athletic scholarship for the spring semester. His books and his tuition would be fully paid for, and at the end of the school year, he would be able to transfer to the school’s Williamsburg campus.

The scholarship didn’t pay for meals, which was understandable. William and Mary couldn’t afford that. The High Hat had awful debt problems, and the Norfolk Division campus couldn’t even afford to publish a 1937 school yearbook.

Under Depression-era circumstances, the scholarship offered to Frank was quite generous. All he needed to get through the school year was a little assistance from his father. It seemed reasonable to assume that Joseph could afford to feed his son for a few months.

The problem was that Frank’s father refused to help him. Actually, Joseph was overreacting to his irrational fear that Frank would end up like Paul. His eldest son played football, and he died in an alcohol-related tragedy. Frank played football, too, and he occasionally drank beer. To Joseph, this was totally unacceptable. He considered alcohol to be the tool of the devil, and he didn’t think college was important. He thought that Frank would be better off working at the foundry.

With most of his money gone, Frank began the spring semester not knowing where his next meal was coming from. He still lived at 719 Pine Street, and if he had to play sports to stay in college, how was he going to eat when he ran out of money?

Shortly after receiving his varsity basketball letter, Frank dropped out of college in February of 1937. William and Mary lost a catcher, but Frank gained a job.

In March of 1937, Frank returned to Berkley Machine Works and Foundry as a molder. He worked in this position under Sam Jones, who had known Paul Jackson when he worked at the foundry. Paul’s death had thrown a pall over 719 Pine Street, and in the summer of 1937, Joseph began thinking about moving his family out of their Berkley residence.

When Paul played minor league football, his team was Norfolk’s only professional football team. Shortly after his death, the Dixie Professional Football League was formed. The new rival league had teams based in Norfolk and Portsmouth, and by mid-1937, the Berkley Braves were on the verge of losing fans to the local Dixie League teams when their coach suddenly quit.

In the late summer of 1937, the Dixie League’s Portsmouth Cubs signed Clarence Ace Parker to his first professional football contract. It was around that time that the Berkley Braves signed twenty-three-year-old Frank Jackson as both a player and head coach.

To this day, Frank lays claim as the youngest man to serve as head coach of a professional football team. At five foot eight and 138 pounds, he was the smallest man in history to play professional football.

Frank’s brief career as a minor league football player began in September and ended in the middle of his rookie year. During an intrasquad game, Frank was playing left guard when the other team’s fullback fumbled the pigskin. After a mad scramble for the ball, Frank had just fallen on the football when several players piled on top of him.

Frank left the field with a knee injury. He never played football again, but he remained on the job as head coach through the 1939 season.

In 1938, the Jacksons moved from 719 Pine Street to a new residence in Berkley, located at 207 Bellamy Avenue. By the fall of that year, the Berkley Braves were competing with the Norfolk Shamrocks for ticket sales. The Shamrocks won the Dixie League championship in 1938, and although they played in different leagues, the Shamrocks were more popular than the Braves. Football was popular in Norfolk in 1938, but the city didn’t have enough fans to support two minor league football teams.

In May of 1939, Frank left Berkley Machine Works and Foundry and took a temporary job in Roanoke. From May 22 until September 26, he worked as a draftsman for the Bureau of Public Roads Division of the US Department of Agriculture. During that time, he lived in Roanoke at 430 Elm Street SW.

During the Indian summer of 1939, Frank returned to 207 Bellamy Avenue to coach the Berkley Braves for another season. At that time, he began working at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard as a marine engineering draftsman. He then spent the next two years acquiring experience in the application of power plants to naval vessels and taking night school courses at the University of Virginia’s Portsmouth campus.

When he arrived home from Roanoke, he received an unexpected surprise. The Dixie League had added an expansion team called the Newport News Builders. In 1939, the Berkley Braves had to compete with three Hampton Roads–based Dixie League teams for ticket sales. The handwriting was on the wall, and Frank had to do some soul-searching.

He realized that the Berkley Braves’ days were numbered. There wasn’t a lot of money to be made as a minor league football coach, and Frank needed to broaden his horizons. At the end of the 1939 season, Frank resigned as head coach of the Berkley Braves.

On September 18, 1941, Frank moved out of his parents’ house and rented a house located on Powell Lane in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. He had just been hired to work as a senior marine engineering draftsman at Cramp Shipbuilding in Philadelphia.

His new job was similar to the job he had at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, except that he would be paid a higher salary.

