Frank Marvin Hopkins
Frank Marvin Hopkins was born on 29 August 1920 in the Missouri Ozarks, the son of William Franklin Hopkins and Della Mae Kassinger. The family remembers his birthplace as Poplar Bluff, the county seat of Butler County, where his mother had lived before her marriage. His own Social Security application and his draft card both give his birthplace as Ripley County, the next county west, where his father's people lived around Doniphan. He was the youngest of the family. His brother William Ezra was born in 1913, his sisters Edith in 1914 and Ruth in 1916.
He grew up at Flatwoods, a crossroads in Ripley County close to the Arkansas line. His father ran a trucking business there. On 16 February 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor, Frank registered for the draft before O. J. Dunn, the registrar of Local Board No. 1 at Doniphan. He gave his address as Flatwoods and named his employer as W. F. Hopkins of Flatwoods, his father, who was also the man who would always know his address. The registrar described him as 5 feet 5 inches tall and 130 pounds, with blue eyes, brown hair and a light complexion, and noted a scar on his nose. Frank did not write the signature himself. Dunn printed "Frank Marvin Hopkins" on the line and wrote under it "his X mark," with his own name as witness.
In September 1942 he applied for a Social Security number. He named his parents as William B. Hopkins and Dellie Casanger, the way a clerk heard Della Kassinger.
By the spring of 1943 he was in Los Angeles. On 27 April 1943 "Frankie Hopkins," aged 22, married Diries Judson Kemp, aged 18, there. Thousands of young people from the Ozarks went to Southern California in those years for war work in the shipyards and aircraft plants. Their son Lonnie Guy Hopkins was born at Long Beach on 31 May 1943. A second son, Billy Daniel Hopkins, followed on 30 November 1944. By 1950 the family was back at Flatwoods. By June 1956, when Lonnie applied for his own Social Security number, they lived at Marshall in Calhoun County, Michigan.
Frank spent the rest of his life in Calhoun County, around Albion. His first wife, Diries, died on 1 August 1984 and was buried at Albion Memory Gardens. He married Madora Short, a Calhoun County farmer's daughter twenty-one years younger than he was. Their son Michael was born in Michigan in 1974.
Frank Marvin Hopkins died on 21 March 1999 at Albion, aged 78. He was buried at Albion Memory Gardens under a flat bronze marker with a rose at each side, reading "Frank M. Hopkins, Aug 29 1920, Mar 21 1999." Madora died three months later and was buried in the same cemetery. Both of his older sons were laid there too, Lonnie in 2006 and Billy in 2007.
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Cite: Heirology, "Frank Marvin Hopkins (1920-1999)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/frank-marvin-hopkins-1920-1999-8f4669.