Frank Turone Sr.

Frank Turone was born on March 6, 1925 in North Tonawanda, NY, the middle of three children. His father was a railroad laborer; both of his parents, as well as his older sister, had been born in Italy. The family had arrived in the US two years before Frank was born.

Frank graduated from North Tonawanda High School, working as a pinsetter in a bowling alley during his high school years. He was drafted on March 6, 1943, at which time he was working at Buffalo Bolt Company; he enlisted on May 21, 1943.

Frank was inducted into the Army at Fort Niagara, near home, and then assigned to the cavalry at Fort Riley, KS. He underwent 13 weeks of radio operator training, and was then transferred to Camp Chaffee in Arkansas, and later to Camp Forrest in Tennessee, finding his way into the Signal Company Special. In his autobiography, Frank recounts a number of his adventures in Europe with the Ghost Army, but concludes with a thought expressed by many men in the unit—that it was the combat troops that deserved the glory. "We all envied the combat troops and wished we could be part of their outfits. How wrong we were! Only after the war was completely over did we come to realize the significance of our effort and the impact that we had on the outcome of some of the major battles in Europe."

In that same document, Frank recounts the amusing story of the "La Morra" game the soldiers used to play to help pass the time after they'd first arrived in France. It was introduced by Frank and several other Italian-Americans in the unit. "To start with, two people pair off against each other. Each person makes a fist, throws his fist at his opponent and at the same time exposes one or more fingers and yells a number from one to ten." Winning is based partly on the total of the two numbers, and there are other complexities involving ties, etc. Winners had to wash out the losers' mess kits.

One of the prerequisites of the game was that the numbers be yelled out in Italian. "There were only a few of us Italians in the platoon, yet we influenced almost the whole platoon to play the game. . . . The ones who were interested in playing the game played by our rules. That is, the numbers must be called out in Italian—no exceptions!"

Frank was discharged on November 19, 1945 with the rank of T/5. He used his GI Bill benefits to attend college, and, influenced by his radio operator training, earned a BS degree in the new science of television engineering at the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago.

After graduating in 1949, he briefly worked at Zenith Radio Corp. in Chicago and at Sylvania Buffalo. But by 1951, he'd gotten a job at Bell Aircraft Corporation* as a lab technician in the Missile Lab, and began a 50-year career in the aerospace industry.

Shortly after joining Bell, he met and fell in love with his brother-in-law's cousin, Pierina, an Italian who had emigrated to Ontario the year before. The couple married on August 16, 1952, and settled in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Frank commuted over the border to Bell Aircraft daily, and they remained in Ontario until 1953 when Pierina was able to immigrate. Then they relocated to Niagara Falls, NY. Frank advanced through the ranks at Bell, eventually becoming a dynamics engineer and moving into missile project engineering.

Frank and Pierina would go on to have five children: Sam, Suzanne, Frank Jr., Patty, and Gina. The older children were born in New York; the younger in Orlando, FL after Frank left Bell Aircraft and joined Martin Orlando** as a senior engineer in 1959. He would spend 16 years with the company, working on missile guidance systems, including the Pershing Missile Program at Cape Canaveral and later the SPRINT missile program. Those years included one year when the family lived in Camarillo, CA, where Frank served as an engineering field representative on a flight test program.

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, ratified by the US and Russia in 1972, eventually put an end to the SPRINT program, and Frank could see that a pink slip was in the offing. He bought a laundromat and got his real estate license in Florida, but the market did not work in his favor. In 1975, he took a job in Technical Publications with Litton Systems, Canada, a defense contractor, and the family relocated to Toronto, with Pierina happy to be back near her family.

Frank remained in Toronto and in technical publications for the rest of his career, working for Litton, General Motors, Haviland Aircraft, and several other aerospace companies. He retired in 2001.

Frank died on April 2, 2011 in Toronto.

*Bell played a crucial role in the development of rocket propulsion after WWII, spearheaded by some of the most brilliant minds in rocket science ​such as Walter Dornberger (ex-commander of Nazi Germany Peenemünde Army Research Center) and Wendell Moore.

**Martin became Martin Marietta two years later, and eventually Lockheed Martin.

Sources

1940 census
https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2442/records/4046724?tid=&pid=&queryId=b9674cc9-e012-4ade-baf7-c9f698eefe90&_phsrc=vVP5&_phstart=successSource

1943 draft card
https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2238/records/303970657?tid=&pid=&queryId=dd9992cd-c2bb-4c14-b2d8-53e4894e49c0&_phsrc=vVP2&_phstart=successSource

1943 enlistment record
https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/8939/records/1954946?tid=&pid=&queryId=69957632-1496-4f0b-bd0c-044d2696e791&_phsrc=vVP1&_phstart=successSource

1950 census
https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/62308/records/293752078?tid=&pid=&queryId=fb1ab869-15c1-4f70-94d3-4cd181bda858&_phsrc=vVP4&_phstart=successSource

1956 Niagara Falls city directory
https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2469/records/95891236?tid=159082061&pid=152082518029&ssrc=pt

2005 Autobiography of Frank Turone (family document)

2011 Social Security death index

https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/3693/records/90590690?tid=159082061&pid=152082518029&ssrxsc=pt