Journalist Frank (b. Francis) Sinclair was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1895. He found it necessary to go to work after one year of high school, but later studied commercial art at Pratt Institute in New York City and journalism at New York University. Sinclair worked part-time for the New York Globe while attending the university and later spent two years as telegraph editor of the Oneonta (New York) Daily Star.
During World War I Sinclair served with American forces in France. He was co-founder and managing editor of The CRO, the second largest serviceman's newspaper in the American Expeditionary Force. He was honored by the French for promoting good relations between the Americans and the French people. After the war Sinclair joined the Janesville (Wisconsin) Daily Gazette as sports editor. He was active in promoting local sports leagues from 1919 to 1928, served as president of the Southern Wisconsin Baseball League and the Janesville Bowling Association, and was one of the organizers of the Big Eight, a southeastern Wisconsin high school athletic conference.
From 1928 until his retirement in 1961 Sinclair was on the staff of the Milwaukee Journal as a reporter and feature writer, and for two years in the 1930's as assistant city editor. Sinclair covered labor, medicine, crime investigations, aviation, railroads, utilities, consumer and price news, and veterans' affairs. Among the most important stories he covered were the Dillinger gang shootout at the Little Bohemia resort in the 1930's and the Wisconsin Electric Company and the Kohler strikes. Perhaps his most significant work as a reporter was a series of articles on World War II veterans which appeared in forty newspapers and contributed to the passage of the GI Bill.
Sinclair was a member of Milwaukee's Mayflower Congregational Church and of its board of deacons. He was on the board of directors of the Milwaukee chapter of World Neighbors, Inc. After his retirement from the Journal, Sinclair did free lance magazine work and also wrote Blue Cross in Wisconsin, a book about health insurance, in 1964. Sinclair died in 1973.
