Frank Mensel ~ June 22, 1929–September 4, 2023

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We sadly announce the passing of Robert Franklin (Frank) Mensel, 94, on September 4, 2023 in Denton, Texas. He was born on June 22, 1929 in Provo, Utah to Olive Christiane Syndergaard Mensel and Harry Bowman Mensel, a few weeks after the family had moved to Provo from the town of Hiawatha in Carbon County.

Frank was a people person and a gifted writer, qualities that laid a foundation for a varied and highly successful professional career. He spent his youth in Provo, where he became editor of the Provo High student newspaper and a stringer for the Provo Herald. He married his childhood sweetheart, Carol Adams, in 1949. Across 48 years together, they raised four children, cultivated numerous friends, and played countless games of bridge and rounds of golf.

The family moved to Salt Lake City in the early 1950’s, where Frank served as a news reporter at all of Salt Lake’s major newspapers. Among other notable assignments, he was lead reporter for the Deseret News in covering the 1956 mid-air plane crash over the Grand Canyon that claimed 128 lives. He also covered open-air nuclear tests in southern Nevada, as well as the government crackdown on polygamy in Short Creek, Arizona. In 1956, he was asked to serve as director of the news bureau for the University of Utah.

Frank was also active in political affairs, becoming the president of the Young Democrats of Utah. From 1956 to 1958, he wrote policy statements for the Democratic Party, including for congressional candidate David S. King. When King was elected to the U.S. congress in 1958, he tapped Frank to be his press secretary, the beginning of the family’s dual existence in both Utah and Maryland. King served three terms from 1958 to 1966, and Frank ultimately became his staff director. When King finally lost his seat in 1966, Frank received an executive service appointment as assistant administrator for the Small Business Administration, and the family moved to Maryland on a permanent basis.

In 1968, Frank began the most consequential phase of his career, accepting a job as the sole federal liaison for the American Association of Junior Colleges and the Association of Community College Trustees. From then until retirement, Frank was in continuous service to America’s junior and community colleges, arguably writing more words in support of community colleges than any person of his era. Among his proudest achievements was the passage of the Pell Grant program, which he brought to fruition in partnership with Senator Claiborne Pell and Dr. Lois Rice, Frank’s longtime policy colleague. The Pell Grant program now funds a significant portion of all tuition fees at community colleges nationwide. Later, he was a key player in authoring the Montgomery G.I. Bill. Frank was also a national policy advisor for the American Student Association of Community Colleges, an organization he co-founded. This track record of service to higher education eventually earned Frank an honorary doctorate degree from Salt Lake Community College.

Frank’s first wife Carol passed away in 1997. He later married Dr. Bonny Franke and acquired three lovely new daughters and numerous adoring grandchildren. They made their home in Plano (and later Denton), and he spent the remainder of his life in Texas. He was preceded in death by his parents, sisters Dorothy Stratton, Laura Montori, and Marjorie Denny; first wife, Carol Adams Mensel; and grandson George Glissmeyer. He is survived by wife, Bonny Franke, daughter Zenda Schwab (Paul); three sons: Fred Mensel (Jane), Darrell Mensel, Bob Mensel (Dale); three step-daughters: Carole Franke Bonner (Henry), Sandra Kim Lepley (Bob), Paula Franke Mears (Bruce); 14 grandchildren and step-grandchildren, and 18 great-grandchildren.

Those who knew Frank knew his love for humor and thirst for knowledge, so we will leave him with a quote from his blog, “Always Frank”: “If our existence has taught us anything, it’s that life requires discipline to work positively. Discipline in every phase: self, family, community, job, government, business, and the arts.”

GBA: My Silence

When I hear the call to stand at a public event and sing “God Bless America”(GBA), I stand in silence. Though I’m probably as patriotic as the next guy — and just as hypocritical — I’m student enough of history to know that we’re at least two grave sins short of grace.

It’s obvious that these sins have a root in the violence that came ashore with the first colonists and their primitive firearms. Was it necessary, or just inevitable? Either way, it flourishes today in the appetite that floats our largest entertainment industry. Football, of course.

