Richard G Frost

Born in 1929 to Willis and Ruth Frost (née Kettlewell), Richard (Dick) Frost grew up in Redwood City, California as the Roaring Twenties gave way to the Second World War. As a boy, he worked with his father, a civil engineer, surveying land in and around San Mateo County. He was a junior neighborhood warden while his brother Jack (yes, Jack Frost), fourteen years his senior, served in the US Army Signal Corps. He was a sixteen-year-old post engineer at the Dibble General Hospital in Menlo Park on VJ Day in 1945. A graduate of Lincoln High School in Redwood City, he attended Santa Clara University briefly before transferring to San José State University to earn his undergraduate degree in 1949. In 1951, he married Francis Atkins, with whom he had three children, Robert (Bob) Frost, Diana Friedman (Frost), and Catherine Bogin. A drummer by avocation, he joined the musicians' union young, playing jobs with jazz bands and visiting musicians throughout his life. His musical ear and love of language brought him back to SJSU to study poetry with the poet William Stafford. After receiving his Master of Arts degree in 1957, his family moved to Baltimore, MD, where he taught literature at Towson State College by day and played music by night. He joined the English faculty at the State University College at Oneonta in 1959, teaching literature and writing there for nearly fifty years, earning the title Professor Emeritus. His poetry has been widely published in magazines including Harper's and The Atlantic, and he is the author of five nationally-recognized poetry collections (The Circus Villains, Getting Drunk with the Birds, Jazz for Kirby, Neighbor Blood, and Mephisto's Flea Song). His poetry has been read at the United Nations and his early papers are archived at the Richard Frost Collection at Boston University. After his divorce in 1969, he married poet Carol Frost (née Kydd), beginning a loving relationship that would last for the rest of his life. They raised two children, Daniel and Joel, in Otego, NY. There, he founded, played drums for, managed, and was the lead vocalist of the Catskill Stompers, a seven-piece jazz band popular in upstate New York well into the 1990s. He enjoyed sabbatical years in Europe with his family, sitting in with bands in Germany, England, and wherever he traveled. He retired to Winter Park, Florida, in 2008, where Carol had been appointed Professor of English and director of the Winter with the Writers Program at Rollins College. He played his last gigs in Cedar Key, Florida, in his late eighties. The two moved to Mount Dora, Florida in 2014, where he lived out the rest of his days. He died by Carol's side six months and a day after his 94th birthday, while a selection of his favorite jazz 78s played in the background. He is survived by his five children, six grandchildren (Kyle, Maxwell, Wyatt, Luca, Marco, and Zoe) and three great grand-children (Wesley, Finley, and Graham).