FRANK DAVID SHOLIN CAMEO                                                                                  

by Paul David Sholin

Frank David Sholin was thirteen years old as the twentieth century rolled in. He lived a very eventful life in that century of change for sixty three more years. He was five foot six and a half inches tall with thin dark-brown hair and weighed about one hundred fifty pounds most of his life. He often had a small mustache. Although he was somewhat sickly as a small boy, he was exceptionally strong physically as an adult. In spite of his wide travels, sometimes to primitive places, he was seldom ill.

He was born January 10, 1887 in Russell City, Kansas, to Jonas and Sophia Hanson Sholin who had come from Sweden in the eighties. The family moved in 1890 to Oregon. He was the second son in an impressive group of seven boys -Edwin, Frank David, Arthur, Jessie, Eskel, George, Burnum Mark, known as B.M., and Elmer. Two sisters died before they were three. Jonas was described by his son as mainly being a gold-prospector. The family grew up in very rugged circumstances. Jonas often had to hunt game just to feed the family. David was basically a self-educated man. His schooling as a boy was minimal. As the boys grew they soon left home to make their ways in the world on their own.

My father was a world -traveler who made his first trip to Nome, Alaska with his father on a gold-prospecting venture. (The Paul David Sholins found themselves investing in a gold mine in the 90s in that same tradition. Nothing has come of any of these efforts to get rich,) Frank David's next trip was to the Philippine Islands where he became the overseer of a large plantation of coconut palms. His religious interests were sharpened by his contact with a missionary who needed someone to run his launch.

David was very handy with engines as well as carpenter skills. The time spent with this missionary made a deep impression on him. When he returned to the United States his newly-heightened interest in the Christian faith led him to enroll in a Bible College in Nyack, N.Y. This is where he met Edith Trautwein of Toledo, Ohio., who had studied to be a teacher. This was the woman he was to eventually marry. He had learned Spanish very well in the Philippines. That led to his accepting an assignment as a Protestant missionary to Argentina. Edith accepted a similar assignment on the same mission. They were married in 1918 in that country.

Because of illness, he returned to the United States with his wife and first child, Paul David, (the author of this sketch,) who was born in Olavarria, 300 kilometers from Buenos Aires. The trip was made when I was six months old. The family returned to Oregon where he was reared and a second son, William Allen, was born in Hood River. Within a very short time they all crossed the Pacific to live in Jolo, a small island in Mindanao. This assignment was to work with the Islamic Moros for the Christian Missionary Alliance. The Alliance was a movement started by a Presbyterian clergyman to reach the less-affluent in this country and abroad. It became a denomination during World War I. They sent out more missionaries than there were pastors in that church.

In 1926 , because of Edith's physical health, they were forced to return to Portland, Oregon. David's widowed mother came to live with them for a year because she had suffered from a stroke.  Now it was time to go to Toledo, Ohio, since Edith had not been home for years. In '27 , with limited funds, the move called for some creativity. David rounded up an old bakery delivery vehicle. He stripped it down and built a wooden living-space and attached it to the frame. There was nothing like it on the washboard roads across the States. After weeks of adventurous driving the family of four finally arrived in Toledo. That vehicle was very likely the first RV to cross most of the United States. If only the inventive Frank David had obtained a patent for the idea, the future might have been quite different from the gold story. FDS served a rural church as pastor for over two years outside of Toledo.

Then a call came from Toronto. A large church there, called The Peoples' Church, wanted to send a Spanish-speaking couple to Spain to work with The British Missionary Society. The project called for the establishment of a school for Spanish Evangelicals. It was to train potential pastors for the growing Evangelical Protestant movement in the Spanish-speaking world. The family now crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1930. They got settled in time to witness the abdication of the Spanish throne by King Alfonso XIII and the establishment of the second Republic. It was a thrilling time of change for Spain. Some of the young men the Sholins were teaching took part in the celebration parade which would have been forbidden for Protestants to do under the monarchy.

David and family lived in Spain from 1930 to 36 with a brief furlough in 1934.They were located in three different towns or cities during that time. Granada, however, became their home town for the Sholin boys. Living on the top floor of an old hotel in the Alhambra Palace grounds left indelible memories of relationships with peers and with Spanish history. Along with his missionary duties Frank David was a foreign correspondent. He was a stringer for the Toronto "Globe" and the "Toledo Blade." They published every word he ever sent them. There were not many correspondents for any U.S. papers in Spain at the time.

General Francisco Franco put an end to the Republic and Spanish democratic dreams in a brutal civil war. The prelude to World War II had begun. When the Franco troops took Granada the summer of 1936 the Sholins were caught, along with some sixty other Americans, in the isolated city. The first month of the war rumbled around them. There were even air-raids. Friends of the Sholins were taken out and shot. Herr Hitler sent Junker bombers to Franco as help. One of them was used to fly the refugees out of Granada, including the Sholins, in order to avoid any foreign complications for the General. The Sholins were allowed to take just one suitcase apiece and leave everything else behind. The USS Oklahoma was standing by near Gibraltar to take the Americans out of danger.

