Short Bio:
A Short Biographical Sketch
Carl and Jeanie Franklin
August 12, 2014
Dear schoolmates,
My wife Jeanie (Jean Marie Ritke) and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary on June 2, 2014. We have raised four children (three boys and a girl) and have six beautiful grandchildren (three boys and three girls) ranging in age from 18 to 5. Our oldest—Molly Ann Franklin has just finished her freshmen year at St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana.
We are Quartodeciman Sabbatarians and have been since our teen years. We host a small independent fellowship on the Sabbath in our home here in Southwestern Michigan. We observe the Christian Passover on the fourteenth day of the first month as set by the Calculated Hebrew Calendar, and all the holy days of God in their proper seasons.
For nearly 50 years, we have been working to defend the true gospel of Jesus Christ—“the faith once delivered.” We offer our research material on SkyDrive free of charge as a means of sharing the results of multiple thousands of hours of Biblical research with others around the world.
We do not represent a church organization. Our SkyDrive Archival System does not seek to promote any centralized church but to promote the spiritual growth of our brethren in the Sabbatarian community at large. We believe that the observance of the weekly Sabbath and annual holy days is one of the main signs that a Christian has been rooted and grounded in the basic faith of Jesus Christ. We also believe that the doctrines expounded on SkyDrive are a major element of our faith and the spiritual core of our walk with Christ.
We have no staff. We rent no office space (I work out of a small bedroom in our home and my wife off the kitchen table). We have no website. Our only Internet presence has been through the websites of others and now our new Internet based SkyDrive Archival System.
My wife Jeanie helps me with my research and edits my material as she has time. But much of the time she is busy treating patients in her home-based clinic. She is a nationally board certified healthcare practitioner. She earned a Bachelor of Science Degree as well as a Master’s Degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine from The Florida Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine, St. Petersburg, Florida on December 17, 2004. Shortly afterward, she was awarded the status of Diplomat in Oriental Medicine—Dipl. O.M. by the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine--NCCAOM.
Both of us were called to the knowledge of God’s truth through the radio ministries of Herbert W. Armstrong in the mid 1950’s. I was age 15 and Jeanie was 13 when we began to study the Bible in earnest. We soon learned of Ambassador College in Pasadena, California, an institution which Mr. Armstrong had founded to teach the truths of God’s Word. It wasn’t long before both of us were making plans to attend A.C.
I enrolled at Ambassador College in the fall of 1959 at the age of 17 and was baptized into the spiritual body of Christ in the spring of 1960 at age 18. Jeanie was baptized into the spiritual body of Christ at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the spring of 1961 at the age of 16. She was admitted to Ambassador College in the fall of 1961 at the age of 17.
We were in the cafeteria line at Mayfair, Ambassador College, when I first laid eyes on Jeanie. It was love at first sight! There stood before me this beautiful little brunette with the most wondrous eyes. I knew at that moment that I wanted her to be my wife and lifelong partner. We were married after a 3 ½ year courtship on June 2, 1964, the day after my graduation from Ambassador College.
I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Theology and a Minor in Communications, and began a new job as administrative assistant to Dr. Roderick C. Meredith, a vice-president of the Worldwide Church of God (formerly the Radio Church of God, which Mr. Armstrong had founded).
My first employment with Dr. Meredith ran from June 1964 to January 1965. In January 1965, Dr. Meredith sent me back into the field ministry to serve as administrative assistant to District Superintendent Bryce Clark in Kansas City, Missouri. (I had previously served as Mr. Clark’s administrative assistant for 14 months between my third and fourth years at Ambassador College.) In 1966, when Mr. Clark was called back to Pasadena, I remained in Kansas City as administrative assistant for 6 months to Mr. Dean Blackwell.
When Mr. Clark returned to the field ministry as superintendent of the new Nashville District, he asked that I again serve as his assistant. So Jeanie and I moved from Kansas City to Nashville. A year or so later, Dr. Meredith requested that I be ordained an elder. I was ordained into the service of Jesus Christ in Nashville, Tennessee, at Passover time in 1968, and have been a local elder every since.
After two years, during part of which I co-pastored the Knoxville and Chattanooga churches, Dr. Meredith called me back to Pasadena to again serve as his administrative assistant. I served in this capacity from January 1970 to January 1972. My responsibilities, to name a but a few, included managing Dr. Meredith’s office, writing letters under his signature, researching material for Bible classes, Plain Truth and Good News articles, preparing and grading tests, preparing dossiers for ministerial trips and planning and coordinating mailings advertising the evangelistic campaigns then underway.
