= Harry_A._Franck =

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= Harry_A._Franck =
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Introduction
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Harry Alverson Franck (29 June 1881 - 18 April 1962) was an American
travel writer during the first half of the 20th century.

Biography
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Harry Alverson Franck was born on June 29, 1881, in Munger, Michigan,
the eldest of three children of the blacksmith Charles Adolph Franck
(1856-1933) and Lillie Evelyn Wilsey (1861-1955), herself the daughter
of a local blacksmith, Peter Alverson Wilsey (1827-1915), and his wife
Almira Lincoln Graham (1829-1907). Harry's father Charles was born in
Schwerin, Mecklenburg, Germany, but at less than a year old came to
the United States with his elder sister and his parents, Heinrich
Franck (1823-1877) and Wilhelmina Christina Magdalena Kort
(1829-1912), who remained in contact with family in Schwerin; in the
course of his travels, Harry visited these relatives at least twice,
detailing these visits in 'Vagabonding Through Changing Germany', but
identifying his relatives only as "a family distantly related to my
own".

In the summer of 1900, following his freshman year at the University
of Michigan, Harry Franck set out with only $3.18 in his pocket to see
Europe. He worked his way across the Atlantic on a cattle boat,
visited England and France, and got back to Ann Arbor two weeks after
classes had started. While an undergraduate, he bet a fellow student
that he could travel around the world without money, and after a year
of teaching, proceeded to do so. He spent sixteen months circling the
globe, working to earn money along the way and performing feats such
as walking across the Malay peninsula. His book, 'A Vagabond Journey
Around the World' (1910) sold well enough to encourage him to continue
his travels, following five years teaching in two private schools and
in the Springfield, Massachusetts Technical High School.

Franck had many adventures, not all of them pleasant, but all
described in his plain, somewhat sardonic style, which was the
antithesis of the highly romantic prose of other popular travel
writers, such as Richard Halliburton. All his books except 'Winter
Journey Through the Ninth' (see below), are out of print, but some are
now in the public domain and freely available online, and all are
readily available secondhand.

His books intimately recorded life as it was lived in the societies he
visited, at a time when many of them were changing rapidly under the
influence of industrialization. As historical sources they are of
value for their pen-portraits of figures such as the "Irish Buddhist"
U Dhammaloka. Young readers may find it hard to believe that the
societies were true descriptions of situations of less than a century
ago, but they ring true in the context of other autobiographical
writings and even the fiction of those days and of many decades after.
His observations and much of his wording inevitably mirror the racist
attitudes and religious prejudices of his time, but it is appropriate
to note from incidents retailed in works such as Zone Policeman 88,
chapters II, VIII, X and elsewhere, that Franck's personal attitudes
towards everyone were basically humane, unpretentious, and courteous,
if informal. His tone becomes subtly acrid in retailing examples of
explicit racism or other forms of inter-group insensitivity. His
unconscious remarks and use of words that nowadays are unacceptable in
civilised speech are mainly of interest in revealing the differences
between the conventions of the day and those of say, the late 20th
century.

In 'Wandering in Northern China' (1923), he visited Korea, which had
been a Japanese colony since 1910. The first thing he noted was that
Korea was virtually devoid of trees. The aristocracy had been stripped
of their duties but were allowed to wear the unique attire of their
rank, although many were living in poverty. Franck reported that the
women "displayed to the public gaze exactly that portion of the torso
which the women of most nations take pains to conceal."

In the same book he reported on a visit to the northern Chinese city
of Harbin, which at the time of writing (1923) contained a large
population of refugee Russian aristocracy. He reported that the
refugees held formal gatherings every Saturday night, complete with
formal dress, although most of them were destitute. A former Russian
aristocrat approached the director of the YMCA whom Franck was
visiting to ask for some food; the director told him he would be
welcome to lunch in exchange for cutting the grass. The Russian
apologized but said he was unable to comply--manual labor was
declasse--and departed, unfed.

