Chapter I
In the Beginning
He was born Frank Ellis Ferree, August 6, 1894 in a small
village on the Platte River, twenty-four miles west of
Omaha, Nebraska. His entrance into the world was at-
tended to by a Dr. Reed, a friend of the family who appar-
ently was frequently on call to attend to Frank's mother's
ills.
Dr. Reed, fully aware of the family's strained financial
condition (there were eight of them when Frank was born)
after attending to the medical needs of the family, had the
habit of picking up his satchel, getting into his one-horse
buggy and leaving abruptly without asking for pay. It
seemed he wished to get out of the way before the embar-
rassing question came up.
At the time, Frank's father operated a small weekly
newspaper, The Valley Enterprise, which he had founded in
1887.
When Frank was one year old, Dr. Reed again an-
swered a hurried call to the Ferree residence. He found
the boy unconscious, apparently dead, from what his
mother thought was "some sort of stroke."
Dr. Reed glanced around and saw a teakettle of hot
water on the stove. "Get me a washtub," he snapped.
A big tub was placed on the floor near the stove, the
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teakettle of water dumped into it, along with a bucket of
fresh water from the well. The doctor plunged the uncon-
scious boy into the tub of warm water. In a moment
Frank's eyes opened and he began to cry.
After that Frank's mother kept a tub full of water
handy and several buckets of water were constantly kept on
the back of the stove, ready for action.
Frank survived, and at the age of five, he had a full
head of brown curly hair that had never been cut, and res-
idents of the town often expressed wonder whether he was
a boy or a girl.
When he was ten, Frank was outside on a crisp fall day
playing a game popular at that time. Several children would
get on one side of a house and attempt to throw a ball over
the roof of the house to another group on the far side.
When one of them caught the ball, he would run around
the house, attempting to catch a member of the opposing
team. Such game was called "annie-over" or "anti-over" de-
pending on which way a child wished to mispronounce it.
While playing, Frank was brought up short by a voice
which seemed to come out of the sky on his right side. The
voice called his name, loud and clear. There was no mis-
take. He stopped playing and listened, but there was no
further sound.
A few days later while playing the same game, he
heard his name called again. The same voice, the same loud
and clear call, to the right of him and out of a cloudless sky.
There being no other explanation, Frank thought that
perhaps his mother had called him. He went inside the
house, expecting to find his mother in the kitchen busily
cleaning house. She seldom rested until afternoon when,
the midday meal dishes cleared away, she would allow her-
self a catnap before beginning supper.
To his surprise, Frank found his mother sitting in a
rocking chair in the front room he told her of the mysteri-
ous voice which called his name from out of the sky.
She became very upset upon hearing her son talk of
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such things. "It you hear such a voice again, come and tell
me quickly, she said. Then she became strangely silent
and wouldn't talk to him again about anything.
A few days later a small bird came and perched on
Frank's right shoulder, but the voice out of the sky did not
call his name again.
When Frank was fifteen years old, his father sold his
weekly newspaper and moved to northwestern Nebraska
where he filed on a homestead. Frank had been in the
eighth grade at the time. Now, there would be no more
formal schooling for him.
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Chapter 11
A Bible and a War
Frank loved the wide open spaces of pioneer life on the
Nebraska plains. He basked in the closeness to nature, of
living close to nature's laws as God had made them.
He felt sorry for one of his father's plow animals, a
strong blind mare named Mollie. Mollie always did her
share of' work in the fields, even though she did not know
where her next step would be. She had to be led around
the barnyard, but coming in from work in the evenings,
bone dry and thirsty, she could usually smell the water
trough and went directly to it.
Frank was tall for his age and he soon got a job as a
cowboy On a nearby ranch. As a ranchhand he earned $1.50
a day plus room and board, a fair-sized salary for those
times. To earn such pay, however, he had to rise before
sunrise, and keep going until long after sundown, with time
off only for meals and a chance to wash the dust off before
falling into bed at night. There wasn't energy left, even for
a boy of fifteen, to get into trouble, nor was there oppor-
tunity, living and working under the open sky and within
the deep soul-stirring silences of nature.
Frank became more and more a nature lover. His active
mind devised theories and techniques to cope with life as
he understood it.
