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Heavy Gavel. Literally presiding over Lutheranism's move toward the outside world is Franklin Clark Fry. He is, in fact, considered to be the outstanding presiding officer in his or any other church; with Roberts' Rules of Order at his fingertips and a mind like an I.B.M. machine, he seems able to get purposeful action out of the most unpromising assembly. When he presided at the opening session of the constituting convention of the National Council of Churches in 1950, he insisted on no fewer than 44 amendments to the proposed constitution before permitting the United Lutherans to join. One lady delegate, sinking into her seat after missing one of the sessions, whispered to her neighbor: "What do the Lutherans want now?" Says a Lutheran colleague: "He can see a goal and get to it faster than anyone I've known. That's perhaps one reason why he gets along better with men than with women—the women always want to debate. He is not exactly the warmhearted shepherd. He has a tendency to kick the rumps of the sheep, rather than lead them."
Some of the sheep have learned to fear Dr. Fry's brisk impatience. One such was a delegate who held the floor at a conference with a tedious speech declaring his readiness to "go to bat" for some project. On his third repetition of this phrase, Fry banged down his gavel and intoned: "Three strikes—you're out!" Other sheep become altogether too sheeplike—as did one bemused delegate who rose to proclaim: "I move what President Fry thinks."
Advice to the Faculty. Franklin Clark Fry has rarely had doubts about what to think, and the certainty of his background helped. Heinrich Frey, a mechanic who traced his ancestry to William Tell, arrived in Pennsylvania from Germany about 1670. His descendant Franklin Clark Fry—the third in a row to enter the Lutheran ministry—grew up in Rochester, where his father was pastor of the Church of the Reformation. The small Fry showed an early attachment for the church; at the age of four he was heard to warn a friend: "You keep off! This is my father's church." He brushed up his reading technique on the minutes of synodical conferences.
Young Fry whizzed through Rochester's East High School and Hamilton College with top marks, gained a reputation as a shrewd campus politico and a smooth orator. He also spent a year at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. Though Fry's religious activities at college "consisted of playing pool at the Y.M.C.A." (he explains: "Hamilton's undifferentiated Protestantism didn't appeal to me"), there was never any doubt where Franklin Clark Fry was headed. It was Lutheran Theological Seminary at Mount Airy, Philadelphia, where his grandfather Jacob had been professor of homiletics. Here he underwent his first and only spiritual crisis. "Inadequate instruction was the problem. I already had a firm grounding in the faith, but the defense of it presented by the professors didn't begin to match the caliber of the archaeology instruction I'd had at Athens. I got very impatient with the seminary. But it made me think."