Frank, We Hardly Knew Ye: The Very Personal Side of Frank Parsons

Little is known about the personal life of Professor Frank Parsons, the person who is one of the preeminent figures in the development of, and credited with founding, the career counseling specialization of modern day professional counseling as well as all professional counseling and the related fields of vocational psychology and counseling psychology (Aubrey, 1977; Salomone, 1988; Whiteley, 1984). Almost all who write on the life of Frank Parsons have focused on the facts one might find in any biography. Parsons was born on such-and-such a date, went to such-and-such school, did such-and-such, died on such-and-such date, and was buried in such-and-such cemetery. There is also some information regarding persons with whom he worked and information on the very few who were his friends, but rarely are readers given any in-depth assessment of the type or quality of these relationships. Nowhere is there any data on persons whom Frank Parsons cared about, loved, flirted with, dated, slept with, or married. In fact, it is only after Parsons's illness that his archives contain information of a more personal nature. It could have been that Professor Parsons felt no need to preserve his more personal writings or it could have been that he was only able to personally edit his archival legacy while he was still in good health. We can only speculate on the cause of this difference. Such personal information as this can be useful in helping to bring the historical figure to life in the eyes of those unable to experience the actual person. It has been left to people like us to piece together the bits of extant data to attempt to provide a more complete picture of Frank Parsons. Watts (1994) reviewed what had been written previously about the personal side of Frank Parsons and found that "regarding Parsons' private life, all his biographers agree little is known. There are very few papers of a personal nature among the Parsons Collection at Yale University" (p. 266). Although John Brewer (1942) was a personal acquaintance of Parsons, Brewer's account of Parsons was limited to Parsons's ideas and accomplishments, with limited hints about those with whom Parsons was intimate. H. V Davis (1969) provided another account of Parsons's life, but focused on Parsons's more negative traits, specifically his "peculiarity of attitude" (p. 21) and lack of a sense of humor. Gummere's (1988) article on Parsons also noted his more eccentric behavior. Flower (1915), who also knew Parsons personally, and Mann (1950) both described Parsons clearly, placed him into his historical context, and provided some insight into what motivated Parsons's public life. According to Watts (1994), "all of Parsons' biographers have [had] a true Victorian reticence regarding his personal life" (p. 265). Each of the previous biographers, however, has added a piece to the Parsons's personal puzzle. The intent of this article is to take these pieces and put them together to form a whole picture of Frank Parsons, the person. Using personal papers from the Parsons Archives at Yale University, reports from other biographers, and personal interviews with family members and acquaintances of Parsons, this article is divided into sections on Frank Parsons's physical appearance; character and personality; quirks, eccentricities, and prejudices; traumatic events in his life; and personal relationships and, in that context, sexual orientation, including an historical analysis of the climate for the expression of one's sexuality in the United States from 1854 to 1908 (Parsons's birth and death years). Physical Appearance The best physical portrait of Frank Parsons is a black-and-white view of the left side of his face provided on the page facing the title page of Brewer's (1942) History of Vocational Guidance. In this portrait, he is a slender man with short, dark, wavy hair; a well-trimmed, short but full beard that creeps past the meeting of his neck and face; and sad, almost indifferent eyes. …