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THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, MARCH 15, 2022
Frank, Oregon businessman and civic leader, dies
By DOUGLAS PERRY
The Oregonian
He was Oregon’s beloved local
tourist, traveling the state’s byways
and reporting back to a large, enthu-
siastic audience.
For Gerry Frank, who died Sun-
day at 98, this was far from his only
claim to Northwest fame. Before he
began recommending day trips on
KPTV’s “Good Day Oregon” and
highlighting favorite restaurants
in a column for The Oregonian, he
served as U.S. Sen. Mark Hatû eld9s
right-hand man for more than two
decades.
When Frank stepped down as
Hatû eld9s chief of staû in 1992, The
Oregonian pointed out that he was
“nearly as prominent as his boss.”
For years, Frank was Salem’s
best-known restaurateur, holding
court at Gerry Frank’s Konditorei,
where he oû ered up <his famous
crushing handshake” to patrons
and friends alike. He also promoted
numerous charity endeavors over
the years and served on a multi-
tude of corporate boards. He even
became a favorite of Big Apple con-
noisseurs after writing the top-sell-
ing travel guide, “Where to Find It,
Buy It, Eat It in New York.”
He was celebrated as Salem’s
“First Citizen” and its “most-eligi-
ble bachelor” — and as Oregon’s
“third senator.”
When Frank turned 93 in 2016,
popular conservative radio host Lars
Larson heralded him as “the single
greatest ambassador for Oregon and
the Northwest.”
Frank insisted he never expected
to have such a multifaceted public
career. “I thought I would be in the
family business all my life,” he said.
That business was, of course,
the Meier & Frank Co., Oregon’s
biggest and best-known retailer
throughout the 20th century. In its
heyday, the department-store com-
pany9s Northwest inû uence was so
great, wrote former Meir & Frank
store model Jan Boutin, that its
“sales representatives joked that
there were four major cities on the
West Coast: Los Angeles, San Fran-
cisco, Seattle and Meier & Frank.”
Frank, the great-grandson of
store founder Aaron Meier, was
never Meier & Frank’s mayor —
that was his father Aaron Frank. But,
as he later did for Hatû eld, he served
as its indefatigable major domo. He
traveled extensively to discover the
secrets of the world’s top retailers,
and in 1955 he personally put what
he’d learned into practice as man-
ager of the company’s new Salem
store.
Ten years later, the company’s
board suddenly forced his father out
as chief executive. Amid bickering
among members of the family, the
company was sold to the St. Lou-
is-based May Department Stores
Co. Frank said the contentious bat-
tle for control of Meier & Frank was
“the saddest” period of his life.
He never really got over it. “In
Frank’s view,” The Oregonian wrote
in 1977, <the most poisonous inû u-
Michael Lloyd/For The Oregonian
Gerry Frank, mentor to politicians and businessmen for generations, celebrates his 93rd birthday at the Roger
Yost Gallery in Salem in September 2016.
GERRY FRANK DILIGENTLY KEPT UP WITH
OREGON’S POWER ELITE EVEN LONG AFTER LEAVING POLITICS,
BUT HE INSISTED HIS TRUE AVOCATION WAS VERY DIFFERENT.
MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE HE LOVED DISCOVERING NEW
PLACES AND MEETING EVERYDAY PEOPLE. FOR DECADES HE
SERVED AS THE SOLE JUDGE OF THE ANNUAL CHOCOLATE-CAKE
CONTEST AT THE OREGON STATE FAIR.
ence in Oregon has been the control
of business by owners from outside
the state who don’t ‘have a stake, a
real emotional tie’ here.”
Gerald W. Frank was born in
Portland on Sept. 21, 1923, eight
years before his great-uncle, Julius
Meier, became Oregon governor.
His privileged childhood was oû -
set by his father’s work ethic and his
mother’s social obligations, and he
admitted he spent more time with
his governess than with his parents.
Frank graduated from Lincoln High
School, served in the military during
World War II, and attended Stan-
ford University and England’s Cam-
bridge University.
Despite holding fancy degrees,
Frank didn’t begin his retailing
career in the Meier & Frank execu-
tive suite. “He started in the receiv-
ing room opening boxes,” Boutin
wrote, “then got promoted to open-
ing larger boxes!”
After the May Co. took over the
company, Frank turned to another
passion: politics. He had been man-
aging Hatû eld9s campaigns since the
mid-1950s. Now he joined the sena-
tor9s oû ce, initially taking a dollar-
a-year salary.
Frank, whom Hatû eld called his
“best friend,” soon became chief of
staû . He relished the job 4 even on
the rare occasion when Hatû eld9s
viewpoint made him uncomfortable,
such as when the senator opposed
the Vietnam War.
