Happy Camp Ranger District

Frank E. Rankin, Jr.

Some of you know the story very well. On February 10, Frank E. Rankin, Jr. would have been 87 years old. Frank, known to most of us siblings as "Bubber", was the third of 12 children of Frank and Candace Rankin and the oldest of eight sons. I do not wish to repeat the story of his accident on January 30, 1960, except for the following excerpt from the SACRAMENTO BEE in early 1960.

HAPPY CAMP, Siskiyou Co. --Sixty two felons are living on a 35 acre honor camp eight miles west of here which they like to think of as a memorial to the Late Leiutenant Frank Rankin, camp superintendent.
Rankin drowed January 30 while tying to string a television antenna across the Klamath River for a TV recently installed in the inmates' recreation hall. It was part of a rehabilitation program in which he had high hopes. . . .

This brief excerpt, the first two paragraphs of the article, tells you something of the character of Frank.

I last saw Bubber in June 1957. He and Helen and his family had come to Louisiana as part of their vacation trip. I was a student at Louisiana College living at a rooming house next door to the College in Pineville. They came by and offered to take me with them on a side trip to New Orleans. I remember our eating at the Court of Two Sisters restaurant in the French Quarter. I'm sure we talked about a lot of things but one thing I remember. I wanted to help with the expenses.. Bubber told me had had money set aside for the trip and needed to spend it. The amount? Two hunderd dollars. Can you imagine the cost of a road trip from California to Louisiana today?

I'm sure that most of what I remember about Bubber was primarily what I saw of him when he made return trips home. Bubber was a straight forward, no nonsense fellow with a dry sense of humor. He was a natural born leader and always commanded respect because of his personality. On the day of the accident he likely was not compelled to be in the boat that overturned; but, he was not one to shirk repsonsibility and he obviously had compassion for the prisoners.

On that momentous day Nancy and I were visiting with Charles and Gladys and family in LaJunta, Colorado from our home in Denver. The news came in from Helen in California about 7:00 p.m. It was a shock indeed - the first death in the family since Lewis died from diphtheria in 1930 at the age of eight.

Siblings describe Bubber as a calm individual who never got excited nor appeared agitated when wronged. He would not hesitate to defend himself and rarely, if ever, lost a fight during his growing up years. One would not know he was angry until after he had awarded the due punishment to a perpetrator. He was a football player and a boxer in high school and skills learned during his school years were later put to good use. Bubber was an individual who, when given a lemon, made lemonade.

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