Luke F. Walton
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Walton paternal line

Frank J. Walton (1919–1991)

Frank J. Walton was Luke F. Walton’s grandfather. He sold steel, served as a Marine corporal in the Second World War, and ran a business in Los Angeles. In 1971 Governor Ronald Reagan made him Secretary of the Business and Transportation Agency. In that job he led the creation of the California Department of Transportation and gave it its name, Caltrans. He chaired the steering committee of the governor’s tax reduction task force. From 1975 to 1977 he was president of the Heritage Foundation. In 1983 he was ordained a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church. This page is built from the documents. Where they disagree, it says so.

Birmingham and Baltimore

He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on 29 November, the third of three children. “My father was from a cotton plantation in Greensboro, and my mother was a society girl from Knoxville, Tennessee.” On the form he filled out by hand for the Bancroft Library in 1983, he gave his father as John T. Walton of Greensboro, Alabama, a steel broker, and his mother as Julia T. White of Knoxville, Tennessee. His Social Security record names the same parents. The 1920 census index has him as a baby in his father’s Birmingham household. His father, called Jack T. Walton in the family, was murdered in Hale County in March 1945 .

By his own account he spent about his first twelve years in Birmingham. During the Depression the family moved to Baltimore, where his mother’s parents lived, and he finished growing up there. He said his parents were Southern Democrats. In 1940, his first vote, he read both party platforms: “I don’t really belong in the Democrat party.” He voted Republican. He said he never voted any other way.

Steel, and the Marines

He studied business administration. The governor’s release on his appointment calls the school the Eton College of Finance in Baltimore, which has not been identified, and adds post-graduate study at Northwestern. In his hand , it is graduate work in metallurgy at Northwestern. He took that work on a cooperative course while working in steel. He was a field engineer for Rustless Iron and Steel in Baltimore, then managed its district office in Chicago, then went to Los Angeles.

About a year after reaching Los Angeles he joined the Marine Corps, for about three years . His Veterans Legacy Memorial and his marker at Fort Rosecrans give his rank as corporal. He met Helen Barbara Olseske, a Navy nurse, at North Island in Coronado, and they married while he was still in the Marines. Her marker gives her rank as lieutenant.

After the war he spent three and a half years in Pittsburgh in stainless-steel distribution and left as vice-president and general manager. In 1950, just before the Korean War, he came back to Los Angeles with two children and a dog. He started at Jorgensen Steel as a trainee and became a salesman. He moved to TubeSales, a metal-tubing distributor, and retired as its president in 1963, in his mid-forties.

Arcadia, and 1964

He worked precincts, recruited candidates, and was a town chairman of the Eisenhower campaign in Arcadia . In 1964 he was the Republican nominee for Congress in California’s 25th District. The Evening Tribune’s candidate lists of 3 June and 4 June 1964 name him there: Frank J. Walton, Arcadia, Republican, opposite Ronald B. Cameron of Whittier. He won a nine-way primary and lost the general election to Ronald B. Cameron, the Democrat, with about 45 percent of the vote . He remembered it as 46 percent , ahead of Goldwater in the district. Around midnight, with the count still open, he told Helen: “It would just be my dumb Irish luck to win and be the only Republican back there!” Two precinct workers, Shirley Diehl and Patti Bates, ran the campaign as their first paid job in politics.

After 1964 he went into chemical distribution. The 1971 release has him as owner and president of AIRKEM, a Los Angeles firm that made “ecological and environmental control products for industrial plants and institutions.” It also lists him as a founding director of the Commerce City Bank and of the Industrial Council of the City of Commerce, a director of the Steel Service Center Institute, chairman of the Los Angeles Civil Service Commission, and chairman of Arcadia’s Personnel Commission. In 1966 he was master of ceremonies at Reagan’s San Gabriel Valley kickoff dinner for governor, where he met the Reagans for the first time.

