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Fry headed the student body at Mount Airy and led a movement to advise the faculty on revision of the curriculum. "The seminary has caught up with him now," says President Emeritus Luther D. Reed. "He was simply ahead of the faculty in those days."
Democratic Heresy. His first pastorate, in 1925, was the Church of the Redeemer in Yonkers, just north of Manhattan. Fry remembers his four years there as "wonderful, difficult years"; his parishioners remember him as the young man who increased the congregation from 200 to 400. In the choir he found "the first and only girl I was ever attracted to—I suppose because she was a strange, offish person, too. She sang soprano solos, was quiet, not especially pretty, and she was going with another fellow at the time. We would go to the opera together. I remember asking permission to kiss her —it was granted, to my surprise." Hilda Drewes and Pastor Fry were engaged in 1926, and married the next year. They have two sons, Franklin Drewes, a Brooklyn pastor, and Robert T., a Manhattan lawyer; daughter Constance is married to a Lutheran pastor.
In 1929 Pastor Fry was called to his second and last parish: Trinity Lutheran
Church in Akron. Soon Fry's congregation was hard hit by the Depression; it was then that he became a Democrat, an allegiance that causes considerable head-shaking on the part of his 90-year-old mother, widowed for 25 years. "Franklin is such a brilliant fellow," she says, "I don't see how he can be so stupid on political matters." Comments Fry: "Mother would vote for the Devil on the Republican ticket—and frequently has."
"Who Wanted It?" The turning point in the life of Franklin Clark Fry came in the 1944 convention of the United Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. On the first ballot his name appeared on 114 of 520 votes. Says Fry: "It was the first time anyone had received that number on the first ballot—but who wanted it?" On the fourth ballot Fry was president of the United Lutheran Church in America. Without a word, he rose from his chair and went upstairs to the hotel room where his wife was waiting. As he recalls it, they looked at each other for a long moment, and Hilda Fry said quietly, "I'm sorry." Said Fry to a friend last week: "I have always suspected that of those who voted for me in 1944, half thought they were voting for my father and half for my grandfather."
Fry's somewhat impersonal efficiency-combined with a zest for combat and a habit of slapping his thigh and laughing uproariously at his own jokes—makes it unlikely that he will ever be voted the best-loved churchman of the year. But his ability to handle the workloads of several ordinary men is legendary.
President Fry's schedule from last December through the middle of February was fairly typical: the General Assembly of the National Council of Churches in