Our first grave sin was our savage treatment of Native Americans. There’s hardly a deeper irony in our history than our view of them as savages. That being our excuse for herding them west until their shrinking numbers would be confined to pitiful reservations, a thin slice of the land mass that was their original home. The largest reservation is now the home of the Navajo and Hopi Nations in the northeast corner of Arizona, about one fifth the size of the state. It’s home now to roughly half of the nation’s surviving Native Americans, left to press their dreams and their cultures against the massive forces of capitalism and modern living.

No less grave has been and is our adventure in slavery. Greedy white men could not see that the importation of legions of black men and women would change the very character of the United States in too many ways to track, and eventually would doom the rule of lily-white society, while it would breed unimaginable conflicts and crimes for which we have yet to reach accommodation and solution. Little wonder that our prison population is the largest in the developed world.

Such is a price we pay for also being the gun-happiest country on the globe.

Primitive as the firearms were that landed with the colonists, we knew instantly that they overmatched any native weaponry. To ensure that advantage, we turned their improvement into one of our earliest industries, which gave us the long rifles that made it easier still to herd the Natives west, while also enabling wanton sportsmen to slaughter the vast herds of helpless bison that were the main resource of the Natives’ way of life.

Can thinking people see all this as history on which God smiles — as He/She hears our voices pounding GBA? Well, maybe the Creator owes us that, if indeed we came from divine hands?

Still, I can’t sing it, knowing that gunfire is claiming nearly a hundred lives every day in the USA. That’s a toll of more than 30K a year. I can’t believe that pleases a Creator whose aim was a just world, or a nation of Christian belief. In the National Rifle Association, the gunmakers and dealers, I see only the henchmen of the antiChrist. It was never the intent of the Founding Fathers that the 2nd Amendment would advantage such misguided souls.

Frank Mensel — June 2016

P.S. It’s my sad fortune that in my love of baseball, I must turn a deaf ear to GBA at every 7th inning stretch. FM

NRA: Keeping Nation at Risk

If any Founding Father were alive today, surely he’d be aghast at the waves of death condoned in worship of the 2nd Amendment. He’d just as surely praise the free press, which won’t give the national conscience a rest on this national disaster.

A national disaster it surely is! With toll of deaths inflicted by guns running at 30,000 and more a year so far in this century, the loss is approaching an average of a hundred lives a day, not far below the toll of highway deaths. But with no reasonable excuse. Who’s to blame? Ourselves, most of all. The gun lobby, none the less. Its tireless voice is the National Rifle Association, which refuses to accept the 2nd Amendment as written. The sportsmen (and women) who support it should open their eyes to the dots, running in two directions.

In one direction they expose the greed of the gunmakers and their dealers. A close look will show that the lion’s share of the NRA budget is contributed by the those two allies. The NRA ranks high among the better funded lobbies that work Washington, and spread campaign money to friends in Congress.

Those lobbies are loosely known as the “Special Interests.” Their concentration in and around the capital, and their money, have made Washington the nation’s costliest city in which to do “business,” upstaging Los Angeles and San Francisco as well as New York. The suburbs of Virginia and Maryland join the city in making it the most expensive real estate market. The city of WeThePeople, no longer.

In the other direction the dots show the ghastly price we pay for an unqualified right to bear arms, a right exercised ironically by only a minority, despite the relentless touting of it by the deep pockets that profit from it. Their relentless assault never quotes the Amendment as written, but plays it incessantly as an unqualified right.
It keeps us the most gun-happy nation of the Free World, with mass shootings running better than one a day. In the first 336 days this year, there were 355 mass shootings nationwide, virtually certain to surpass the 2013 record of 363 such horrors.

With terrorism surging around the world, raising the threat and the anxiety at home, the day may be coming when a majority of our homes will be armed. But protection and safety can never be assured, as deadlier weapons are flooding the global market, from high-count magazines to rockets and drones. What security do assault rifles give homes, when and if they they are assaulted with computer-aimed rockets fired from miles away? Or by drones?

But the spread of deadlier arms are almost certain to blanket us with bigger mass killings. If I could rule the country for a day, I’d adorn the spot where anyone died of gunfire with a small white cross bearing the initials NRA.

Frank Mensel — December 2015

P.S. When quoted as written, the 2nd Amendment puts its intent on delivering a citizen militia, an intent amply fulfilled by the States in the National Guard each has proudly built, to Army standards. The 50 National Guards today form the backbone of the American Army.