Secretary of Business and Transportation, 1971–1974

Lewis Uhler , who had worked on the 1964 campaign, called to ask whether he would take the agency. After interviews with Ned Hutchinson and with Reagan, Mike Deaver and Ed Meese in the room, he was offered the job. The next morning, at breakfast: “He said, ‘Good morning, Mr. Secretary.’ I let out a war whoop and I said, ‘Yippee!’” The appointment was announced on 23 July 1971 : “Governor Ronald Reagan today appointed Frank J. Walton, Los Angeles business and civic leader, as Secretary of the Business and Transportation Agency.” The release gives him as 51, a Republican, married to Helen, with five children, at 141 West Longden Avenue, Arcadia. The salary was $35,000. Facing confirmation before Senator James Mills , he went to Mills first and told him he would oppose Mills’s gas-tax bill. The Evening Tribune carried the appointment the same day. It names the man he succeeded as James M. Hall, matching the governor’s release , and says Assistant Secretary Brian Van Camp had been administering the agency since Hall resigned the previous December. The San Diego Union reported the appointment on 26 July 1971 . It gives the salary as $35,000, names James H. Hall as the secretary he succeeded, and says the appointment was subject to Senate confirmation.

On 9 September 1971 the Union reports that Governor Reagan appointed Terry M. Chambers, 49, assistant manager of the Tournament of Roses , assistant director of the Business and Transportation Agency. The paper calls him the No. 2 man to Frank J. Walton. It says the office oversees a dozen state departments, among them public works, the highway patrol , motor vehicles, alcoholic beverage control, insurance, and banking.

A week after the appointment, the governor announced that “Frank J. Walton, Secretary of Business and Transportation, has issued instructions that overweight loads will be permitted ” for vital cargo during the July 1971 labor disputes. As chairman of the Toll Bridge Authority he presided over the 19 November 1971 meeting that approved the first toll-free car-pool lanes on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge . In October 1971 he was on the cabinet briefing list with Ed Meese. On 13 September 1972 the Evening Tribune quotes him on new bus tolls on the state bridges. He called them a determined state effort to reduce the cost of state services and to encourage mass transit. That day the authority deferred action on a request for a 5-cent cut in the 30-cent charge for motorcycles and three-wheelers on the San Diego–Coronado Bay Bridge . On 15 January 1973 the Tribune gives his report on the Bay Bridge car-pool lanes after a year. He said the experiment had not cut the number of cars, and that 10 percent more people were crossing in the same number of vehicles. He put the crossing at 10 minutes for car-pool riders and the time cut for all commuters at 20 percent. The lanes were for buses and for cars carrying at least three people. On 7 February 1975 the Union, in a piece on ferries across San Diego Bay, calls him a former secretary of the Business and Transportation Agency and a former chairman of the California Toll Bridge Authority.

On 30 June 1972 the Evening Tribune quotes him on the Mills-Alquist-Deddeh Act. He said local governments in California’s 58 counties had formed 37 transportation planning agencies under it. He said the act took the sales-tax exemption off gasoline, with the money for local mass transit and for state transportation planning. The tax was expected to raise $175 million a year for local government, and he put San Diego County’s share at slightly more than $8 million in the next fiscal year. The Tribune names Senator James Mills of San Diego and Assemblyman Wadie Deddeh of Chula Vista as the prime authors, and says legislation by Senator Alfred Alquist of San Jose was incorporated in the act.

The idea of one state transportation department came before him. He said so : “Not that I came in with the idea, I didn’t; I simply just inherited the idea from those who were trying to do it.” A McKinsey consultant, James Balloun, was already studying it for Public Works. In his account Balloun told him it would only happen if the secretary led it in person, so he did, chairing meetings up and down the state and selling the Highway Commission, the Transportation Board and local governments on it. “I never had more experience in selling than I had in trying to develop a Department of Transportation. I guess if there were anything that I could call sort of a personal monument, that might have been it.” He credited Neil Dunham, a career deputy at Public Works, with building the organization day to day.

The staff wanted to call the new department CAL-DOT. “I said, ‘No, no. No, we don’t parrot the federal government, we operate on our own. We’ll have to find another name.’ We ultimately came up with CALTRANS . Every time I see the CALTRANS emblem on all the trucks and the jeeps and all the rest, I remember the day that we put all the designs up on the wall in front of me and I picked that one out and I said, ‘That’s the one we’ll go with.’” AB 69, carried by Assemblyman Wadie Deddeh , created the department inside his agency. Reagan signed it on 14 December 1972 and said: “I would also like to commend Assemblyman Wadie Deddeh, who introduced the bill and guided it through the legislature, and Secretary of the Business and Transportation Agency Frank Walton, who worked so hard on this bill.”

