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Permanent LinkRepresentative Frank Finley Merriam View All Years
FRANK FINLEY MERRIAM
MR. SPEAKER: Your committee, appointed to prepare a suitable resolution commemorating the life, character and public service of the late Honorable Frank Finley Merriam, begs leave to submit the following memorial:
Frank Finley Merriam, newspaper man, legislator and state executive, was born on a farm in a log cabin near Hopkinton, Iowa, December 22, 1865. He was the eldest of eleven children born to Henry C. and Anna E. Merriam. He passed away while living in Long Beach, California, April 25, 1955, at the age of eighty-nine.
He worked his way through Lenox College at Hopkinton, Iowa, and he graduated in 1888. He served as principal of schools at Hopkinton, Hesper and Postville, Iowa; and Wisner, Nebraska. He then returned to Hopkinton and became publisher of the Hopkinton Leader.
He was elected to the Iowa House of Representatives and served in the Twenty-sixth, Twenty-sixth Extra and Twenty-seventh sessions of the General Assembly.
On November 8, 1898, he was elected Auditor of State and served until 1903. In that position he was ex-officio Commissioner of Insurance and Superintendent of Banking. He became publisher of a Muskogee Indian Territory newspaper in 1903, but he was called to Long Beach, California through family illness in 1910, where until 1920 he was in the advertising department of the Long Beach Press, later the Press-Telegram, and afterward a bank president and real estate broker in Long Beach.
In 1916 he was elected to the California Legislature, and re-elected four times. In 1928 he went to the State Senate, and in 1930 he was elected Lieutenant Governor, and on June 2, 1934, he became Governor of the State of California, defeating Upton Sinclair in one of the most bitter campaign fights in California’s history.
Mr. Merriam was married in 1903 to Mrs. Nellie Bronson Day, formerly of Des Moines, Iowa, the widow of Charles H. Day. He again married on January 25, 1936, at the age of seventy, to Mrs. Jessie Lispey, an Iowa childhood acquaintance and widow of an Iowa banker.
Therefore, Be It Resolved by the House of Representatives of the Fifty-seventh General Assembly of Iowa: That in the passing of the Honorable Frank Finley Merriam, the state has lost an honored citizen, and the House by this resolution, would express its appreciation of his service, and tender its sympathy to those who survive.
Be It Further Resolved: That a copy of this resolution be spread upon the Journal of the House and that the Chief Clerk be directed to forward an enrolled copy to the family of the deceased.
FLOYD H. HATCH,
ROBERT B. CARSON,
RUSSELL ELDRED,
Committee.