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On rare occasions when work was slack on the ranch
and he had an afternoon off, he loved to pull off his clothes
and shoes. He would wrap them in a bundle which he car-
ried under one arm while he ran and walked along the cat-
tle trails that stretched between water holes, windmills, and
salt licks. Tall grass grew on each side of the trails.
It was total freedom for a boy of his age. Stark naked,
and without embarrassment, he felt total submersion with
the cosmic forces of nature. As he strode along uninhibited
bathed with the sun's warm rays and the soft summer
winds, he saw small poison adder snakes glide aside on the
warm sands of the paths as he approached. Sometimes a
rabbit would hop out of the way and disappear in the tall
grass.
Nothing stood between him and God, not even the
civilizing effect of clothes. He listened to the wind in the
tall grasses, watched the white pufFy clouds drift silently
overhead. A buzzard circled above gracefully. The earth
was warm to the bottoms of his feet, the sun washed the
whole earth in a healthful bath of golden cleanliness.
One Sunday his project was to walk over and explore
an abandoned cabin. He knew that a woman had once lived
there long enough to homestead the land, then sold it and
moved away with her children.
He wondered about the place as he approached on
foot. The creepy loneliness of the unpainted shack had long
attracted his curiosity. He neared it and entered, thrilling
at the creaking of the rotting boards beneath his feet. From
the dark shade he could look out on hot, sunburned miles
of grasslands. And the silence was golden.
He poked through the debris. At last he found a book
on the floor. He picked it up and turned its leaves. It was a
Bible, the first he'd ever seen, although he had heard of
such a book many times. He sat down on the floor and
leaned against the splintery boards of the wall. There in
total silence and peace, he read and read. When he
finished, he left the book where he found it and walked
-- 5 --
back along the miles of warm cattle trails, his mind ab-
sorbed in what he had read.
A couple of weeks later, he spent another Sunday in
the abandoned and rotting cabin, reading the same Bible. It
was his first experience with God's written word. When
he'd been a boy, his mother had taken him along with the
family to a small church where would some-
times allow him to pull on the rope that rang the bell. But
there had been little in the church ritual that he'd under-
stood, especially at his age.
Now in the lonely cabin on the abandoned prairie of
Nebraska, there was much in some parts of the Bible that
he could not make sense of; but many parts of it did make
sense, more sense than anything he'd ever read before. It
seemed, in parts, to give possible answers to questions that
had been bothering his sharp mind for a long time.
At any rate, he again left the Bible where he'd found
it, and never got around to returning to the shack again.
Other projects claimed his attention.
One day he packed fifty-seven baby spruce and yellow
pine seedlets in a gallon can. With the can in one hand
and a large can of water in the other hand he climbed to
the top of a large, rangy hill that he'd often watched from
the sod house of his father. There he planted the baby
trees, returning twice more with water for them. The fifty-
seven trees grew up to became a monument in the treeless
grazing country. There they still stand, an oddity in a bar-
ren prairie, and today very few people know or remember
the reason for their existence on the hill.
Actually, Frank never liked ranch work, but there was
no other kind of work available near his father's homestead,
so one morning in 1915 when he was twenty-one years old,
he hooked the pony to the buggy and traveled for Wood
Lake, some thirty-five miles north to the railroad. He left
the rig at the livery stable for his father to pick up later,
and asked a friend for a loan of three dollars, which he
didn't get.
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\
Penniless; he caught a freight train for a 100-mile ride
east to a settlement. Going into the countryside he asked
for work and food. The found a day's work cutting potato
eyes in a farmer's basement. At another place he rolled up
woven wire in one day, a job that the farmer had expected
to take two days.
After that he had no place to stay and was hungry, so
he slept in a haystack near a farm house. In the morning he
went to the house and asked for something to eat. They in-
vited him in for breakfast.
Hearing of some construction work on a new telephone
line nearby, he walked over and applied for a job and went
to work for the Northwestern Bell Telephone Co. After a
year with the company, he returned to his father's home.
Later, Frank described this first excursion away from
home as the darkest days of his entire life.
Three years later Frank was twenty-four and had at-
tained to the same height as Abraham Lincoln, six feet four
and a half inches. A mature man now, he filed his own
homestead claim some thirty-five miles from his father's
homestead.
