Biography
Shaw, the son of John D. Shaw and Katherine Roche, was born February 1, 1877, in or near Warwick, Ontario. He had a brother, Joseph. The family moved to Detroit, Michigan, then Colorado in the late 1880s and Kansas, before settling in Missouri. He went to public schools in Denver and in Joplin, Missouri. He studied business and then began clerking in a country store in Joplin and soon became a salesman with the Campbell-Redell Wholesale Grocery Company. He remained in the grocery business for thirty years, except when he was briefly with the Ozark Coal and Railroad Company at Fort Smith, Arkansas. As a representative of the Cudahy Packing Company, Shaw moved to Los Angeles in 1909. In 1919 he joined the Haas-Baruch Company in Los Angeles and left it when he was elected to the City Council.
Shaw's childhood affliction with polio left him with a noticeable limp for the rest of his life.
He was married to Cora H. Shires on February 5, 1905, in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and in 1909 the couple moved to Los Angeles. They had no children. She died in 1951 at the age of 68. At age 76, Frank Shaw was secretly married in Tijuana, Mexico to Dortha Sheehan, age 22, and revealed the fact three years later, in January 1956.
Shaw was a member of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the United Commercial Travelers of America, the Los Angeles Athletic and Jonathan clubs, the Presbyterian Church, Masonic Temple 320, the Shriners and the Elks, Moose, Eagles and Maccabee lodges.
He died of cancer on January 24, 1958. His residence then with Dortha was 101 or 108 West 71st Street, in the Florence district. Burial took place in Inglewood Park Cemetery.
After Shaw's death, a will leaving all of his estate to Dortha Shaw was contested in court by a group of the former mayor's relatives, led by Shaw's niece, Frances S. Lawrence, and his brother, Joseph. A jury sided with the Lawrence claim that Shaw had been unduly influenced by his new wife, but the verdict was not put into effect because all of the parties later agreed to a settlement.
Read more about this topic: Frank L. Shaw
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