While working at Cramp Shipbuilding, he was introduced to a beauty pageant contestant who had been invited to try out for the US Olympic Swim Team. She was twenty-one-year-old Nina Jean Ellis of West Philadelphia. It was love at first sight.

Nina was then living with her sister and her parents in a row house located at 123 South Forty-Eighth Street. In the fall of 1941, Frank was introduced to Nina’s parents, who approved of the match. In order to spend more time with Nina, Frank moved into the Brierhurst Hotel in early 1942. The Brierhurst was located on the corner of Forty-Fifth and Walnut Streets, three blocks from the Ellis residence.

By early 1943, the children of Annie Jackson were engaged to be married. Frank was living at 4917 Walnut Street when he proposed to Nina. Ruth would be marrying Captain Paul Clark of the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Ruth and Paul were married on March 27, 1943, in North Carolina. After a brief honeymoon, they rented a house in Norfolk. The following month, Frank spent a three-day weekend visiting his parents. At that time, Frank was ineligible for conscription. He couldn’t be drafted because his employment supported the war effort.

Before leaving Norfolk, Frank visited Ruth at her new home. Ruth was a Southerner, and she did not want a Northerner marrying her brother, so she told Frank a story designed to get him to break off his engagement. Ruth told Frank that their parents were ashamed of him for marrying a Yankee. She also told him that they were ashamed that he wasn’t fighting for his country in the war. In reality, none of this was true. Frank’s parents were happy to have a son who was serving stateside in a noncombat role. They were happy that their son didn’t have to serve in the military, and they had no problem with the fact that Frank was going to marry Nina.

Because he was pressed for time, Frank left Norfolk without discussing any of this with his parents. After he returned to Philadelphia, he quit his job and enlisted in the US Army on April 30, 1943. He did this because he wanted his parents to be proud of him.

When he later found out that Ruth had lied to him, he realized that he had been deceived into joining the Army. That wasn’t supposed to happen! Ruth never dreamed that Frank would join the Army. She only wanted to stop Frank from getting married.

On September 6, 1943, fifty-year-old Billy Ellis escorted his eldest daughter down the aisle and gave her away in marriage to Frank.

The wedding took place at the Chapel of the Mediator in West Philadelphia. Frank wore his military uniform during the ceremony, and Nina wore a beautiful white wedding gown.

Frank’s military career began in South Carolina with basic combat training at Camp Jackson. From December of 1943 until March of 1944, Frank took mechanical engineering courses at the University of Vermont as part of the US Army’s STP Program. At the university, Frank learned about the Army’s tactics, techniques, and procedures.

While studying in Vermont, Frank realized how hard it was for the front lines to communicate with headquarters. In early 1944, he came up with an idea for an invention that could be spliced into communication wires. Frank developed a device, which he called the Constant Communication Device. When put into use, it would allow the front lines to stay in constant contact with headquarters during combat.

In August of 1944, Staff Sergeant Frank Jackson was sent to France, where he served in the Twenty-Sixth Division (328th Infantry Regiment) of the Third US Army. The Twenty-Sixth Division was known as the Yankee Division, and the commander of the Third Army was General George S. Patton Jr.

Well-known as a military genius, General Patton was the best Army tactician to come down the pike since Robert E. Lee. Officers who served under Patton in France included William W. Quinn and John Sherman Cooper.

Patton’s Third Army passed through Orleans in August and advanced toward Metz across northern France. While in France, General Patton had one of his many near-death experiences. Sergeant Jackson and a group of Army officers were accompanying Patton on an inspection tour when a grenade went off. Jackson was hit in the back with shrapnel. Patton received no wounds, but the other officers were all killed.

Shortly after receiving the Purple Heart, Sergeant Jackson received the Bronze Star Medal. After leading his men to an important victory on the battlefield, he was offered an officer’s commission. Because he detested some of his superior officers, he turned down a commission he was entitled to. He said that he preferred to stay with his men in the platoon.

It was around that time that he befriended Colonel Dwight T. Colley (Twenty-Sixth Division, 104th Infantry Regiment). The sixty-one-year-old colonel was related to President Robert H. Colley of the Atlantic Refining Company. The colonel was decorated for his heroic actions of November 8 and was one of the men responsible for the Third Army’s swift advance across northern France.

