Frank Finch III Profile

Frank Finch III

A few months ago, Frank Finch III saved a toddler from getting flattened by a car. This was outside the 2022 Common Ground Mayoral Forum. To hear him tell it — Frank, not the toddler — it wasn’t a big deal. Frank, as usual, was paying attention. He saw a small child toddling into the street and then stepped in and did something about it. If you’re thinking, “Well, that story pretty much sums up Frank Finch III,” I won’t argue with you. 

I met Frank on an unusually warm November afternoon outside the Sherman Perk coffee shop. We were supposed to meet inside, but neither of us knew it was closed. So we sat at one of the picnic tables and talked about his life. 

A few generations before Frank was born, Chicken George — yes, that Chicken George — moved his family from Mississippi and settled in Tennessee.

Frank remembers the author Alex Haley coming around to talk with his aunts, gathering stories for what would become “Roots” — the watershed book and television series that helped change America. Alex Haley was one of Frank’s cousins. His most famous cousin is Tina Turner. Yes, that Tina Turner. 

Frank was born in Ripley, Tennessee in 1947, the second oldest of what would turn out to be six kids. When Frank was little, his father moved the family to Elyria, Ohio, 20 miles east of Cleveland on the Ohio Turnpike.

Not to brag, but I was really good at sports,” he said. Frank was good at all of them — baseball, basketball, you name it, he did it all. When he was 10, Frank played on the championship little league baseball team. 

“The guys who sponsored the team owned the hardware store and the grocery store, and they put us on the back of a truck and paraded us around the track. Everyone in the city turned out to cheer for us.” 

Later that year, Frank’s mom died. The family was devastated. His dad did his best to keep it together and brought his brothers and sisters to live in Milwaukee. Frank moved in with his Uncle Melvin and Aunt Elizabeth in Elyria and lived with them until he was 13. 

He was all set to play football for Elyria High School with the dream of heading to Ohio State. Then the rival Grafton school called up Elyria and ratted him out. Frank wasn’t living with his parents, which meant he wasn’t eligible to play. Asinine? Petty? Spiteful? Yep. But with Frank out of the way, Grafton would have a better chance of winning. That’s how good he was. 

Frank was crushed. Until that moment, family and sports had been pretty much his entire life. His mom was gone. His dad, brothers and sisters were living in another state. Frank had stayed behind because of sports, and now that dream seemed dead. And without something to bend his considerable energy and attention towards, he became depressed. 

“Bullshit,” said his dad who was having none of it. “Bring your butt up to Milwaukee.” So Frank brought his butt up to Milwaukee. Life wasn’t a whole lot easier here, but it wasn’t terrible either.

“Our neighborhood was excellent. I mean, you knew everybody, and everybody knew you. Everybody watched out for each other. And there was no BS going on because we all knew each other. Okay, a neighbor named Oscar made a home brew and sold it for fifty cents a quart. I never drank it because it was so nasty. But he'd pay us a nickel per bottle. We brought in, you know, quart bottles and gave them to him, and he’d clean them out. So we were on the hunt for bottles. That was our hustle. They used to play Tonk all the time at another house.” 

Tonk is a card game similar to Gin Rummy. I’d never heard of it. “Black folks will know what you’re talking about,” Frank told me. From what I can tell, there are roughly a million versions of Tonk. It’s a fast-paced game that demands your attention in a way that a game like, say, Sheepshead doesn’t. The rules are simple enough, but that doesn’t make it easy. Tonk is especially challenging because you have to constantly adjust your game on the fly. Sometimes all you can do is get rid of as many points as possible — points are bad — and hold on until someone else wins. It helps if you can count cards. A little luck doesn’t hurt either. Is Tonk a metaphor for something? It feels like a metaphor for something. 

Frank was living on 18th and Cherry with his dad and his siblings, but he wasn’t playing sports, and he wasn’t going to school. That was about to change. 

He was shooting hoops at a nearby playground when future basketball legend John Johnson saw him. Johnson would later lead Messmer High School to the 1966 Wisconsin state title and go on to play for the University of Iowa before being drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers in 1970. “The Enforcer” would end his 12-year NBA career with the Seattle SuperSonics. Back then he was just another kid from the neighborhood. 