On 18 August 1972, signing the bill that took the Mineral King road out of the state highway system, Reagan directed him and Resources Secretary Ike Livermore to study “the economics and esthetics of the key roads that furnish automobile approaches to High Sierra wilderness areas.” He said in 1983 that he and Livermore were often at opposite ends on the environment and stayed good friends. He also described Nixon ’s impoundment of about $4 billion in federal highway money owed to California, and the agency’s answer: keep projects ready to build the moment funds came loose.

The tax task force

At a cabinet retreat at Cameron Park, by his account , Reagan said the administration had done a good job of keeping government under control, and Frank told him that was not the point: there had to be an actual tax cut. Reagan gave him the job. He chaired the steering committee of the Governor’s Tax Reduction Task Force. Lewis Uhler chaired the working task force under it. Its consultants included Milton Friedman , Peter Drucker , James Buchanan and William Niskanen .

At his press conference on 30 January 1973 , Reagan was asked who headed the task force. He answered: “Frank Walton.” On 9 February he told the state’s newspaper publishers , “About six months ago we established a task force on tax reduction with a steering committee headed by Frank Walton, our Secretary of Business and Transportation.” In May, campaigning for the measure, he quoted him : “As one of our cabinet members, Frank Walton, said the other day: ‘If you overpay your utility bill, the company returns the over-payment to you. It doesn’t divide it up among your neighbors.’”

On 24 May 1973 the Evening Tribune says he wrote the task force’s report on its use of public funds, as steering committee chairman. He wrote that the direct contracts with the welfare agencies were for administrative costs only, and that no welfare recipient had been denied a benefit because of that support.

The plan became Proposition 1, the tax-limitation initiative, and it lost at the special election of 6 November 1973. In 1983 he agreed that it set the stage for Proposition 13. On 9 September 1973, addressing Republicans in San Diego , Reagan apologized that they had not had the cabinet briefing they were supposed to get “from Ed Meese, Frank Walton, and Earl Brian ,” adding, “all three of them can do it better.” On 12 December 1974, at the Sacramento tribute to Governor and Mrs. Reagan at the end of the term, Frank was master of ceremonies , and he and Helen sat at the head table.

The Heritage Foundation

On 2 May 1975 the Evening Tribune lists the present situations of Reagan’s men. His line is cabinet secretary of business and transportation, “who has remained in Sacramento,” beside the new jobs named for the others. The Union on 7 February 1975 had already called him a former secretary. He was president of the Heritage Foundation from 9 June 1975 to February 1977 . He said he went to Washington because it was the bicentennial and he wanted to do something for the country. By his account the budget was about $500,000 a year when he arrived and $2 to $3 million when he left. He built a broad base of small donors by direct mail and set up the foundation’s quick-response service on urgent issues. He said he did not like Washington, and he went home to California.

In October 1980, when Meese became Reagan’s chief of staff, the University of San Diego’s staff newsletter asked him about Meese : “He’s an open, honest, forthright and genuine man. He’s a rarity in government.” At Heritage’s tenth-anniversary dinner on 3 October 1983, President Reagan said : “It’s great to see old friends from California that are also Heritage activists, like Frank Walton.”

On 29 April 2014 Heritage published “National Security in an Uncertain Age.” James Jay Carafano introduces Maribeth Walton McGinley and her husband, Colonel James D. McGinley, as the benefactors of the annual Colonel James D. McGinley Lecture, held with the Marine Corps University Foundation. Heritage says their relationship with the foundation dates to its earliest days. After Frank served as Secretary of Business and Transportation for Governor Reagan, Maribeth’s father was president of the Heritage Foundation from 1975 to 1977. Heritage gives no years for the secretaryship. General Barry McCaffrey thanks them for funding the lecture.

San Diego

On 16 May 1978 he spoke at the annual awards luncheon of the San Diego County chapter of the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge, at Vacation Village. The Union calls him a former California secretary of business and transportation, and says he talked about conservatives in Washington and free markets. The paper calls the economics prize a Nobel Peace Prize when it names Friedrich Hayek in 1974 and Milton Friedman in 1976.

