Early Years, Family, Education
White was born in Texarkana in Bowie County, Texas, as Durward Frank Kyle, Jr. His father, Durward Frank Kyle, died when White was six, and White's mother, the former Ida Bottoms Clark, married Loftin E. White of Highland Park, Texas. He took his stepfather's name and became "Frank Durward White". After the death of the stepfather in 1950, the Whites returned to Texarkana. White enrolled in the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, New Mexico but was subsequently recommended to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, by then U.S. Senator John L. McClellan of Arkansas. He graduated from the academy with a bachelor of science degree in engineering in 1956. He also excelled in the study of Spanish. Though he was a Naval Academy graduate, White became a pilot in the United States Air Force.
From his first marriage to Mary Blue Hollenberg, a member of a prominent Little Rock family, White had three children. In 1975, two years after his divorce, White married Gay Daniels, who survived him. Frank and Gay acquired custody of the children from his first marriage, but they had no children together.
White was baptized as a youth in the Christian faith at Beech Springs Baptist Church in Texarkana (Miller County, Arkansas), later pastored by future Republican Governor Michael Dale "Mike" Huckabee. He and Gay attended the First United Methodist Church in downtown Little Rock for a short time. They left the Methodist congregation and, with other couples, established the fundamentalist Fellowship Bible Church.
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