If his employer asked Frank Arthur Vanderlip to bury a body, the only question he would ask would be, “How deep do you want the hole?”. Born in 1864, when he was a boy, romps with his collie, Snap, and pigs getting out of their pens were a frequent occurrence for young Frank. He fed the calves and revelled in riding his pony, Dutchman, and enjoyed “a perfect companionship with my father and mother”. It’s hard to believe that this happy little boy grew up to demand from the president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, “that a monetary authority should be formed to seize all [American citizens’] gold … and it was a good idea to get off the gold standard” so that the Federal Reserve could issue fiat paper money. On the contrary, back on the farm, “There never was compulsion in the family and there never was resistance; but there were kindnesses every day”.

Frank’s mother was from Salem, Massachusetts. Her family of distinguished pioneers settled in Cleveland, Ohio where her father owned a wagon factory. Frank’s father was a farmer and a blacksmith from Ohio, who began working at the Woodworth Wagon Works. As superintendent of the factory, Charles Edmond Vanderlip met his boss’s daughter, the sixteen-year-old Charlotte Louise Woodworth, and married her. When Frank was a boy his father died of consumption and his little brother died of Tuberculosis. He remembered how his mother struggled to meet the $5,000 mortgage on the farm. But, strangely, even as a young boy, he also remembered the mortgage was loaned at 10 per cent interest.

Frank liked science and Shakespeare. He worked as an apprentice in a machine shop but, continued reading and indulging his studious nature through high school. He wanted to attend Cornell University for a degree in “Science and Electricity”. But, upstate New York was too far a journey for college, so instead he enrolled at the University of Illinois with friends of his from high school, and pursued literature.