Please welcome Melissa Franks, our newest contributor to richardhowe.com. In this post, Melissa shares stories from her dad, Bill Franks, but Melissa and I also hope that this is the first of many “Lowell Stories” in which we capture in writing the spoken word stories that breathe life into the history of Lowell, but which are sadly ephemeral because they are rarely recorded in any form.  If you have such a story to share, please get in touch and we’ll help preserve it in print.

Richard Howe

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Bill Franks, Lowell High School class of 1950

LOWELL STORIES: “Rank has its privilege”

by Melissa Franks

My Dad, Bill Franks (April 30, 1932 to January 9, 2023) was a Lowellian through-and-through.  He was also a great story teller, and his subject was often Lowell.  When he was well into his 80s, I finally recorded some notes about his work history, which he readily reeled off like it was yesterday.  

It strikes me that his reminiscences are revealing of the types of limited, menial jobs available to a Lowell High School graduate circa 1950.  Dad’s grit and sense of humor were almost a requirement.  I also find remarkable his recall, especially for numbers like wages earned, down to the cent.  Though perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising for a boy raised during the Depression. 

Raised, no less, by a single father, his dear Pa, Otto Franks, who was forced to take mandatory retirement at 67, the same year Dad turned 18 and graduated high school:  1950.  For 27 years, Pa had labored as a “fireman,” shoveling coal into boilers at Lowell Electric on Perry Street.  Upon his layoff, the pair were left with between $70 and $75 a month ($27 from social security + a $50 pension), with rent costing $5/week.  “We got by:  you didn’t have things to spend money on.”  And now Dad was in charge.

What follows are my father’s words and narrative, detailing his jobs from high school graduation through his time in the Navy, when he realized “rank has its privilege,” after which he fast-tracked through college under the GI Bill, in search of greener fields.  The quotes, in bold print, are all his.

Lowell’s first supermarket

Dad found his first job out of high school at what was also Lowell’s first supermarket, Stop & Shop, where he joined a line of job seekers that stretched from the hill at Thorndike Street all the way to Elliot’s Hot Dogs.   Turning for home after an hour’s wait, Dad ran into a friend who knew the Assistant Manager, and thereby lucked into a position.  He worked at Stop & Shop for a year and a half, including a move to the Haverhill store with a stipend for the long, back roads drive.  At a salary of $40 a week + $5 for the commute—that’s $1 an hour—the pay was “great” for the time.  Unfortunately, he was laid off.

Mill work

So, like multitudes of Lowell youth before him, Dad sought work in the mills.   Having heard from a friend at the “Y” about an opening for an “office boy,” Dad went to the Merrimack Manufacturing Company.  Because that post was filled, Dad took a job on the night shift as a “comber attender.”  Built in 1823, Merrimack Mills was the first of the Lowell mill complexes, with facilities supportive of its operations and output, from a machine shop to a dyehouse to boardinghouses, and it was one of the last to close in 1958.  It still employed thousands when Dad was there.

Working from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., Dad was charged with ensuring the smooth running of eight comber machines, each of which had eight rows of cotton that scrubbed and stretched the fiber that then went in a can, and onto the next yarn-making process.  Dad remembered well the “nice lady,” one of the original mill girls now elderly, who came every morning before 6 a.m. to clean the machines.  At the shift change, the women would reset the clock from 3^rd to 1^st shift.  It took him more three to four months to realize that when she changed the dial, the mill matron was also shorting him 15 minutes.

It was “piece work” pay, by the can.  At $40/week + a 3^rd shift differential to $44, the bonus opportunity could earn him $50/a week, and averaged out at about $48.  Unfortunately, breaks were only for smokers, who could rest in a three-sided glass room through which they could still monitor the machines.  So, what did he do?  Dad started smoking.  He spent about a year at the mill.

Converting Medford & Melrose to Natural Gas

Dad then took up work with “Conversions and Surveys,” an effort affiliated with gas companies to transition towns from manufactured to natural gas.   Assigned to the Boston-area, Dad worked house-to-house, then town-to-town to drill into stoves to widen the burners to support natural gas, which required more air.  Paid $50/week + overtime + travel expenses, “We were living like Kings.” Unfortunately, the job ended after just six months when the company moved to Brooklyn.

Ahoy! Bill Franks aboard ship

In the Navy

Dad was also drawing part time pay via the Naval Reserve, which he joined in 1950 when the Korean War broke out.  Finding himself out of work at the end of 1951, he went to the Naval Reserve, near what is now Greater Lowell Vocational Technical High School, and asked to be put on active duty.   That same day he took a physical and got his draft papers.  That night, he told his father he’d enlisted.  The next day he took the train to Boston, then another to Bainbridge Naval Training Center in Maryland for a three-month bootcamp.  While he transitioned from reserves to Navy, Dad was unwittingly put in the Army Draft.  Thinking he was AWOL, the Army sent him a letter, which he only received months later, when he was already aboard ship.

USS Fremont

Dad was assigned to the USS Fremont APA-44, an attack transport ship based in the Norfolk Naval Yard.  The USS Fremont ran 24 LCVPs, or Landing Craft Vehicle & Personal.  Also known as “Higgins Boats,” these were the sea-to-shore vehicles that helped the Allies win World War II.  On the “deck force”, Dad chipped paint all day long.  “It’s always rusted, so you’re always chipping.  Talk about boring jobs, it’s a boring job.” 

That didn’t last long.  “To get out of chipping paint I got myself transferred to the radar division.” Dad was sent to Class A Radar School in Norfolk, where he trained for three months returning to the ship as a radarman.  His active duty tour comprised a “Mediterranean cruise” (a term which then held no reference to a vacation cruise) and a monthlong stop at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  All in all, he enjoyed his naval experience, which finally gave him some fun money.  “When you were out to sea you never spent money, so you hit port and you have a week’s worth of money to spend, so you go crazy:  drunken sailors.”

Front of postcard: Bill Franks and shipmate on liberty in Italy

Back of Postcard: addressed to his Dad, John “Otto” Franks, 63 C. Street: “Dear Pa, Would like you to save this card for me. Love, Bill”

Finally, when the Korean War ended and Dad was discharged from duty, he became more self-directed, taking advantage of the GI Bill to pursue a college degree at Bryant College (now Bryant University).    “I realized I could get an education, and if went back in the service, it would be as an officer and not an enlisted man.  When they say rank has its privilege, rank has its privilege.”  Of course, he did this with gusto.  Taking nine courses a semester year round, Dad completed his 132 credits to earn a degree in Business Administration in just two-and-a-half years.

Dad’s quest toward a career continued to careen alongside his entrepreneurial spirt, but those are Lowell stories for another day…