frank l.
Frank, George's second son, was born on September 26, 1920 in Brooklyn, New York. His earliest memories are of Middlehope, New York, where the parsonage was next door to the Methodist Church. An important memory was learning to fly fish for trout while in the eighth grade. After high school graduation, Frank attended Springfield College in Springfield, Massachusetts, majoring in Physical Education. As a result of participating in the college Student Christian Association, Frank felt led to go on to theological studies after college.

From 1942-1945, Frank attended Yale Divinity School majoring in the field of Religion in Higher Education. In 1945, the International Committee of the YMCA invited him to accept an appointment to the Student Division of the YMCA in China. That required an additional year of study of the Chinese language, history, and culture at Yale.

Frank was engaged in student ministry in China until December 1951: two years in Beijing in the government universities there and three years in National Chungking University. The Chinese communist takeover in 1949 and the Korean War, which China entered in 1951, made Frank an enemy alien and effectively ended his student ministry in China. The photo above shows Frank in 1951, the day after he was pushed over the border between China and Hong Kong. He is wearing his "letter" sweater from Springfield College (for soccer).

The China experience led him back to graduate study at Yale. Following his marriage, Frank and his wife accepted a call from the Presbyterian Church to prepare for work in higher education in Indonesia. After teaching in the Indonesian Christian University in Jakarta, Frank did field work in Eastern Indonesia before spending a year in New Haven Connecticut, writing his dissertation. In 1962, Frank and his family returned to Indonesia, where Frank taught in Satya Wacana Christian University in Salatiga, Central Java, primarily in the fields of sociology and anthropology.

After a furlough - lengthened by the coup attempt and attendant massacres in Indonesia in late 1965 and early 1966 - Frank was called back to work with the Indonesian Council of Churches to help establish a Research Institute. The first task was to assist the regional Protestant denominations in carrying out a comprehensive study of the Christian Church in Indonesia, which occupied him until 1980. He then spent two years teaching graduate theological students at Satya Wacana in sociology of religion and missiology.

In 1982, the Presbyterian headquarters called Frank to Atlanta, Georgia, to lead a team in designing and implementing a study of the World of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations by the Presbyterian Church (USA) and so serve as Staff Associate for Southern Asia and the Islamic World.

In 1988, Frank Cooley was "honorably retired" from the Presbytery and spent the next two decades preaching, speaking, and fly fishing. In the 1990s, he and his wife Carolyn began researching the Cooley family's "Little House" connection. In 1998, they drove from Georgia to De Smet, South Dakota, and - in their camper - followed the 1894 route of the Cooleys and Wilders from De Smet to Mansfield, Missouri.
- posted by pioneergirl at 10:00 PM