Actor admits life’s a series of accidents and survival

Frank Elmore is pictured in a publicity shot curing his multi-decade acting career. Contributed photo.

MARY LOU MONTGOMERY

It takes an inordinate amount of guts to be an actor. St. Louis native Frank Elmore believes he lived up to that analogy.

Now retired after a multi-decades-long acting career on the television screen, in advertising and in the theater, he is among the regular coffee drinkers at Hannibal’s Java Jive. He checks in daily in order to catch up with what the creative forces in town are up to.

While his name is not one you would recognize as connected with a star-studded career, he readily admits to enough work throughout the years to earn a comfortable pension.

“I didn’t make my money writing music or singing. (I did) some acting, some film, some tv, and 500 commercials. My pensions are based on those.”

His most memorable advertising role - and lucrative as well - was an “ED” ad campaign in the 1990s.

“Who’s going to see this?” he mused when contemplating whether to take the job. “I’m in a gym, talking to a guy about ED.”

Turns out, people did see the ad campaign.

“That thing ran for six months, on the networks and in newspapers. I got a letter from a girlfriend from high school. ‘We just saw your ad, it was in the Post Dispatch.’”

In the print ad, he is holding a piece of paper. He said, with a grin, “that paper says: Frank doesn’t have ED.”

“It was the biggest commercial I ever had.”

TV work

A television highlight of his career came at the beginning of the 21st Century. For three years, Frank played Agent Michael Ford, an FBI chief, on the soap opera “General Hospital.”

“I didn’t even audition” for that job, he said.  He knew the casting agent, who said, “Can you be around for this? I know you, Frank, It’s just a couple of lines.”

After his initial appearance on the show, “They kept calling me back. I even had a hallway set with ‘Ford’ written on the door. If you opened the door, it was my office with a window. They built me an office. I had just moved in (to that office),” when the world around him changed.

“Very shortly after that,” during his third year on the show, “Bin Laden and his boys bombed the World Trade Center. I had just moved out of New York. I was still working on the show. After a little while, half a year, they said they were going to cancel my story line. They said they can’t do anything anymore with explosives.  They decided to kill the FBI story and go back to doctors and nurses. Bin Laden got me axed,” he said.

Acting a destiny

After graduating from high school in Kirkwood, Mo., ”I didn’t want to go to Vietnam,” he said, so he enrolled at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, which was then a two-year college. As he progressed in college, the school transitioned into a three-year college, and ultimately a four-year college. That’s where he obtained his bachelor's degree in English.

After graduating, he went to work for McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, writing technical manuals. Soon, he was drafted. He did his best to sway the draft board on his enlistment path. “I tried to be an entertainer, but they said ‘you have an English degree. You’re a clerk.’

Once in Vietnam, troop morale was at a rock bottom, he said. “They were putting together a rock band, and they wanted some GIs to perform.” He signed up. “For three months I flew up and down Vietnam,” entertaining the troops.

And that’s when he caught the acting bug. “If I hadn’t gone to Vietnam, I wouldn’t have gotten the nerve to try acting. Vietnam got me into show business. It wasn’t like I planned it. Life is what happens when you’re trying to figure out what to do.

“I’ve had such a zig zag life.” How his career evolved "was better than any of my plans were.”

Survival

“It is accidents, and survival. You do get rewarded by it. I look like Hannibal as a reward for me.

After his retirement, he followed his niece, Lisa Marks, to Hannibal. She and her husband, Ken, established the Hannibal History Museum, and she started Hannibal’s first Steampunk Festival.

Once in Hannibal, “I started taking pictures, acting and painting and drawing; doing things I love. I wasn’t held back by having to make money from it.”

Some of the fruits of his labor are showcased at Java Jive:

Paintings hanging on the wall, and a 30-minute video he made of Hannibal events, which is playing in the shop’s seating area.

Lisa and Ken ultimately left Hannibal, and are now living in Delaware. Frank decided to stay in Hannibal, which he has called home for the last eight or nine years.

Anacin ad

Another ad promotion that was lucrative for Frank was for Anacin aspirin. 

He promoted Anacin for pain relief, in a TV spot followed by a full-page print ad in the New York Times. Frank was pictured holding a bottle of Anacin.

“I was still living in New York. I remember I walked down the street. Everyone had read the New York Times, then they threw it in the trash. In one case, the newspaper had blown out of the trash, the pages had flipped open and there was my picture, being walked on.”

“I had some good times; and tough times. For three years I didn’t work.”

During that time, he was a a waiter in New York City. But even then, during that down time, there were some positive moments.

“I met John and Yoko,” he said, “and Peggy and Paul Simon come into our restaurant.” They would ask him how his career was going.

“Ironically, I sang both John Lennon’s and Paul Simon’s songs when I was performing for the troops in Vietnam,” he said.

Frank Elmore is with Mickey Mouse, during shooting of a commercial for Disney World. Contributed photo

Mary Lou Montgomery can be reached at montgomery.editor@yahoo.com