On November 22, 1944, Metz fell, and the following month, Frank Jackson moved into Germany with the Third Army. On December 22, 1944, General Patton ordered the Yankee Division to disengage from frontline combat and move north toward Bastogne. In January of 1945, members of the Third Army were hospitalized with frostbite during the Ardennes crisis. Evening temperatures were low that month, but Frank kept himself warm with a wool blanket that he swiped off a dead German soldier.

After the Battle of the Bulge, the German Army was in full retreat. After moving east through Saarland, Patton’s Third Army crossed the Rhine River at Oppenheim on March 22, 1945. By April, Nazi resistance had weakened considerably. The Nazis could not hold out much longer, and it was only a matter of time before Hitler was ousted.

On April 12, 1945, Nazi atrocities were inspected by Generals Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton at concentration camps located in the Third Army sector. The next day, Patton’s Third Army liberated Alexander Kleinlerer from the Buchenwald concentration camp. On April 29, 1945, while the Soviet Army was advancing on Hitler’s Berlin bunker, the Third Army liberated Wally Kinnan from Stalag VII-A in Moosburg.

After Kinnan was liberated, Patton’s Third Army marched into Austria. On May 4, 1945, the Third Army entered Linz (Hitler’s hometown). Three days later, the Yankee Division arrived in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, hours after the unconditional surrender of Germany. The war in Europe ended with the fall of Prague on May 11, 1945.

Three days later, General Patton was celebrating at the headquarters of Soviet Marshal Feodor Tolbukhin. The Third Army had been in continuous combat for nine months. During that time, they crossed twenty-four rivers in their march to Czechoslovakia.

Daily during those nine months, Sergeant Jackson carried thirty pounds of equipment used to connect the Constant Communication Device to communication wires. Because he was the only soldier who knew how to splice it into the wires, he regularly had to crawl on his belly (while being shot at) to the communication wires to splice his invention into the wires.

Carrying heavy equipment over difficult and uneven terrain caused Frank to suffer unbearable back pain. Crawling around while under gunfire only aggravated the pain. Although the invention was a blessing, lugging all that heavy equipment across Europe was a curse.

During the summer of 1945, Frank was hospitalized overseas and was prescribed a course of physical therapy. He was given a diagnosis of chronic back strain, but the therapy only provided him temporary relief. Mainstream medicine couldn’t correct his back problem, and he was destined to live with chronic back pain for the rest of his life.

On the morning of July 16, 1945, a plutonium bomb was detonated at the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico. The force of the explosion knocked George Kistiakowsky to the ground. A primordial new weapon had been tested, which would accelerate the end of World War II.

On August 6, 1945, a U-235 bomb destroyed Hiroshima. Three days later, Nagasaki was destroyed by a plutonium bomb, and the Japanese surrendered on September 2, 1945.

On September 5, 1945, twenty-six-year-old cipher clerk / GRU officer Igor Gouzenko left the Soviet Embassy code room in Ottawa with 109 KGB and GRU cables. The telegrams revealed that twenty-five Canadian citizens were Soviet intelligence assets during the war.

Gouzenko revealed to the Security Service of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that Soviet intelligence agents had penetrated the Manhattan Project in Canada and the United States. Gouzenko’s revelations led to the conviction of Alan Nunn May and others. Gouzenko also revealed the existence of a Soviet asset code-named ELLI, who was a senior counterintelligence officer in Great Britain.

Some people believe that ELLI was Charles Howard Dick Ellis. During World War II, Dick Ellis leaked British state secrets through his brother-in-law to a Soviet double agent who leaked the information to German intelligence. Dick Ellis had a Russian wife and was a close associate of Kim Philby. He was also a descendant of William Webb Ellis, the nineteenth-century British soccer player who picked up the ball and ran with it at Rugby.

Billy Ellis told me many times that William Webb Ellis was one of his ancestors. In other words, he was related to Dick Ellis.

Billy also claimed to be descended from Mary Queen of Scots, who was convicted of high treason.

It seems that my grandfather’s branch of the family broke all the rules.

On November 30, 1945, Frank Jackson received an honorable discharge from the US Army. He then returned to West Philadelphia and moved into 123 South Forty-Eighth Street with his war bride, her parents, and her kid sister, Barbara. In December, Frank got his old job back at Cramp Shipbuilding and began the process of becoming a civilian.

In early 1946, defense production was being scaled back, and war veterans were completing their education. Nearly one million veterans had recently entered college, and it was time for Frank to finish his college education.

In March of 1944, Frank quit his job and resumed his education under the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944. He entered the University of Pennsylvania that month in the middle of the semester as a sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering.