Instead of coming with the family to the U.S. in August of '36, David decided to go back into Spain to try to care for the students left behind and to try and salvage any of the family's belongings. It was dangerous. David's name was on a death list of people sought by the supporters of Franco. He had been known as one who favored the Republic through the years. General Franco declared openly that he had had to start the war to eliminate the Protestants, the Masons, and the Communists. Frank David Sholin was a Republican and had nothing to do with Masons or Communists. He demonstrated the courage, which was always a part of him, when he said goodbye to the family, not knowing when he could join them back home. It was many months later that he was able to get a ship back to the States. From there he visited Cuba and Puerto Rico. No one had ever heard of Castro in 1937.

After a year in Toronto, Canada, where he had checked in with The Peoples' Church, he and his wife found their way to North Carolina. By this time the boys were studying in a Christian Academy in Orlando, Florida called Hampden DuBois. They were in charge of an orphanage in Morganton, N.C. for some time. During this period I went to college and Bill finished high school. He eventually married his high school sweetheart there which gave the family some permanent roots in that State. During the 50s there were years spent in Arizona where I had settled after college and Princeton Seminary. Bill was now a commercial artist and I a Presbyterian minister. For a time, Frank David was employed in a remote copper mine doing traffic for huge dump trucks in the midst of boulders and rattle snakes. He also liked to collect hundreds of rocks. When retirement time came David and Edith moved to Charlotte, NC to be near Bill's family. The traveling was over. Their last years went by peacefully. David died at 75 and Edith at 97. They are buried side by side in the large Charlotte cemetery.

When it came to dying, David went true to form consistent with his courage and faith. In 1963 he suffered a coronary occlusion as a result of bad surgery a decade before. The pain was severe. As he was lying on the gurney in the hospital, supposedly out of it, his doctor said to Bill who was there with him, "Your Dad could come through this if he is careful in his recovery." Dad spoke up from the gurney, "What, and go through that again?" "not me." "I'm going home with my Lord." Very soon after, he died. As I looked at my father in his casket I suddenly realized for the first time that we had never been close. How could we? He was a Swede, taught not to show much emotion. No matter how deeply his feelings went he did not easily express them. I do not remember his ever telling me that he loved me. He would do things for you, from building a wonderful wooden rocking-horse, when I was five, to making a three-car garage into a playroom for my family.

He would take my seven year old son David Craig hunting in the Kaibab Forest near the Grand Canyon. He used to go rock-climbing with his two boys in Spain. He taught them how to shoot a gun or drive a car. He helped Bill build a whole house on a lake in North Carolina. He did not stay in touch with his brothers. He left all communications to his wife. He once told me that he owed all he had ever accomplished in life to his wife. I am not sure how often he told her that. He would tell stories of his experiences when he was preaching or teaching. I do not remember him sitting us down to do that with Bill or me. His Christian faith was shaped by the religious currents of his time. The preachers on horseback of frontier days had Protestant successors in the early 1900s. They preached the Word in tents and tabernacles. Billy Sunday and others helped shape the Evangelical world far more influentially than Billy Graham does today. The missionary movement, Catholic and Protestant, spread out across the world establishing churches in a hundred countries during that time. Frank David and Edith concentrated on Spanish-speaking countries.

In the ecumenical and pluralistic world of today how does one evaluate the role of a Protestant Christian missionary in Roman Catholic countries? In a 1957 trip to Spain where the Sholins had labored in the 30s I attended Mass one Sunday in the town Catholic church which had been considered enemy territory in my youth. The Padre, in his homily that day, was preaching the same message that was "gospel" to a Protestant. Why then try to disrupt the established faith-patterns of a Catholic culture with a Protestant missionary message? In retrospect, this observation might be appropriate. In the changing world of the 30s, and it could be true today as well, the authoritarian fabric of Roman Catholicism leaves little room for a democratic approach to government and life. Military-like obedience does not make for a free expression of believers when it comes to voting for leaders in a public election of community or nation. The Protestant Reformation had a significant role in the emergence of democratic dreams of the people along with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Frank David Sholin and his wife may have had a far larger impact on the world than the saving of 'Protestant souls' in Roman Catholic countries. In the reflections of their sons, they have died into God who is the final judge of the worth of the lives they have lived. They traveled the world with a message of hope and of love. More of that message is needed as we move into the start of a new century. Frank David Sholin did leave his mark in this world.


December 1, 1999
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EL VIEJO -DAVID SHOLIN, Que Dios te cuide ||
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