41 Ships, Pins, and Promises: Uncle Frank and the Waterways of War

 Ships, Pins, and Promises: Uncle Frank and the Waterways of War

Frank Francis Coon – My Maternal Great Uncle

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 41 – October 8, 2025

Prompt: Water

When I was little, my mother told me about the letters she used to write to her Uncle Frank. One of them came back, stamped “Undeliverable — No Forwarding Address.” I still have that envelope, postmarked January 18, 1946, and addressed simply to Frank Coon, General Delivery, Portland, Oregon.

Frank had gone west to help build ships during World War II, but by the time her letter reached Portland, he had already moved on. She told me he used to send home pins — one for each ship completed — small tokens of pride from a man whose life had once taken a very different course.

Frank Coon, my maternal great uncle. 

Frank Coon holding his great nephew, David Wallis, June 1945.

A Boy in Trouble

Frank Francis Coon was born February 29, 1893, in Springfield, Missouri, the oldest son of Josiah Coon (also known as Joe Moore) and Lucinda Crull. The family lived in Tulsa, Indian Territory as early as 1900, but life was not easy.

In 1910, thirteen-year-old Frank made the local headlines for all the wrong reasons. The Sapulpa Evening Light called him “the first Tulsa County youth to be sentenced to the new reform school at Pauls Valley.” His crime? The “purloining of a roll of lawn hose.” The paper described him as troublesome, an incorrigible boy who would spend the next eight years learning a trade — a harsh sentence for a child who’d already seen too much loss.

Eight years later, in 1918, the Tulsa Daily World ran another story under the headline “Does Some Tulsan Wish a President?” The tone was different this time. Frank was described as bright, manly, and ambitious — “anxious to make good.” He was first in his class at the State Industrial School, and the superintendent wrote that he’d become “a boy any man would be proud to have.”

The paper invited readers to give him a home. Perhaps someone did. Perhaps, as often happens in life, he found his own way.

Working the Land — and the Lines

When the WWI draft was registered in 1918, Frank was working as a pipe fitter for Cosden Oil Company, part of Tulsa’s booming petroleum industry. Over the years, he learned the trades that built Oklahoma: groundman and lineman for the Public Service Company, section hand for the Sand Springs Railway, and eventually, after decades of hard work and hardship, a shipbuilder.

The boy who once stole a hose to play with water now helped build the great ships that carried it — vessels that would sail far beyond his landlocked Oklahoma roots.

To the Water’s Edge

By 1946, when my mother’s letter came back from Portland, the war had ended. The Kaiser shipyards in Oregon, where men like Frank worked, were already winding down. It was a place of urgency and purpose — where thousands of Americans, men and women alike, built Liberty ships and victory vessels at a breathtaking pace.

Even if I can’t say exactly which shipyard employed him, I can imagine the scene: sparks flying from welders’ torches, cranes swinging steel plates into place, the smell of salt and oil in the air. Each launch was marked by celebration and exhaustion — another ship off to sea, another small victory for peace.

Frank Coon and his sister, Elizabeth Moore Nolen, looking at sailor boy, Leonard "Sonny" Nolen, probably Christmas 1951. 

The Man Who Stayed Ashore

Frank never went to sea, but his work sailed the world.

The pins he sent home were small reminders that even from the edge of the Pacific, his hands had touched history.

After the war, he returned to Oklahoma. In his later years, he lived quietly in Skiatook, not far from his sister Elizabeth Moore Nolen — my grandmother. He died there on November 8, 1970, at age 77, after a lifetime that had started with missteps and ended with quiet dignity.

Closing Reflection

The boy who stole a roll of hose so he could play with water grew up to build ships that crossed oceans.

He disappeared and reappeared throughout his life, leaving behind little more than newspaper clippings, a returned letter, and the story of redemption that runs like a current through generations.

Uncle Frank didn’t go to sea, but his work sailed the world. The pins he sent home were small, but each one marked a vessel that carried someone else’s brother, husband, or son across the water.