Jesse D. Franks Jr. was born in 1919 to Dr. Jesse D. Franks Sr. and Sallie Graham Franks. Before him they had a baby girl, Graham Elizabeth, in 1916 who died during the flu epidemic in 1918. After Jesse they had another girl in 1923 named Nancy Lee.
His parents met while Sallie was teaching music at a Synodical College near Ripley and Dr. Franks was a pastor at the First Baptist Church in Ripley, Mississippi. They married in 1915. Sallie died of ovarian cancer in 1927 at age 35. Dr. Franks then sent both of the kids to live with Sallie’s sister, Aunt Annie Laurie in Abington, Virginia while he grieved.
In 1930 Dr. Franks married Augusta Fort, a home economics professor at the Mississippi State College for Women. Augusta was strict, especially towards Jesse who made trouble with the pranks he and his friends would throw around town. The neighbors also gave him the nickname “Red” because of his red hair.
Dr. Franks paid his way through Mississippi College by working in the college dairy after learning farming from his father. To help get more money he also had a garden and a cow in the backyard of their Victorian-style parsonage next to Columbus’s First Baptist Church at 705 Second Avenue North. Jesse would collect the milk and deliver it to neighboring families under the name “Columbus Ice Cream and Creamery Company”, but he never got to start his ice cream operation because a neighbor complained about the cow until it was moved to the countryside.
In high school Jesse was the guard for the Lee High School football team and played the trumpet in the band. During the summer he would work as a camp director at Camp Ridgecrest in North Carolina, while Nancy would go to the sister camp, Camp Montreat. This is where he met his future fiancé, Dottie Turner from Philadelphia, MS, as a counselor in his sister’s cabin.
Jesse went to Mississippi College in Clinton, Mississippi where he played football and studied economics. He was president of the student body his senior year, was voted best leader and most popular student, and included in Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges. After graduating in June 1941, he began pastoral studies at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Dottie –who was at Belhaven College in Jackson— and Jesse planned to marry after her graduation in 1942.