In 'Zone Policeman 88' (1913), Franck worked as a police officer in
the Panama Canal Zone and assisting in the census of its citizens. In
'Vagabonding Down the Andes' (1917), he tells of his trip walking the
spine of the Andes, traveling with a camera and a revolver, but
without a blanket. He paid for his return trip by selling Edison
phonographs. In 'Vagabonding Through Changing Germany' (1920) he
reported the turmoil in the aftermath of World War I. He even traveled
through the Soviet Union in 1935, not without difficulty, and recorded
his impressions in 'A Vagabond in Sovietland' (1935).

In 1938 Franck was 57 and began to travel by air, which was still a
novelty at that time. He wrote 'Sky Roaming Above Two Continents' in
1938 and 'The Lure of Alaska' in 1939.

When he was 61 years old, Franck obtained a commission as a Major in
the Army Air Force (having served as a lieutenant in the cavalry in
World War I) and served with the Ninth Air Force in France in the
closing days of World War II, where the fighting was still going on.
He reported vividly on the devastated conditions in eastern France. A
nearby fortress had been bypassed by the Americans but was still
manned by a German garrison. The Germans fired the same number of
rounds from their cannon every night at the same time; the Germans, he
was told, weren't aiming at anything, they were just following orders
not to surrender. 'Winter Journey Through the Ninth' was not accepted
for publication at the time because publishers felt the market for war
memoirs was glutted. It was privately published by the Franck family
in 2000.

Harry Franck married Rachel Latta (1892-1986), a Philadelphian working
as a secretary to a correspondent and a volunteer in the US army
hospital whom he met in Paris, in 1919. She eventually offered her own
point of view on their subsequent travels in her 1939 book, 'I Married
a Vagabond'. The couple had five children, all born in different
places, but made their home life in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where
Harry Franck died of a stroke in 1962.

Works
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*'A Vagabond Journey Around the World' (1910)
*'Four Months Afoot in Spain' (1911)
*'Zone Policeman 88' (1913)
*'Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras' (1916)
*'Vagabonding Down the Andes' (1917)
*'Working my Way Around the World' (1918--Lena Franck’s rewriting of
the 1910 'Vagabond Journey')
*'Vagabonding Through Changing Germany' (1920)
*'Roaming Through the West Indies' (1920)
*'Under the palm-tree of Haiti' (1920 pamphlet)
*'Working North from Patagonia' (1921)
*'Wandering in Northern China' (1923)
*'Glimpses of Japan and Formosa' (1924)
*'Roving Through Southern China' (1925)
*'East of Siam' (1926)
*'All About Going Abroad' (1927)
*'The Japanese Empire: Geographical Reader' (1927)
*'China: Geographical Reader' (1927)
*'Mexico and Central America: Geographical Reader' (1927)
*'South America: Geographical Reader' (1927)
*'The Fringe of the Moslem World' (1928)
*'Treasures of the Holy Sepulcher' (1928)
*'I Discover Greece' (1929)
*'Marco Polo, Junior: The True Story of an Imaginary American Boy's
Travel-Adventures All Over China' (1929)
*'A Scandinavian Summer' (1930)
*'Foot-Loose in the British Isles' (1932)
*'Trailing Cortez Through Mexico' (1935)
*'A Vagabond in Sovietland' (1935)
*'Roaming in Hawaii' (1937)
*'Sky Roaming Above Two Continents' (1938)
*'The Lure of Alaska' (1939)
*'The Pan American Highway; From the Rio Grande to the Canal Zone'
(1940)
*'Rediscovering South America' (1943)
*'Santo Domingo, the Land of bullet-holes' (1959)
*'Winter Journey Through the Ninth' (2001)

Some of Franck’s works have been translated into German, Chinese,
Spanish, Japanese, Slovak, and Czech. The 'Geographical Readers' were
a series partially based on his earlier works.

External links
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*[http://www.harryafranck.com Harryafranck.com], family website run by
his grandson Steve
*
*
*

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