<I9m a û ag-waver,= Frank said of
his early support for President Lyn-
don Johnson’s escalation of the con-
û ict in Southeast Asia. <I9ve been in
the military. I must say my (attitude)
has always been, ‘My country, right
or wrong.9 I found it very diû cult
not to accept what the president, the
commander-in-chief, was saying.”
But he backed Hatû eld9s anti-
war stance for one simple reason: “I
trusted Mark’s intelligence.”
He also stuck with Hatû eld
through late-career scandals that
threatened the senator’s reputation,
such as the revelation that Hatû eld
had accepted gifts from lobbyists. In
2012, a year after Hatû eld9s death,
newly released FBI documents
showed that in 1985 the federal
government had secretly indicted
a Greek arms dealer on charges of
bribing the inû uential senator.
For years Frank was probably the
best-known congressional staû er in
the country. In 1976, a Salem man
approached Hatû eld at a campaign
event and asked for a brief audience
— with his assistant. “My wife says
she won’t want anything else,” he
told the senator, “if she can just see
Gerry Frank.”
“It is hard to overstate Gerry
Frank’s contributions, through
decades of service, to our community
in Salem and to the state of Oregon,”
Gov. Kate Brown said in a state-
ment Sunday. <As the chief of staû
to Sen. Mark Hatû eld for over 20
years, he was sometimes called Ore-
gon’s Third Senator. He also advised
countless governors throughout the
years, myself included. I am lucky
to have called Gerry a trusted coun-
selor and friend.”
Throughout the 1970s and
beyond, rumors swirled that Frank
would run for governor, and pun-
dits around the state believed that, if
he did, he would easily win. But he
never threw his hat in the ring.
One longtime friend oû ered
a theory on why Frank never put
his name on the ballot: “I think he
knows that the title ‘Gerry Frank’
is enough to get him anything he
wants in Oregon.”
That included cushy spots on a
long list of corporate boards — as
well as a place on an advisory panel
for Aequitas Capital Management,
which collapsed in 2016 in one
of Oregon9s largest-ever û nancial
scandals. The company’s receiver,
Ronald Greenspan, issued a report
that chronicled Aequitas’ long his-
tory of institutionalized self-dealing
and “actual fraud,” which he called
“Ponzi-like.”
In 2007, Aequitas provided Frank
with $250,000 for a planned restau-
rant in Portland. When Aequitas
fell apart, the receiver came look-
ing for repayment. Frank “initially
denied he owed anything in the mat-
ter,” The Oregonian reported, but
he ended up paying the debt with a
combination of stock from a health
care û nance company and cash.
Frank diligently kept up with
Oregon’s power elite even long
after leaving politics, but he insisted
his true avocation was very dif-
ferent. More than anything else
he loved discovering new places
and meeting everyday people. For
decades he served as the sole judge
of the annual chocolate-cake con-
test at the Oregon State Fair. In the
early 1980s, shortly after beginning
his Oregon TV career, Frank wrote
“Where to Find It, Buy It, Eat It
in New York,” which immediately
became an indispensable guide for
anyone who found themselves in
New York City. Twenty editions of
the book have been published, and
more than a million copies have
sold.
Years later came his Oregon
guidebook, “Gerry Frank’s Ore-
gon,= û rst published in 2012. This
book grew out of travels for his
newspaper column, which he titled
“Friday Surprise” — a reference to
the popular weekly Meier & Frank
sale from back in the day. He never
forgot that his Northwest celebrity
had as much to do with his family’s
department store as anything he had
accomplished as a politico or travel
writer.
“Carrying the name of Frank and
getting around the state as much as
I do, I am constantly, practically
every day, still running into peo-
ple who worked at the store, whose
relatives worked at the store, who
shopped at the store as young peo-
ple, who visited the store from far-
away places in the state,” Frank
told the Oregon Historical Society
in 1991. <Meier & Frank was very
much a part of their lives and was
certainly the focal point of the com-
munity life.”
Frank loved being an important
member of the community. It drove
him, during his long post-Meier
& Frank career, to seek out work
he believed made Oregon better,
whether that was trawling the halls
of power in Washington, D.C., run-
ning a restaurant in Salem, leading a
charity drive in Portland or sitting on
a corporate board in Lake Oswego.
“I want to have a personal iden-
tity,= he said in 1977 of his various
charitable and corporate eû orts. <I
want to be involved in something. I
don’t have anything to gain by push-
ing any company, but I want to have
(a role) in the economic and cul-
tural fabric of the state. I resent any
implication that there is any ques-
tion about it.”
There was a question about it
every now and again, but Frank
will be remembered as a beneû -
cent champion of his native state,
one who worked hard for the greater
good. And he did it until the very
end. He liked to point out that he
wasn’t one for hobbies — he felt
drawn only to activities that made a
diû erence.
“I can’t sit and clip coupons,” he
said. “I can’t go out and play golf.”
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