Now his lean gawky body was sorely pushed in the
hard labor of making a home out of the rough, wild coun-
try. It didn't take him long to get enough of it. Adventure
called in the form of an army enlistment. He left his
homestead and walked fifty miles north to Valentine, Ne-
braska, the nearest railroad point, where he enlisted in the
army. The chance to see more of the world and its peoples,
was just too much to pass up.
Three months later, he was in France, assigned to the
26th Infantry, 2nd Field Signal Battalion of the First Divi-
sion. He'd moved so fast his pay never caught up with him.
Less than two weeks after landing in France, he was
packed into French cattle cars and moved towards the front
lines in the Argonne Forest. Near Nancy, the slow moving
freight train was sidetracked several times and when Frank
stuck his head out of the freight car he could see long swift
Red (Cross passenger- trains loaded with wounded and dying
-- 7 --
soldiers returning from the front roaring past in the night
Frank and the others with him kept silent. Strange
lonely thoughts began to pass through their minds Would
they be able to hold up to the strain of the front? How
would it feel to kill another human being, a man they'd
never seen before, a man who'd done them no harm, a man
who was a pawn like themselves, a man who was not basi-
cally evil? How silly it was for good men to kill each other
on their government's orders, when the bastards who
caused it all sat back, ate good food, slept in warm beds,
and suffered no wounds
Frank realized his mistake in volunteering for duty. "I
finally decided that I would not shoot first in a close en-
counter with a German," he said later "That was the best I
could decide "
His group consisted of sixty men in the signal corps
whose assignment was to lay telephone lines in front of the
25th Infantry's embattled position. For days his group
marched towards the front Dead American and German
soldiers lay where they had fallen and dead horses had
been cut out of their harnesses and rolled off to the sides of
the road.
At night, when they camped, he could see the flashes
of the big guns They reminded him of summer thun-
derstorms in his native Nebraska.
His group reached the battle zone on the morning of
November 11. As they passed French artillery was, still
warm, the crews waved their arms and yelled hysterical,
"fini la guerre," the war is finished.
The war was over and he hadn't fired a shot his only
misfortune was a back injury suffered during exercise
warm-ups back in the States
He was reassigned to Headquarters Company of the
25th, with Colonel Theodore Roosevelt commanding. He
was one of the first six men to follow the German army
back across the Rhine, where he spent a year with the army
-- 8 --
of occupation before he was discharged, receiving a small
government pension because of the injury to his back.
Frank had seen enough of war to last him a lifetime.
He came back home, and went to work fixing up his
homestead.
Shortly afterwards, he visited his parents. While there
he was stricken with sciatic rheumatism, and the resultant
spinal curvature kept him in bed for six months with a
weight attached to one leg.
When he finally regained enough health to get out of
the house, he conceived the idea of beating down the tall
grass in a small area so the sun's rays could get to him,
then he would strip off all his clothes and sunbathe for sev-
eral hours each day. Such exposure to mild exercise, sun,
and fresh air and good food soon restored him to vigorous
health.
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Chapter III
Colorado, California, and Wisconsin:
A Prelude to Texas
But now the extreme loneliness of his bachelor life on his
homestead began to bother Frank. In his pre war days
he'd known no other way of life. He'd taken the loneliness,
the vast spaces, the hard work as a matter of course. Now
exposure to faraway places and the rich camaraderie of his
army buddies made the life of a homesteader appear more
barren than he cared for.
He got a job with the postal department and for ten
years he carried the mail on horseback over a seven-mile
Star Route from Lewanna to Cascade, Nebraska. He carried
his letters in a saddle bag strapped behind his saddle.
Later the route extended to Purdum, some twenty-one
miles down the North Loop River, and Frank had to update
his method of travel. He bought a Model T Ford and hired
his younger brother Fred, to help.
They kept the Model T in the barn during the winter
months. One morning while they struggled to start it, the
Ford backfired and set fire to the hay. With the barn door
open and an upward draft out through the loft, Frank and
his brother had a tussle on their hands to keep the fire from
spreading.
Pitchforks of blazing hay shot out the door as Frank
-- 10 --
pitched hay faster and harder than he had ever done in his
life. Fred carried water from the well and after fifteen min-
utes they had the fire out and had left on their mail route.
They never tried to start the Ford inside the barn
again .
That same winter an unusually heavy blizzard and sleet
storm struck the Nebraska plains, almost destroying tele-
phone communications for miles around Sargeant, Ne-
braska.
