Ira William Frankel

Ira was a bit of a genius, who left a promising career in the physical sciences to follow his true passion: folk singing.

Ira attended the Prospect Hill elementary school in Pelham, New York, and then Pelham Memorial Junior High School and High School. In first grade he distinguished himself as a poet:

Fog is very quiet

It tiptoed in so soon

When we least expected it

In the afternoon

Shortly thereafter, he showed himself as a future scientist. He surprised (and sometimes frightened) adults with what he could do with chemicals from Gilbert’s kits, figuring out that he could use them to construct small incendiary devices as well as to perform magic tricks. Using surplus resistors, capacitors, vacuum tubes and other components supplied by an uncle, he taught himself to build electronic circuits. In junior high school, he and his close friends all built equipment and passed the Federal Communications Commission’s tests to become amateur radio operators, and he was assigned a license for his station, with call sign W2WOH.

He also volunteered for the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service, a unit of Civil Defense established during the Cold War to search for radio equipment that might be operated by spies. The drills consisted of dividing a local group into two teams, one of which would hide a portable transmitter. The other would use homemade receiving equipment (often with bent coat hangers as antennae) to try to triangulate and find the transmitter. On one occasion, Ira’s team hid the transmitter in a baby carriage, dressed in adult clothing, and wheeled the carriage around in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to confuse the searchers.

In high school he stood out for his scientific frame of mind. He was an active member of the high school radio club and the physics club, and as a chemistry expert was one of the three members of a team that won first prize for the Westchester region in a science competition sponsored by Columbia University. (The team insisted that their silver cup be displayed in the same trophy case that housed all the sports trophies that students at Pelham high had won). In his senior year, he also had a leading role in the school play, John Loves Mary.

After high school he attended Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, where he continued his scientific studies. But he soon decided that he needed to do something that would more concretely improve the world. He enlisted in the U.S. Peace Corps, became proficient in Farsi, and was sent to Iran, where he taught English.

At the University of Oregon in Eugene, Ira was an outstanding physics graduate student, but his heart was mostly in music and the arts, especially in the varied world of folk and traditional music of the time. He played a fine folk guitar, writing a few songs but mostly getting together for songs with friends. He met his wife, Linda, at the university and the two became a popular singing duo. In time, they collaborated on a CD of songs in English and other languages, entitled “Polyglots: From Tehran to Tigard.” A Eugene friend, Delores Day, remarks on the keen interest he took in dance and music while at the university, especially from other cultures. This had been strengthened by his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Iran. Indeed, he retained a lifelong interest in Persian culture and food, sometimes even chiding an Iranian Restaurant waiter about some item he’d eaten. His love of music continued in Portland, where he was very active in the Portland Folklore Society, singing and helping them to keep up with the emerging digital world.

In his later years, living in Beaverton, Oregon, he often expressed discouragement at the world's failure to get along, its failure to live more creatively with differences of belief, language, and cultural ways. He deplored the destructive conflicts globally over cultural and economic priorities. Still, he kept his guitar and would now and then sing a bit of Persian song.

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