Frank N. Ikard

Frank Neville Ikard (January 30, 1913 – May 1, 1991) was a Democratic United States Representative from Texas' 13th congressional district, centered about Wichita Falls, Texas.

Frank Neville Ikard
Member of the
U.S. House of Representatives
from Texas's 13th district
In office
September 8, 1951 – December 15, 1961
Preceded byEd Gossett
Succeeded byGraham B. Purcell, Jr.
Judge of the Texas 30th Judicial District Court
In office
November 1948 – September 8, 1951
Personal details
Born(1913-01-30)January 30, 1913
Henrietta, Clay County
Texas, USA
DiedMay 1, 1991(1991-05-01) (aged 78)
Washington, D.C.
Cause of deathCardiac arrest
Resting placeArlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia
NationalityAmerican
Political partyDemocratic
Alma materSchreiner University

University of Texas

University of Texas School of Law
OccupationLawyer/lobbyist
Military service
Branch/serviceUnited States Army
Battles/warsWorld War II Prisoner of War in Germany

Ikard was born in Henrietta in Clay County, Texas, and attended the public schools and the Schriener Institute, in Kerrville, Texas. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1936 at the University of Texas in Austin, where he was a member of the honorary men's service organization known as the Texas Cowboys. He received his law degree from the University of Texas School of Law in 1937 and was admitted that year to the bar.[1]

Ikard began his practice of law in Wichita Falls in the firm now known as Gibson Davenport Anderson; one of the founding partners of the firm was Orville Bullington, the 1932 Republican gubernatorial nominee.[2]

Ikard enlisted in the United States Army in January 1944 and served with Company K, One Hundred and Tenth Infantry, Twenty-eighth Division. He was prisoner of war in Germany in 1944 and 1945. He was awarded the Purple Heart Medal.[1]

Political history

After the war, Ikard served as judge of Thirtieth Judicial District Court of Wichita Falls. He was appointed chairman of the Veterans Affairs Commission of Texas in 1948. Then Governor Beauford Jester in November 1948 named Ikard as judge of the Thirtieth Judicial District Court. He subsequently was elected in 1950, and served until September 8, 1951. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions in 1956, 1960, and 1968. He was chairman of the Texas State Democratic Convention in 1960.[1]

Ikard was elected to the Eighty-second Congress to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of his fellow Democrat, Ed Gossett. He was reelected to the Eighty-third and to the four succeeding Congresses and served from September 8, 1951, to December 15, 1961, when he resigned to become an oil industry lobbyist.[1]

He was one of the majority of the Texan delegation to decline to sign the 1956 Southern Manifesto opposing the desegregation of public schools ordered by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. However, Ikard voted against the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960.[3][4]

Later career

Ikard served as the executive vice president of American Petroleum Institute from 1962 to 1963 and as president from 1963 to 1980.[1] He spoke during the Annual Meeting of the American Petroleum Institute 1965 and stated:

This report unquestionably will fan emotions, raise fears, and bring demands for action. The substance of the report is that there is still time to save the world's peoples from the catastrophic consequence of pollution, but time is running out.

One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts. The report further states, and I quote:

“… the pollution from internal combustion engines is so serious, and is growing so fast that an alternative nonpolluting means of powering automobiles, buses, and trucks is likely to become a national necessity.” Ikard, F. N. Meeting the challenges of 1966. In Annual Meeting of the American Petroleum Institute 1965 12–15 (API, 1965).[5]

He was appointed in 1965, and reappointed in 1967, to the University of Texas Board of Regents by Governor John B. Connally, Jr.[6]

Personal life

Ikard was the grandson of rancher William S. Ikard.[7]

His first wife was the former Jean Hunter, who died in 1970. They had two sons, Frank Ikard, Jr., and William F. Ikard. Later, Ikard married the former Jayne Keegan Brumley (c. 1927–2010), a native of Walpole, Massachusetts, a prominent journalist, and the widow of Calvin Brumley, a journalist too, he originally from Hereford, Texas. The Brumleys moved in 1960 to Boston, Massachusetts, where Calvin headed the area bureau of The Wall Street Journal. Jayne worked for the Boston Herald and contributed to Newsweek. She provided the first national coverage of cookbook author Julia Child and became a close friend of the opera singer Beverly Sills. She interviewed Robert Frost and covered the campaign in 1966 of United States Senator Edward Brooke, a Moderate Republican and the first African-American elected to the upper congressional chamber since Reconstruction. She later covered the 1968 presidential campaign, first Robert F. Kennedy and, after Kennedy's assassination, Richard Nixon, the victor in the race against Hubert Humphrey.[8]

Ikard met his second wife at an environmental conference in Sweden. He was irritated when he first saw Jayne carrying an image of a silver whale while she marched in a parade in Stockholm. The two were introduced the next night at a dinner and were married after a quick courtship six weeks later in Austin, Texas. On their wedding day, the Ikards visited former President Lyndon B. Johnson, then in the last year of his life, and Lady Bird Johnson at their LBJ Ranch in Gillespie County in the Texas Hill Country. Johnson invited the couple to spend their honeymoon at his Haywood House twenty miles away. He presented the Ikards with their first wedding gifts, two silver mint julep glasses stamped with "LBJ" on the bottom.[8]

Ikard died in 1991 in Washington, D.C., of cardiac arrest.[9]

Ikard is interred at Arlington National Cemetery.[10] Jayne Ikard was Roman Catholic. She died in Washington, D.C., of emphysema at the age of eighty-three on August 27, 2010 and is interned alongside her husband at Arlington National Cenetery.[8]

Quotes
  • Former Congressman Frank Ikard once wisecracked that Alan Greenspan is "the kind of person who knows how many thousands of flat-headed bolts were used in a Chevrolet and what it would do to the national economy if you took out three of them".
U.S. House of Representatives
Preceded by
Ed Gossett		 Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from Texas's 13th congressional district
1951–1961		 Succeeded by
Graham B. Purcell, Jr.

References
  1. "Frank N. Ikard". bioguide.congress.gov. Retrieved February 27, 2013.
  2. "Barbara A. Gibson, "Our History: Gibson Davenport Anderson"". ghrdlaw.com. Retrieved June 11, 2010.
  3. "HR 6127. CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1957". GovTrack.us.
  4. "HR 8601. PASSAGE".
  5. Franta, Benjamin (November 19, 2018). "Early oil industry knowledge of CO2 and global warming". Nature Climate Change. 8 (12): 1024–1025. Bibcode:2018NatCC...8.1024F. doi:10.1038/s41558-018-0349-9. ISSN 1758-678X. S2CID 91286403.
  6. "The Honorable Frank Neville Ikard", Former Regents of the University of Texas System, University of Texas System, retrieved January 24, 2012
  7. "Fifty Years Ago," Clay County Leader, Henrietta, Texas, Vol. 70, No. 11 (June 14, 2001).
  8. "Jayne Brumley Ikard, 83, Was Hostess, journalist, Islander". Vineyard Gazette. September 2, 2010. Retrieved March 9, 2016.
  9. "Frank N. Ikard, Ex-Congressman and Oil Lobbyist, Is Dead at 78", The New York Times, retrieved January 24, 2012
  10. "Burial Detail: Ikard, Frank Neville", ANC Explorer, Arlington National Cemetery, Official Website
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