Frank Davis is an attorney practicing law in Guthrie, Oklahoma. He received his LLB from the University of Oklahoma College of Law in 1959. After graduation he served as Ada's Postmaster for one year, practiced in Medford, served as the Logan County Attorney, and then went into private practice. He served as a state representative for 26 years.
If a researcher wishes to use the information gathered in this interview for uses other than educational or scholarly uses, they may do so without further permission from the interview subject.
Below is a short selection of the interview with Frank Davis. You can listen to the full interview by visiting the Chickasaw Nation Law Library at Oklahoma City University School of Law.
Below is an excerpt from Mr. Davis's interview and a link to download the full transcript.
KEK: Now, after the post office you said you went back into the practice of law. What, what, how did you, how did you, get back into law practice?
FD: Started looking around for a place to hang out my shingle, or for a job, whatever I could find because I was an unemployed postmaster at the time. And I found a job with an attorney in Medford, named Denny Faulkenburg and I went to work for him for $350 dollars a month. And worked there about three months and got a call from a friend here in Guthrie who I had met through politics, and they said that we’re looking for a county attorney in Logan County. The one we had has died and we need somebody, would you be interested? And it pays $500 dollars a month, that was a $150 dollars a month raise and I had just gotten married. And, been married less than a week when I got that call, came to Guthrie, interviewed, was hired as county attorney of Logan County. That was in 1961. I was twenty-four years old at the time, the youngest county attorney in Oklahoma.
KEK: And tell me about your job as county attorney.
FD: Well, the county attorney is the same thing as district attorney is now except you only have one county. And that was a very interesting job and I got a lot of good experience, got a lot of trial experience, had some very interesting cases while I was county attorney. The first week I was on the job, they brought me the first misdemeanor docket which had 400 cases on it. They hadn’t had a misdemeanor term of court in four years. Four hundred cases had stacked up to be tried. Here it is young man, go to work. And so I started on that and of course dismissed a lot of them because the witnesses had left or had forgotten, but we were able to narrow it down to a sizeable number, 100 or so, that we were really going to try if they didn’t plead guilty, and most of them came in and plead guilty once they found out we were serious. We tried three or four and got convictions on all those and after that they started coming in and pleading.