Samuel Frank

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/01/12/barneys-great-adventure

EXCERPT FROM: Profiles
January 12, 2009 Issue
Barney’s Great Adventure
The most outspoken man in the House gets some real power.

By Jeffrey Toobin

Frank’s parents, Sam and Elsie, raised their four children in a distinctly less rarefied setting than the ones in which they all eventually arrived. Sam Frank operated Tooley’s Truck Terminal, near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel in Jersey City.

“My father ran a truck stop,” Frank told me. “He sort of lived on the fringes. We’re talking about Hudson County—Frank Hague was the boss—a totally corrupt place. In 1946, my father’s brother Harry got the contract to sell cars to the city, and of course he had to give a kickback to the guys who ran the city. My father was a middleman or something.”

Sam was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury about the matter. He refused and was found in criminal contempt. “For a while, he was hiding out from the cops in New York,” Frank recalled. “I was six years old, and once I went to see him in the city, and we saw ‘Robin Hood,’ with Errol Flynn. The next day, the cops came to my first-grade class to interview me, to see if I had been with my dad. My father’s sister, Aunt Minnie, taught at the school. She heard about the cops coming and went straight to my classroom to break it up, so I didn’t have to talk.”

Eventually, Sam returned to New Jersey, and was jailed for refusing to testify. “They treated him nice,” Frank said. “They let my mother bring him food. He served for about a year.” The incident notwithstanding, Frank’s parents instilled in their children a belief in the power of the government to do good. “We had this great good fortune of growing up with parents who took politics seriously,” Frank’s sister Ann Lewis told me.