By Andrew Somerville

Perhaps no one could occupy the same place in Prescott folklore as Frank Lester Young. His 1993 obituary described him as “a legendary living fixture of Prescott.”

Frank Lester Young’s oral history recordings for the Sharlot Hall Museum describe his life growing up in downtown Prescott, showing us the character of Whiskey Row in the early 20th century. Born in Phoenix in 1902, he moved to Prescott in 1908. According to Frank, he helped his stepmother clean the hotel rooms above the Palace Bar. At eight or nine years old, he was tasked with cleaning out the “slop jars” (chamber pots) kept in individual rooms for people who didn’t want to walk downstairs to the only toilet in the building. He delivered moonshine, brewed in the Palace’s basement, to the hotel patrons upstairs. He even suspected that the Palace was a “house of ill repute”, because there were cowboys and “a lot of women in and out of there,” although he wasn't sure what was going on.

Frank was African American. His mother was from Nashville, Tennessee, and his father was from Freeport, Louisiana. In his oral history, Frank says the reason his parents moved to Arizona was to “get out of the south.”     

Marie Panzarella, Frank’s close friend, recalls that he was always active, polishing floors, doing maintenance work, working on cars and helping others. She says that he painted cars using spray cans. For a birthday surprise, Frank once spray-painted her Mercury Cougar bright pink. Frank appears to have had boundless energy; Marie notes he only began to “slow down a little bit” a year before he died.

His childhood and later accomplishments as an athlete also attest to his energetic character. As a child, he would run up a hill by the Catholic Church in downtown Prescott to “hold off” kids who bullied him in primary school. This may have fostered his later running abilities.

 Frank’s biological mother died when he was young, and his uncle brought Frank and his siblings to Tacoma, Washington, to escape his stepmother who, as Frank states in his oral history, “beat us up all the time.” In Tacoma he won awards for track and field accomplishments.

He later returned to attend Prescott High School. Both Panzarella and Frank’s obituary claim he was well known in his elderly years for being the most senior Whiskey Row Boot Race runner in Prescott, receiving a trophy for this achievement, and that he stood out in the crowd with his own brightly spray-painted racing boots and cowboy hat. According to Panzarella, the boot and hat colors changed depending on Frank’s mood; sometimes they were the colors of the American flag, but he also “liked gold and was partial to silver.” 

Panzarella also states that Frank was a “true musician” who played various instruments, including the fiddle and mandolin. His obituary in The Prescott Courier from Jan. 3, 1994 mentions that Frank’s humor and musical gift promoted a “harmonious atmosphere.” Panzarella remembers that, since she first became acquainted with Frank at the Bird Cage Saloon and other Whisky Row establishments, he always brought his mandolin and fiddle wherever he went and joined in with bands and musicians playing at the bars, although he was not as precise an instrumentalist after he lost a finger and partial use of one hand in a buzz saw accident. Frank mentions that this inhibited him from playing the cello.

Frank Lester Young appears to have had a life story that connects us to a Prescott very different from today. As Marie Panzarella puts it rather nostalgically in her oral history interview: “I just loved his whole character and I wish there were more people with that quality left in Prescott; we’re now a big city.”

“Days Past” is a collaborative project of the Sharlot Hall Museum and the Prescott Corral of Westerners International (www.prescottcorral.org). This and other Days Past articles are also available at www.archives.sharlothallmuseum.org/articles/days-past-articles/1. The public is encouraged to submit proposed articles and inquiries to dayspast@sharlothallmuseum.org Please contact SHM Research Center reference desk at 928-277-2003, or via email at archivesrequest@sharlothallmuseum.org for information or assistance with photo requests.