Interview with Frances An, January 27, 2022

Interview Summary

Frances An was born Frances Ann McManus on November 2, 1945, in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the daughter of a music teacher, Robert Emmett McManus, Jr. and, Francis Clayton Steward McManus, who was once an editor for the Southern Review and worked with Robert Penn Warren. Frances spent three years of her early childhood in Philadelphia while her father attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. Much of her childhood and educational experience was spent moving around the country as her father accepted various teaching positions and included stops in Mississippi, Idaho, St. Louis, Van Buren, Missouri, Clarksville, Arkansas, and Baton Rouge. He parents separated after her father accepted a teaching position in Arizona, and her mother became a legal secretary. Frances met her future husband Robert Frampton while she was in high school and he was attending Louisiana State University. They married in 1962 after she became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter Rosalind. Frances graduated from Baton Rouge High School in 1963 and she enrolled at LSU in the spring and summer of that year. In the fall of 1963, she transferred to the University of Kentucky and majored in Mathematics and her husband enrolled in Graduate School there, majoring in Mathematics and Astronomy. The Framptons left U.K. in 1968 before graduating when Robert accepted a teaching position in California. In this interview Frances discusses the early 1960s in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Interview Keyword

Baton Rouge, LA school integration Civil Rights Movement 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis President John F. Kennedy's assassination 1963 South Vietnamese coup Gulf of Tonkin Resolution President Lyndon B. Johnson Vietnam War the Draft 1963 campus fashion

Interview Rights

All rights to the interviews, including but not restricted to legal title, copyrights and literary property rights, have been transferred to the University of Kentucky Libraries.

Interview Usage

Interviews may only be reproduced with permission from Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries.