Frank Goodman: "A Friendly, Liberal, and Progressive Spirit"
By Kathy Lauder
Frank Goodman left a significant mark on early 20th century Nashville. At his death, his pallbearers included Tennessee Secretary of State Hallum W. Goodloe; George W. Stainback, Chairman of the Nashville Board of Public Works; Nashville City Assessor Roger Eastman, a longtime business partner; John W. Paulett, newsman and Assistant Superintendent of Public Instruction; Dr. William H. Bumpus, President of the American Local Freight Agents Association, renowned orator, and past Grand Master of the Tennessee Masons; Dr. William E. McCampbell, the Edgefield physician who had delivered the Goodman children; Marcus B. Toney, Civil War veteran and author; and Sumner Cunningham, fractious editor of the Confederate Veteran, who wrote his friend a tender eulogy in "The Last Roll," despite the fact that, at the outbreak of the Civil War, his subject had been a seven-year-old Yankee boy.
Frank Goodman (1854-1910)
Photo from Justi's Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 1898
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on Christmas Day 1854, Frank Goodman studied accounting at Bryant & Stratton's Business College. At the age of twenty-five, this young penmanship teacher was tapped to rescue the failing Nashville (Toney's) Business College. Rescue it he did, and for the next twenty years the school, its name changed to Goodman's Business College, was a respected Southern institution. His book, Goodman's Book-keeping Simplified, became a classic business text. According to Dr. Bumpus's memorial tribute in the Nashville American, "during the time he was conducting the college, he introduced bookkeeping as a course of study in the public schools. His Goodman's simplified bookkeeping was the first and for many years the only method used in this city." William Alexander Provine, renowned Cumberland Presbyterian minister and official of the Tennessee Historical Society, spoke at Frank Goodman's funeral. In the margin of his personal copy of Goodman's Book-keeping Simplified, Provine noted that many of the names used in the book's exercises were those of fellow Nashvillians, including the ten-year-old boys Frank had taught in Sunday school . . . one of whom was the young Provine himself!
Frank Goodman was a dedicated public servant. A member of the State Board of Education from 1883-1903, he replaced John Berrien Lindsley as secretary after 1887 and was on the committee which named Peabody Normal College. He represented Edgefield on the Nashville City Council from 1895-1900. Auditor of the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition, he is recognized on a plaque in Centennial Park.
By the end of the 1890s, his hearing failing, he closed the school and worked as an expert accountant, appearing as a witness in court cases throughout the South. His expertise brought about the conviction of Mississippi State Treasurer Hemingway for embezzling $315,000 from the state coffers. Goodman and associates also performed annual audits of the Tennessee State Treasurer's books, and, once, of "the books of the United States Treasury in Washington."
Active in the Masons and the Knights Templar, he was treasurer of the United Order of the Golden Cross, a unique fraternal organization that welcomed both men and women, providing its members with low-cost insurance if they pledged to abstain from liquor. Goodman and his friends supported the temperance movement, with good reason: Goodman's Business College stood at the edge of the notorious "Men's Quarter." In 1895 the City Directory listed more than 60 saloons on Church, College (3rd Ave.), Cherry (4th Ave.), and Summer (5th Ave.) alone!
In 1880 Frank married Pattie Sims, a Fogg High School graduate and daughter of Leonard Swepson Sims, an Edgefield insurance agent. He tutored their four sons in business techniques; all four eventually became successful businessmen. In 1906, when the Very Reverend John B. Morris of St. Mary's Church in Nashville became Bishop of Little Rock, he asked Goodman to organize the See's books. Since Pattie was already ill with tuberculosis, the family was pleased to move near Hot Springs, where she could receive medical treatment. She died in November 1909, however, and was brought back to Nashville for burial. Only eight months later, Frank would also be buried here, the victim of a mysterious death: stricken after an excessively hot mineral bath at Hot Springs, he never recovered his health, growing steadily weaker until his death. In July of 1910 the hard-working man the St. Louis Magazine had described as "the rising young businessman of the South" was brought home to Nashville by his young sons and laid to rest at Mt. Olivet Cemetery in an unmarked grave.