“John asked me where I went to school,” said Frank. “I told him I don’t go to school. So he takes me to see Carl Hightower, the coach at St. Benedict. They ended up giving me a scholarship and a job cleaning up after school.”

Frank was back in school, back in the game, and the team was one of the best in the city. “We would’ve taken the Catholic Conference title, but the Diocese didn’t want an all-Black team winning the whole thing. This was back when the freeway was being built through downtown. So they closed the school and gave each of us a scholarship to a different Catholic School. They sent me off to Pius. I walked in there the first day and nearly got sick. It was all white. I … couldn’t go there.”

Frank enrolled at North Division a few blocks from his house. There wasn’t any room for him on their basketball team, so Frank got depressed again. He started running with the wrong crowd and getting into trouble. 

“My dad worked at the VA, so I’d drive him to work, take my brothers and sisters to school … and then go look for trouble. That’s all I did.” He realized pretty quickly there was no future in that. One day, he and his friends saw a Marine recruiter. They stopped, and he was the only one of his friends to pass the entrance exam. Frank wasn’t old enough to enlist, so his dad signed the papers. 

A few weeks later, Frank found himself at boot camp in San Diego where he graduated top of his class. “I thought I was signing up to have a future … go to college and all that.” That’s not exactly what happened.

On March 8, 1965, the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade landed in Da Nang, South Vietnam. Their first major battle of what would become a week later, the Vietnam War. Around the same time — after boot camp and 30 days of leave — Frank found himself thousands of miles from home in the middle of a firefight. 

“The helicopter dropped me off in a rice paddy, and I hit this rice paddy and bullets are flying everywhere. And I didn't know which side was which. And I just laid there a while and they hollered at me, ‘Hey, ammo man! Ammo man, we need ammo!’ So I'm swimming almost, you know, in a rice paddy. Talk about a rude awakening with people trying to kill you. It was really horrific.” 

It was also monsoon season. Loaded with heavy gear, Frank and his fellow Marines would often wade through water up to their chests. Every so often, a Marine would step in a water buffalo hole and sink straight to the bottom. 

“All of a sudden the guy next to you would disappear. They’d go down and get stuck in the mud and never come back up. There was nothing we could do. We couldn’t see. And I mean, we lost so many people that way. As an 18-year old, it really blew my mind, you know?”

Do I know? I joined the Army Reserves when I was 17. I went through Basic Training and AIT. I did my one weekend a month and two weeks a year for a few years and got out early. I sort of almost got sent to Kuwait during the first Gulf War. So no ... I don’t know. 

“I mean, we go over there, we know nothing about the North Vietnamese coming up out of the sugar cane fields. We would call artillery strikes, but artillery can't cut through sugar cane. We didn’t know anything about Punji traps [pits filled with sugar cane sticks that were sharpened and poisoned]. Every gate and fence of every village we came to was booby trapped with explosives. Kick it and boom. 

“I had never shot anybody or killed anybody before, you know? But I mean, you begin to realize that these people had been fighting for a long time. They fought the Chinese. They fought the French. They grew up fighting. We should have known that these people were not going to submit. This was their country. A guy I knew over there once told me, ‘You’re only going to be here a little while. I gotta stay.’ That said it all. We should’ve known the war was unwinnable.” 

After his first tour, Frank was sent back to the states. He served in North Carolina as an MP on shore patrol. One day, he and his partner detained two white men for a bank robbery. “We pulled them over and told them to stay put while we called the local cops. They wouldn’t listen. One of the kids staggered into my partner. His .45 went off and shot the kid through the jaw. The highway patrol handcuffed them, threw the bleeding kids in the back of our jeep and escorted us to the hospital.”

The next day it came out in the paper that two Black Marines shot two white boys. Frank’s partner was close to getting discharged anyway, so they sent him home immediately. They put Frank on a ship to Hawaii. While they were at sea, the President ordered the ship to Vietnam, and Frank found himself heading back to Da Nang.

“A few of us had experience in Vietnam, in jungle warfare. Most of the Marines on that ship were new. These kids only had six or eight weeks of boot camp and no jungle warfare training to speak of. We tried to train them as best we could, but we were on an iron ship and these young Marines were gung ho, thinking they were all-powerful, invincible. It was a slaughter.”

In his second tour, Frank was in charge of a weapons platoon and 60 Marines. It was a First Lieutenant's job. The Marines had offered him a commission, but he turned them down. “I said, ‘Are you nuts?!’ I knew that as an officer they could call you back anytime. I wanted to live.”

He was finally discharged on April 1, 1969. April Fools Day. The Marines tried to keep him around, offering Frank $60,000 to reenlist. “I knew what was going to happen — another promotion and send me back. I didn’t want to die.” 

A few days later, Frank was back in Milwaukee with PTSD and no real plans for the future. “I planned to go on unemployment, but that lasted about three weeks.”

As you already know, Frank does not sit still. Frank gets involved, and he is everywhere. He got a job at the post office. He took classes at MATC. He worked with special needs kids at MPS. He got a job at the VA. Then an anti-war group invited him to talk publicly about his experiences in Vietnam. Frank traveled to places like Chicago and New York speaking to huge crowds. Thousands of people. This caught the attention of the FBI. Back at home, they showed up at the VA. 

“They called me up to the office, and I walked in there and they said these men want to speak to you. The FBI agents showed me all these pictures they had taken of me up on stage.” 

I asked Frank if he got in trouble. He shook his head. “They wanted me to become an informant. People loved me because I was telling the truth. The FBI was looking to have me elevated in this group and keep tabs on everyone. I didn't realize, you know, who I had gotten involved with. Once I found out they were a communist group, I was out.

“I went back and I told 'em, ‘Hey, I was at work today. The FBI approached me. They showed me pictures. They had all the places I had been and stuff, and, you know, I don't want to do this anymore.’ Yeah. So I quit.” 

The 1960s, to put it mildly, were a very weird time. Sure, the music had a great beat and you could dance to it, but the 60s were a time of incredible social change. You could call it “tumultuous” or whatever, but most of the tumult was caused by white people reacting badly to other people demanding to be treated like people. So it wasn’t really a surprise that the FBI, ever vigilant for anything that smelled even vaguely “un-American”, would turn up at these rallies. And back then, in the middle of the Cold War, “communist” was a dirty word. Okay, yes, “communist” has been a dirty word in America since roughly October 25, 1917. 

Frank still protested the war every chance he got. “Whenever they had protest marches and stuff, I was there. I was against the war.”

According to Frank, the first time he got involved in any kind of social justice work was when he was working at the Milwaukee County Transit System. Even though he was paying union dues, the union had almost no interest in representing him. He was part time. The union was focused on full-time workers — drivers and mechanics mostly. When the union would demand higher wages or better benefits, which is what unions are supposed to do, they left part-timers out of the equation. This was one of their concessions to management.

Frank told me there was a lot of nepotism happening in the MCTS back then. Most of the kids he worked with were the sons and daughters of managers. So when Frank went to management and asked for the kinds of things you ask for when you’re trying to support a wife and a young son on part-time wages, management said yes. The union was furious. Frank was doing their job because they weren’t doing their job, at least not for Frank. 

“That pissed them off, but I went in front of them, and I said, ‘Hey, I hear you guys talking behind my back about what we’re getting and all that, but I'm paying the same amount of union dues as you are, and I'm a part-timer. If you’ve got a problem with that, step up. Come on, I'll take you one at a time. Get in line.’” No one got in line. 

Frank spent 15 years with MCTS — first as a part-timer and then as a C-man working on buses, then as a B-man doing more complicated repairs and less grunt work, then as a supervisor handing out assignments and making sure the guys were doing what they were supposed to do. Everyone wanted to work for Frank, because he genuinely cared about them. 

“One day a guy comes in drunk. I told him, ‘Don’t punch that clock.’ I had a guy drive him home, another guy take his car home. I knew I wasn't going to let him punch that clock because he would’ve lost his job. This got around, because most of the foremen were assholes. I had empathy for guys.”

Frank found his way to Common Ground the same way many of you have — through his church. He was already part of the leadership at Mt. Calvary Lutheran when his pastor said, “I got the perfect thing for you.”

He was there for that first meeting. “What really impressed me was that we had asked the mayor to be there, and we told him that we’d have 1200 people. We had 2000 people, and he couldn’t believe we were able to gather that many people from all these different churches.” Soon, Frank joined the Common Ground Strategy Team. 

At Common Ground, we work towards building the world as it should be. For Frank, that means everyone has equal access to jobs, food, a home, clean water, good schools and safe neighborhoods. That’s probably why his proudest accomplishment has been Milwaukee Rising. 

Before 2008, there was a housing bubble caused by subprime mortgages and other flagrantly idiotic lending practices. It was, to oversimplify a bit, a high-risk game of financial hot potato driven entirely by greed. The bubble burst, as bubbles do, and suddenly banks found themselves with trillions of dollars worth of worthless investments. Oops. Except we’re talking about homes, which people tend to live in, raise families in, and build generational wealth with. Homes also generate property tax revenue, which is useful for things like roads, schools, first responders and, you know, civilization. Three hundred of these “investments” were foreclosed, vacant and located in the Sherman Park neighborhood. 

These empty houses weren’t generating revenue for the banks. They weren’t generating property taxes for the city. They weren’t sheltering people. And they were dragging the rest of the neighborhood down. Common Ground decided to do something about it.

Milwaukee Rising was formed to rehabilitate 100 homes in the Sherman Park neighborhood, and Frank was all in. The plan was simple, ingenious and a win for everyone . All Common Ground had to do was get the banks on board. After all, bankers broke the system. They should help fix it. 

There is an amazing quote from Upton Sinclair —  “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Now take salary and multiply it by the worldview of people firmly entrenched within powerful financial institutions. That’s what Frank and the Milwaukee Rising team were up against.

“There’s time to be angry, but not when you’re dealing with someone you want something from. You can’t show anger. You can be frustrated. There’s nothing wrong with being frustrated, but you have to come up with a way to reach a place where you’re both getting what you want.”

They started close to home. 

“We talked to the guy in charge of Wells Fargo here, but they weren’t willing to listen or negotiate,” said Frank. “So Bob Connolly gave the signal and we walked out. We got right on a plane and headed to San Francisco to talk with the CEO of Wells Fargo at their shareholders meeting. Some kids who spoke ahead of us were being belligerent, and they were handcuffed and led out. After they spoke, we presented our plan to a room full of people in suits.” 

They had found people with the willingness to listen and the power to make a change. “Their CEO ended up calling Bob and said he’d be willing to give us $4 million to get started.”

And Milwaukee Rising was just getting started. “We sent two people to Germany to talk to Deutsche Bank. They were invited back by shareholders. A group from Deutsche Bank in New York flew to Milwaukee to talk with us, and I led that meeting. After that, they gave us carte blanche. 

“That’s the power of Common Ground. When we call and ask to speak to somebody, they speak to us nine times out of ten. Standing out on the corner with a bullhorn doesn’t work anymore. People in power don’t really care if you're out there not disturbing them directly. Eventually Chase, Bank of America, and US Bank gave us about $30 million to rehab homes. They also agreed to provide loans to people at a time when they weren’t handing out loans to anybody.”

Milwaukee Rising bought properties from the city and the banks, assessed what needed to be fixed — refurbishing beautiful hardwood floors, putting in new windows and roofs, new plaster and drywall, plumbing, electrical, HVAC … whatever needed to be done. They found new buyers, helped them rehab their credit, and, after a class in homeownership, helped them secure loans with these banks.

In the end, Milwaukee Rising rehabilitated and sold 91 homes in the Sherman Park neighborhood. It was an incredible victory.

 “The thing I love about Common Ground is that we've developed into a group that has power. We're able to call on people, you know, the mayor or whoever. Common Ground said they need this or that, and the mayor says, ‘Well, I'll look into it.’ And they look into it. They don’t just turn their head and do what they want to do. They have to listen to us because they know that isn’t the end of it.”

We were nearing the end of the interview. The street lights were coming on, and we both had places to be. I asked Frank who had inspired him throughout his life. He said his aunt and uncle in Elyria were a huge influence. Bob Connolly is second on the list. His father is first. “I told him that right before he died. I laid down beside him and told him how proud I was of what he had done as a man to keep his family together.” 

And maybe that’s who Frank Finch III has become over the years — someone like his dad. Someone who steps up and keeps it together. Frank sees what needs to be done — usually before anyone else — steps up, keeps it together and keeps us going. And for that, we are grateful. 

Thank you, Frank. 

-Ryan Kresse, Writer from member organization SRH