Due to his army experience, Frank applied for, and
got, the job as wire-chief and foreman, and for two years he
worked from sunup until sundown putting the Sargeant ex-
change into working order, and repairing and building new
lines for the rapidly expanding population of the area.
By now all his five brothers had married and had fam-
ilies which were rapidly growing bigger. A sixth brother
had died as a child. A sister had died of the flue when she
was in the first grade.
Then Frank's father died, and a bank loan on his
father's land was foreclosed. As a bachelor, it became
Frank's duty to settle his father's few remaining affairs. He
turned over the household goods to his younger brother,
Fred, who lived on an adjoining ranch.
Frank and his mother loaded up his Model T with a
few personal belongings and headed west. Twenty-one
miles west of Denver, Colorado, in the foothills of the Rock-
ies, they filed on eighty acres in the Golden Gate Canyon
not far from Central City.
The mountain air, the beautiful scenery, the new be-
ginning, did wonders for Frank, not only physically, but
mentally, and spiritually. He seemed to draw stimulation
from the new home.
One day, he found an old copy of the Denver Post and
read of the activities of Amie McPherson in the Denver
City Auditorium. He read with keen interest of the people
who had been cured of various illnesses through faith in
God which had apparently been brought about through the
-- 11 --
preaching efforts of Amie In his mind, he could imagine
the great crowds which the paper described as thronging to
the auditorium to see miracles performed, to be healed,
and to accept Christ as their personal savior.
The twenty-one miles to Denver was too much of a
trip in those days, and too expensive for Frank to person-
ally attend Miss McPherson's lectures But he could, on oc-
casion, buy a copy of the Post and read summaries of other
lecturers who spoke mostly on health as they stopped over
in Denver on their way from coast to coast.
Frank decided there was no better place to experiment
than there on his homestead mountain retreat he tried liv-
ing on nothing but oranges for fifty days
Another time, combining spiritual experimentation
with the practical economics of his threadbare existence, he
fasted totally for ten days. Ahead of his time by decades, he
experimented for months with unfried organic foods, in the
end concluding, as the gentle Buddha had thousands of
years before him, that strict fasts, unusual diets, fads of any
kind, were not the answer to well-being that he sought
By correspondence he studied from a woman who
taught the "science of numerology He learned to use
numbers corresponding to the given name and birth date of
an individual in order to reveal character, business ability,
and to guide one in associations with other people. Today,
he still holds fast to his studies in numerology, realizing, of
course, that there are limitations to his hobby
In 1936 Frank built a service station on his ranch in
the Golden Gate Canyon One night he had just filled the
gasoline tank and was checking the oil on a car when one
of the two young men who had driven up slipped behind
him and slapped him over the head with a blackjack.
Frank reeled back, but didn't lose consciousness "I
always had a hard head," he remembers.
"Give us your money," the young man demanded
Frank peeled his pockets inside out. He had no
money. He was pushed into the rear seat of the car and
-- 12 --
taken up the canyon and told to get out and climb over a
fence into a pasture. The men followed. There they tied his
hands with a rope, and blindfolded him.
Suddenly a shot rang out beside Frank's head.
"Naw, don't shoot him," one of the young men said.
He placed a hand on Frank's shoulder and spun him
around. "Run," he said.
Frank ran, blindfolded and with his hands tied. He
ended up against a thicket of lodge-pole pine trees. His nose
was smashed and his face scratched. He could hear the car's
motor as the two young men sped up the canyon. He
pushed the blindfold out of the way by rubbing it against
one of the pine tree trunks, then he walked back to the
fence and sawed the rope around his wrists in two on the
jagged barbs of the fence.
He still has a scar on his forehead from the experience.
"I reckon they were new at the game," he said. "They had
probably stolen the car at a Denver parking lot. I am con-
vinced that somehow one of the two young men was influ-
enced to spare me."
By 1937 Frank, through good management and hard
work, had increased his holdings from eighty acres to 3,000.
In March of the same year, his mother died at the age of
eighty-three. Overcome with grief, and not wishing to con-
tinue on by himself on the Colorado ranch where he'd
passed so many pleasant days with his mother, he leased
his gasoline station to a retired school teacher. He traded
his 3,000 acres, sight-unseen, for 800 acres of Wisconsin
timberland. Forty of the acres fronted on Lake Sisdowit
only five miles from Lake Superior.
