Frankie Mae Boothby Grubbs Reis

1901 - 1988

Frankie Reis, a pianist, taught for over forty years at four academies and one church school in the Seventh-day Adventist school system. She also taught English and home economics classes.

Frankie was born in Iroquois, South Dakota, the oldest of four children of Elmer Franklin and Susie Estella Sutton Boothby. Her mother became an Adventist when the children were very young and she was determined that Frankie and her sister, Rachel, should have an education. She started teaching them along with two neighborhood girls in an upstairs bedroom of their home, using boxes for desks.

Frankie attended Plainview Academy and then enrolled at Union College in 1919 where she attended for two years. In the summer of 1921 she visited an aunt in the Northwest and that fall enrolled at Walla Walla College, now University, where she and her sister and mother took classes. She graduated with a Junior Piano diploma in 1923 and then was hired to teach music and serve as girls’ dean at Mount Ellis Academy in Montana where she worked for the next four years. 

In 1927 she went to Campion Academy in Colorado where she taught piano, voice, and English for one year and then taught with her mother in the church school at Sheridan, Wyoming, for two years. While at Campion she had married Logan K. Grubbs, whose family lived in Sheridan, and they would have a son, Dale Allison, in August 1928.

Boothby-Grubbs taught at Gem State Academy from 1930 to 1936 before returning to teach music at Mt. Ellis Academy for one year.  In 1937 she accepted a position at Columbia Academy in Washington, where she taught until 1944.  At that time she took a leave of absence for a year, marrying George John Reis that fall.  She resumed teaching at CA in 1945. 

She taught music, English, and home economics at CA until her retirement in 1967, after thirty years. During that time Reis completed an undergraduate degree at Walla Walla College in 1952 and an M.Mus.Ed. at the University of Portland in 1955.   

The Reises were living in Battle Ground, Washington, when he died in 1965.  Two years later she retired but continued to teach part-time. In the fall of 1969 she traveled to Japan, where she spent nine months as a conversational English teacher at the Seventh-day Adventist Center in Osaka.  She was living in Battle Ground at the time of her death, at age 87. 

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Sources: Northern Union Reaper, 26 September 1916, 5; North Pacific Union Gleaner, 9 July 1935, 7; 12 September 1944, 4; 1 May 1967, 7, 8; 4 May 1970, 10; 6 February1989 (Obituary); 1920 U.S. Federal Census; DeCours/Monroe/Moore/Sutton/True Family Tree, Ancestory. com.