The Unabashedly Romantic Frank Jerome Tone [By Bob Kostoff]

Men with scientific minds generally do not display a romantic side, but Frank Jerome Tone did so unabashedly.

Frank J. Tone, father of famed romantic movie star Franchot Tone, was an inventor, electrical engineer and industrialist. He headed the Carborundum Co. in Niagara Falls during the hey day of the electro chemical and electro metallurgical industrial growth in the early 1900s.

His scientific side was well documented but his romantic bent remained in the shadows for many years. Recently a group of love letters he wrote to his intended, Gertrude Franchot, came to light.  His correspondence, beginning in the 1890s, came during their courtship, when one or the other was out of Niagara Falls. One letter was post office stamped Feb. 4, 1900, sent from Frank to Gertrude to an address in Ottawa, Canada.

He wrote, “You are so good to me. I have had five letters since Monday night and all so full of love and life and you.” In expressing his love for her, he acknowledged, his affection was “much more than I can tell you. Words are such weak things.”

Frank was born Oct. 16, 1868 in Bergen, N.Y., Genesee County. His wife, full name Gertrude Van Vranken Franchot, was born Nov. 16, 1876 in Titusville, Pa. Both migrated to Niagara Falls where they met.

Gertrude’s father was Stanislaus Pascal. She and Frank named one son Stanislaus Pascal Franchot Tone. He took the name Franchot rather than Stanislaus, no doubt because it fit better on a theater marquee.

In one letter Frank told of a visit from their friends, the Des Moines. Gertrude was not in the Falls at that time and he wrote her “sorry you were not here to go along with us as we could have had lots of sport with them” He took them around to the Niagara Falls sites and they bought picture post cards “mailed to all their friends just saying ‘ha, ha’.”

When Frank was in New York City one time, he wrote to her on a letterhead of the Hotel Marlborough on Broadway and 36th Street. This was a particularly poignant letter in which he noted, “I am not exactly lonesome yet. Yours is a love so strong and full and free and fearless, I could feel it around the world. But how it draws me.” He added, “Our souls meet in those clear eyes.”

Frank was really impressed with her eyes and in another missive, he wrote, he only had to look into “those fondest eyes” which, he added “looked love — more than that — they speak love and breathe it. They are all love and for me.”

In speaking about how much he appreciated her letters, he wrote (again on Marlborough Hotel stationery) “of course you don’t know what it is to always find a heart throb in your letter box when you ask the clerk for your key in the evening, but it’s getting to be a pleasant old experience.”

Evidently, Gertrude must have been discussing her love for him with others and wrote to him about it. He wrote back, “It must be evident to your friends that you are in love and Mrs. Kenny seems to be quite interesting. She must have referred to a quotation which runs something like “When woman loves, ‘tis her whole existence; man’s love is from his life a thing apart.”

He added, “This is no doubt a wise old saying but they never knew my girlie. I could conceive that I could love a woman who was not a part of my life, but not you. There is that about you that would make it impossible for him you love to think of you as not a part of everything. You are all, and if I could but hold you close and tell you.”

Frank had an electrical engineering degree from Cornell University. He first worked for General Electric, then the Pittsburgh Railroad Company. He joined Carborundum in 1895 and eventually became president, then chairman of the board. He received a doctorate in science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1935.

Franchot followed his father in attending Cornell University but, instead of science, took to drama and became president of the drama club. His father wanted him to join Carborundum as did his older brother, Frank Jerome Tone Jr., but he opted for stock theater work first in Buffalo then in New York City. Hollywood beckoned, but his hart remained with the stage.

The love letters came from Niagara Falls native Elizabeth Reeves O’Connor, who now lives in Rochester. In an email, she wrote:
“ I thought you might be interested in a discovery I made. Years ago, my grandmother gave me a small stack of love letters from Frank to Gertrude Tone (dating back to 1890). Being a teenager at the time, I didn’t think too much of them. I placed them in a box where they stayed for more than 20 years. I recently discovered the letters again, and became interested in the man who wrote them.

“The letters are in ink on delicate letterhead from various hotels. My grandmother had them because my great grandfather, Albert Reeves, was the chauffeur for the Tone family.”

Tone, a member of the Old Fort Niagara Association, also had a hand in preserving the Old Stone Chimney, relic of Fort Schlosser, that now is wasting away mostly unnoticed in Porter Park. The late city historian Edward T. Williams called it “the oldest piece of masonry west of the Hudson River, except the Old Castle at Fort Niagara.”  When Peter A. Porter sold his farm to the Niagara Falls Power Company, then site of the chimney, it was agreed the chimney should be preserved. The Carborundum Company, when Tone was president, purchased that land from the power company. At that time Tone agreed that if the chimney had to be moved, the cost would be split between Carborundum and the power company. Williams wrote, “On account of the expansion of the plant of the Carborundum Company last year (1943) it gave notice that it desired to use the site and when the Niagara Falls Historical Society selected a permanent site for the Old Stone Chimney in Porter Park, it was taken apart piece by piece and set up again near its original location as part of Fort Schlosser in accordance with the agreement made by Frank J. Tone.”

Frank Tone Died in July, 1944 in Niagara Falls. Gertrude Tone died April 16, 1953 in Los Angeles.