But other adventures called, and without ever seeing
his Wisconsin lands, Frank bought an old truck, built it into
a forerunner of the modern mobile home, and headed for
Hollywood, California. He planned to march in the Ameri-
can Legion parade to be held in November in Hollywood,
but decided the weather was too warm to march in his
heavy O.D. winter uniform. He couldn't work up much en-
-- 13 --
thusiasm for marching untold miles on hot asphalt no mat-
ter how stirring the music. He watched instead while
others marched then drove to an outdoor camp in the
nearby foothills
He found there a man who was making fifty dollars a
day custom making silverware (knives forks spoons) for
movie actresses. Later a short distance out from Holly-
wood on Highway Number One he pulled in to a liquor
store where the wife of the owner directed him to a large
mansion above on the hillside where Mary Pickford once
lived .
The occupants of the mansion, Bill, who needed a
crutch to walk, and Flossie, said he could camp in the yard
below. Flossie formerly had done advertisements for vari-
ous products on the movie screen but had been suspended
as an alcoholic.
Frank was hired as caretaker of the mansion. He
worked there until June of the next year then decided it
was time to inspect his land in Wisconsin.
Taking full advantage of his privileges and freedoms as
a bachelor and without further ado he cranked up his
house-truck and left for Wisconsin. He traveled leisurely
stopping to savor the view wherever he wished and spent
an entire month to get to Wisconsin.
He arrived on the afternoon before township crews
were scheduled to cut a road through his lake-front prop-
erty the next morning. Moving quickly, Frank arranged
things so the road would he relocated farther back from the
lake, thus salvaging his valuable lake-front lots.
He contracted a saw-mill crew to make planks from the
many bass-wood trees, but after paying off the crews he
found he'd lost money on the project.
So he had the forty acres on the lake front surveyed
and prepared to sell lots to the rich from nearby big cities.
While he waited for customers, he sold the 760 acres of
timber lands for $3,000 to a developer from Park Falls
Wisconsin.
-- 14 --
He wished now he'd kept his 3,000 acres at the foot of
the Rockies near Denver. Homesick for Colorado, he
loaded up and headed back.
In Denver he found a man who had twenty-three acres
in the Lower Rio Grande River Valley, just outside Har-
lingen, Texas, and about nine miles from Mexico, as the
crow flies. The man was asking $250 for the twenty-three
acres. To make a good deal, Frank paid him $300 and as-
sumed several years of back taxes.
Thus, in less than a year he'd come down from 3,000
acres of Colorado lands, to a measly twenty-three acres of
sun baked dust on the Mexican border, hundreds of miles
from anything approaching the lifestyle he'd known in Den-
ver, Hollywood, and Wisconsin.
No matter. His destiny lay ahead of him, and he
headed south to warm Gulf breezes, soft Mexican music,
and millions of swarming mosquitoes.
-- 15 --
Chapter IV
Another Beginning
He found his twenty-three years to be located about a mile
and a half north of the outskirts of Harlingen. Luckily a
paved road bordered the eastern edge of his property.
Johnson grass grew as high as a mule's back.
Frank bought an old frame house and had it moved
near the paved road. Then he got busy with a saw and
hammer and a paint brush and straightened the house
mended the roof; and gave it all a new coat of paint.
Six of his acres he divided up for subdivision intend-
ing to sell lots. With his own hands he built a small tile
studio-type building hung out his shingle and began to give
massage treatments.
Adjusting to the slower lifestyle of the Border, he sud-
denly seemed to feel he had managed to fulfill his destiny.
"I was busy and I was happy" he said. "I was finally doing
what I had wanted to do for a long time."
His life was almost idyllic except for one thing that
loomed on his conscience like dark clouds rolling in before
a hurricane.
Frank had begun to notice large numbers of Mexican
families roaming up and down the highway in front of his
massage studio. Many of the families had sick children and
all of them seemed hungry. Even the men carried a sick
-- 16 --
frightened look as they walked along the road, looking for
work, yet fearful of the U.S. Border Patrol. He learned
from his customers that these people were called "wet-
backs" because when they crossed the Rio Grande illegally
and came up out of the water on the U.S. side, their wet
clothes stuck to their thin backs.
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