On 10 September 1978 the Union’s business briefs say he has been named Sea World ’s institutional programs director. His 1991 obituary calls the San Diego work a few years as an executive at Sea World, after a move in 1977.

Deacon

Back in California, the permanent diaconate had opened to married men. He went through the seminary studies and was ordained a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church on 28 May 1983 . When the Bancroft Library interviewed him at his home in Coronado that October, he ended the session to go teach a class: “I’m a full-time deacon now.” James Stearns, his fellow cabinet secretary, told the same interviewers: “He’s one of the great gentlemen I’ve known in my life.”

He died on 9 February 1991 . The San Diego Union printed his obituary on 12 February. He had died the Saturday before at Kaiser Hospital, of a heart attack, aged 71. The paper says he was born in Alabama, that he and Helen married in Coronado in 1945 while he served in the Marine Corps and she was a Navy nurse, and that they lived in several places during his years in steel. It dates the secretaryship 1971 to 1975 and the Heritage presidency 1975 to 1977. The records on this page date the secretaryship 1971 to 1974, and the Heritage presidency from 9 June 1975. The obituary says he moved to San Diego in 1977, worked a few years as an executive at Sea World, and, ordained a deacon in 1983, served Sacred Heart in Coronado, All Hallows, La Jolla, and The Immaculata. The memorial Mass was at 11 a.m. that morning at The Immaculata. The paper says his body was donated to science. He and Helen were married for 45 years, by her obituary . She died on 20 August 2012, at 97. Both are commemorated at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery , Point Loma, San Diego.

The obituary names their children : Carol Bassett of Seattle, Michael Walton of San Diego, Joshua Walton of Washington, D.C., Mark Walton of Jacksonville, Florida, and Maribeth Walton of Encino. It names three grandchildren and a sister, Liz Roberson of Santa Monica. Joshua Walton is the uncle who gave Luke the paternal family record.

The U-T San Diego web edition printed a longer account of Helen on 4 September 2012 . It says she was born on 28 January 1915 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, graduated from nursing school in the late 1930s, and joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor as one of 100 nurses chosen for London hospitals during D-Day . It says she met him at Sacred Heart in Coronado while stationed at North Island, and that they married there on 22 November 1945. The Union that morning prints the license: Frank J. Walton, 26; Helen B. Olseske, 30. It says she died of congestive heart failure on 20 August 2012 in Bradbury, at 97, and that she had lived in Coronado until 2002. It counts the marriage as 46 years. The death notice of 28 August 2012 counts 45 years, and says she joined the Navy Nurse Corps the day after Pearl Harbor. That notice sets a private burial at Fort Rosecrans on 3 September and a memorial Mass at Sacred Heart at 11 a.m. on 4 September. The feature places the children then as Carol Bassett of Seattle, Michael Walton of La Jolla, Joshua Walton of Alexandria, Virginia, Mark Walton of Carlsbad, and Maribeth McGinley of Glendale, and it names her brother, Chester Owens, of Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Her maiden name on the notice is Olseske.

1919, not 1918

The day is 29 November everywhere. The year is not. His Social Security record and his Veterans Legacy Memorial say 1918. His own hand in 1983 says 1919. So do the marker at Fort Rosecrans and the diocese’s list of its deceased clergy . So does the 1971 release , which gives him as 51 that July; a man born in November 1918 was 52. Four records to two: this page gives 1919. The Union obituary gives his age as 71 on 9 February 1991. A man born on 29 November 1918 was 72 that day. The age fits 29 November 1919. The marriage license in the Union of 22 November 1945 gives him as 26 and Helen B. Olseske as 30. She was 30 that day if born on 28 January 1915. He was 26 that morning if born on 29 November 1918, and 25 if born on 29 November 1919. The 1920 census index has him one month old in January 1920. That fits a November 1919 birth. A child born on 29 November 1918 was about thirteen months old that January. The sheet itself has not been read. A birth certificate or his Marine Corps record would settle the year on its face.

What is not here yet

His Marine Corps service record. The official 1964 Statement of Vote. The three folders of his speeches in the Governor’s Office research files at the Reagan Library, which are not digitized. Heritage’s annual reports for 1975 to 1977.

Sources

Walton paternal line (family record) · About

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