Frank Phillips (oil Industrialist) - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Frank Phillips was born in Scotia, Nebraska where his parents Lucinda and Lewis Franklin Phillips, the county's first magistrate, had a farm. The infant Frank was still in his crib in July 1874, when swarms of grasshoppers descended on Nebraska, cutting a 100-mile (160 km) by 300-mile (480 km) swath and devastating crops throughout the area. The devastation eventually extended to include Greeley County, where the Phillips farm was. The Phillips quickly decided to pack up, and they moved the family to a small farm in rural southwest Iowa. Frank had ten siblings, including two brothers with whom he later went into business.

A few years later, the Phillips boy began his first entrepreneurial venture, hiring out to area farmers to dig potatoes for 10 cents a day (after completing his chores at home). At age 14, Phillips persuaded a barber in nearby Creston, Iowa, to take him on as an apprentice. Ten years later, Phillips owned all three barber shops in Creston. One of his barber shops was in the basement of a bank in Creston.

Read more about this topic:  Frank Phillips (oil Industrialist)

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:

    Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
    But they are gone to early death, who late in school
    Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.
    Richard Eberhart (b. 1904)

    A worthwhile person seeks not the easy life, for the easy life does not make a worthwhile person.
    Chinese proverb.

    ... many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.
    Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)