READ IT AND R.I.P: We’re all born naked, but I’m not so sure we all die that way. I know the Bible says so, and for the sake of Frank Frost, I’m hoping the Bible — which Frank could read in ancient Greek, Greek, German, French, and some Italian — got it right.
Frank died just a couple of weeks ago at the age of 96 in the Mission Canyon home he built in the early 1970s that included an old-school hot tub. God help anyone trying to get in it with their clothes on. Frank — then a UCSB professor of ancient antiquities — was scornful of inappropriate modesty.
In 1972, Frank ran for a seat on the county Board of Supervisors. With the 1969 oil spill still in the rearview mirror, Frank campaigned as an in-your-face no-growther. Improbably — but perhaps inevitably — he won.
That election marked a tectonic shift in Santa Barbara politics. Along with Frank, that year brought another historic win by Jim Slater. Both men would shake up the Board of Supervisors — then under the political hegemony of the good-old-boy, Chamber of Commerce, oil industry, and developer wing of the GOP.After Frank and Jim, the genie wasn’t getting back in that bottle.
During his time in office, 1972 to 1976, anyone looking for Frank could often find him at More Mesa, a popular nude beach up the Goleta coast. I bring up all this nudity for gratuitously non-gratuitous reasons.
Even before Frank could be sworn in, he and his wife, Amanda, were approached by a charming Montecito swag man, Phil Regan, working for an out-of-town developer named Said Halimi. Halimi wanted to transform More Mesa into an exclusive, gated community called Tyrolean Village with 750 homes, an 18-hole golf course, and tennis courts.
His bag man Regan was a former New York City cop who had found fame in Hollywood B-movies as the “singing cop” thanks to his exceptional tenor voice. He had even sung at Harry Truman’s presidential inauguration, but somewhere along the way, he switched horses and became a supporter for Republican candidates, such as Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. And for Said Halimi.
Regan invited the Frosts to his Montecito home, where he offered Frank $5,000 and lucrative consulting contracts for Frank’s friend Ken Palmer.
Really, $5,000?!
Clearly, Phil Regan had no clue.
Frank Frost was one seriously accomplished badass. His father, who died when Frank was a child, was a Standard Oil executive and a big-ticket philanthropist for the San Francisco and National orchestras when not hanging out at the elite Bohemian Club.
Frank liked to lie, “I had a tendency never to finish anything and sometimes never even start it.” The truth is that by the time he graduated high school at age 16, he knew his way around all 88 piano keys. He attended a number of colleges — including the Virginia Military Institute — hopped freight trains, and hitchhiked across the country. In 1951, he joined the army, maybe to rebel or maybe, as his wife later said, learn how “to be a man.”
Is there a difference?
Frank saw military action in Korea. He was shot at and shelled, and dodged hand grenades. Later, he was ordered to the Nevada desert, where an atom bomb was detonated 4,000 feet from his 10-foot-deep hole. Afterward, he traipsed across the molten sand — transformed into crunchy glass globules — to ground zero, holding a meter reader that calibrated ambient radiation levels. He was a human guinea pig testing how much soldiers could absorb and still keep fighting.
Frank eventually got his BA at UCSB in 1955 and his PhD in history at UCLA, and later returned to Santa Barbara to help build UCSB’s history department. In 1953, Frank’s mother, Eugenia, for whom the word “formidable” was invented, had moved to Mission Canyon with his brother, a classical composer. She quickly became a force within local Democratic circles who had money and knew how to organize campaigns. His sister, an accomplished painter, stayed up in San Francisco’s North Beach, palling around with beatniks, like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
Five thousand dollars? Really?
As a musician, Frank could play anything in any key just by ear. He knew thousands of songs by heart — Gershwin, Cole Porter, the whole American Songbook, but also jazz like pianist Bill Evans. Great songs made him cry.
Frank played professionally for years at swank Montecito restaurants and Milpas Street strip clubs. Their names evoke a nostalgia for times none of us knew: Tico Tico Room, King Supper Club, Johnny’s Seven Seas, Sky Club, Falcon Lodge, Yankee Clipper, and Olive Mill Bistro. He loved them all.
As a scholar, Frank was an expert on ancient Greece. He was also a marine archeologist who explored underwater ruins in the Aegean Sea. During the Vietnam War, Frank — an old-school, anti-Commie, yellow-dog Democrat — was among the last to denounce the war. Eventually, his mind changed by the cumulative weight of so much government deceit.
Really, $5,000?
Frank and his friend Ken Palmer arranged a sting with the sheriff and the district attorney to nail Phil Regan. It was high drama and the stuff of newspaper headlines. Palmer wore the wire; Frank played along. The singing cop got arrested, convicted, and sentenced to two years behind bars. Halimi was never charged for lack of evidence.
Frank Frost’s legacy? Among other things, More Mesa got saved. With the taint of such obvious corruption, even the majority of supervisors who supported the project voted against it. Today, it still functions as a nude beach.
Did Frank have any thoughts about the afterlife? “I am a Christian, a reader of the gospels (in Greek), and a believer in the values taught by Jesus,” he wrote me in an email in 2021. “But I am also an atheist,” he added, “reluctant to blame one single entity for all the messiness of our planet.”
A human being protecting a god in which he does not believe? You don’t get much more magnanimous than that. Some might even call it grace.
Thanks, Frank.
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