When Frank enrolled at Penn, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) had just been unveiled at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. A card reader (for input) and card punch, both manufactured by IBM, were among the ENIAC’s components. Tom Watson Jr. was so impressed by the ENIAC that he drove all the way to Philadelphia to see it when it was introduced publicly at a dedication ceremony.

The ENIAC was the first all-electronic digital computer. It was built at the Moore School of Engineering between 1943 and 1945 and designed by research associate J. Presper Eckert Jr. and assistant professor of electrical engineering John W. Mauchly. Eckert and Mauchly left the university in 1946 and went on to design the UNIVAC at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation.

Between 1946 and 1948, there were a number of undergraduates at Penn who became prominent in their postcollege years. Chuck Bednarik became a member of the Philadelphia Eagles. Earl Martyn Forte Jr. became a vice president at the Banknote Corporation of America. Warren Buffet became one of the richest men in the world. Harold Prince produced a stage play known as Damn Yankees. John B. Kelly Jr. became a city council member in Philadelphia, and Samuel A. Stern became an assistant counsel to the Warren Commission.

By June of 1946, Frank had taken his final exams at the Towne Scientific School. Entering college in the middle of the semester is never easy, but he had completed his sophomore year at the age of thirty-one.

During his junior year, Frank made the dean’s list and was elected to the engineering honor society known as Tau Beta Pi.

He also became president of Sigma Tau, secretary of the Hexagon Senior Society, an editorial staff member of the Pennsylvania Triangle, and a student member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

He also met Dr. John Alonzo Goff (director of the Mechanical Engineering Department and dean of the Towne Scientific School), who was then serving as director of the university’s Thermodynamics Laboratory. Prior to his appointment as dean of the Towne Scientific School, Dr. Goff had been a geophysicist for the Sun Oil Company in Dallas. As a former professor of thermodynamics, Goff knew all about Frank’s mechanical engineering skills and thought very highly of him.

One of Frank’s professors noticed that Frank was rarely present in the classroom. Frank only showed up on the days that tests were administered for that particular course. Frank regularly scored 100 on the tests, but because he never participated in the classroom work, the professor gave him a B as his grade for the course. All his other grades that semester were As.

The professor was amazed at Frank’s brilliance, and he wished that he were as smart as Frank was. There really weren’t a lot of students who could get good grades at an Ivy League school in such an effortless fashion, but Frank was unique and exceptional. With an IQ of 186, Frank was a gifted genius whose potential was unlimited.

During his senior year, Frank joined the Chess Club and began working at the Thermodynamics Research Laboratory. It was at that time that Dr. Goff took an interest in Frank. Earlier that year, former Penn valedictorian Robert G. Dunlop had become president of the Sun Oil Company. Goff realized that Frank had similar potential and took him under his wing. They had numerous discussions about the fundamentals of thermodynamics, and Goff mentored Frank during his last year of college.

While studying at Penn, Frank participated in many high-spirited board games with Nina and her parents at 123 South Forty-Eighth Street. The game of choice was Monopoly, because the streets in Monopoly were named after the streets in Atlantic City. Ninnetta was from Atlantic City, and her father used to be a partner in a print shop located there on Atlantic Avenue.

Every time Ninnetta landed on Atlantic Avenue, she would always stop the game and tell stories about her life growing up in Atlantic City. In real life, Ninnetta always wanted to live on Atlantic Avenue, but she knew that it would never happen. Billy Ellis worked all his life, but he wasn’t much of a provider. Frank represented the future of the family, and Nina knew that Frank would eventually have a high earning capacity.

The wunderkind from Norfolk was faced with intellectual competition at Penn, and it brought out the best in him. He was the first Jackson to go to college, and he always did things in a big way. On June 9, 1948, at commencement exercises, Frank received his bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering and the Hugo Otto Wolf Memorial Medal as valedictorian of the University of Pennsylvania’s class of 1948.

After receiving his undergraduate degree, Frank was hired by Day and Zimmerman as a mechanical engineer in June of 1948 with a starting annual salary of $4,600. He also became a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers at that time.

While working on various research projects, Frank authored several technical papers that were published in the Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Members of the society at that time included John Goff, Rupen Eksergian, and Day and Zimmerman vice president Charles Penrose Sr.

While employed at Day and Zimmerman, Frank began taking night school courses at the University of Pennsylvania’s Towne Scientific School in September of 1948. The following year, Frank drove to Norfolk with Nina