In 1972 Keith Hunter, director of data processing services for the Worldwide Church and Ambassador College, requested that I work with him as a research analyst on a new organizational planning staff that he was forming for Al Portune, vice-president of financial affairs. I joined the staff and served as a business systems analyst specializing in long-range corporate planning. As a member of the staff, I participated in the development and staffing of several new departments and a new corporate division (I had previously worked with David Jon Hill to reorganize several departments in addition to managing the direct marketing effort of the church.) We also oversaw the official closing and financial accounting of our sister campus at Big Sandy, Texas.
In the spring of 1974, Dr. Charles V. Dorothy approached me during the days of Unleavened Bread and asked if I would work with him to organize, staff and manage the new Theological Research Project (TRP) which he, at the request of the Armstrongs, was heading.
For the next two years, I served as manager of TRP as well as secretary to the Doctrinal Committee, which I helped to organize, chaired by C. Wayne Cole. (The TRP project, initiated by Ted Armstrong in 1974 and personally approved by Herbert W. Armstrong, was in no way connected with the later STP project implemented by Dr. Robert Kuhn and Dr. Lester Grabbe.)
Toward the end of 1975, opposition to the TRP project (from a few in high offices) was rapidly gaining ground. I came to realize that the project would not be allowed to continue. In December of 1975 Jeanie and I decided that we should leave California and move our young family to my home state of Michigan where we would be close to family.
We left Pasadena at Passover time in the spring of 1976. The nation was recovering from a recession at the time, but Michigan’s economy was still lagging behind. After arriving in my home area, I was unable to find work. So we moved to Look Out Mountain, Alabama, where I was able to work as a finish carpenter in the construction of luxury homes in and around Chattanooga, Tennessee. This was arranged through a referral by a brother in Christ for whom I had worked previously between college years.
A year later I was again without work, so we moved back to Michigan where I soon joined the administrative staff of Southwestern Michigan College. I functioned for the next two years as an Associate Dean of Community Services. This term of work ran from August 1977 to December 1979. In the fall of 1979, I was hired as an instructor in the School of Business, and for the next ten years or so (from the fall of 1979 to the spring of 1990) I taught data processing classes such as Introduction to Data Processing, systems analysis theory and application along with data processing logic and language classes such as RPG II and III as well as Basic and Business Basic. And, once in awhile subbing in a Cobol class.
When the enrollment in data processing courses dropped precipitously—I was again without work. I was unable to find fulltime work for several years, and was forced to take any part-time job I could find to support my family.
Sometime in the early 1990-s, I reconnected with Fred Coulter, who had been a classmate at Ambassador College and had become a church pastor as well as a publisher of Biblical studies. Years earlier, Jeanie had edited his first book, A Harmony of the Gospels in Modern English and I helped research and market the book (We were living in Pasadena at the time, and Fred was called back from the field ministry shortly after I was.) More recently we worked on Fred’s The Holy Bible in its Original Order project.
I had lost contact with Fred after moving to Michigan, but reconnecting in the 1990’s was the beginning of a long, profitable association, with Fred requesting research on various Biblical topics as problems and questions arose among church brethren—not only those in the Christian Biblical Church of God, which Fred had founded, but in other Sabbatarian churches worldwide. (I was never an employee of CBCG, but simply functioned as an independent contractor.)
I had always hoped to focus my time and energy on Biblical research, and the door was opened at last. I researched all the available material I could find on each Biblical topic, collected my findings and wrote a rough draft, which Jeanie edited. Each research paper was the result of countless hours of work. Fred and I sought to build a firm foundation and to make the Biblical evidence of the truth we believed as clear and understandable as possible.
Some of these Biblical studies have been published by Fred on his website and have made available free of charge along with his own publications. Many are still available on the CBCG website (as an aside, the original website for CBCG was a collaborative work with Ron Cary, who continues to serve as webmaster to this very day.)
In 2006, at age 65, I retired from my association with Fred Coulter and CBCG. Since then I have continued my Biblical research as requests from individuals have brought problems to my attention. While most requests are from Sabbatarian brethren, I have also received requests from people in various walks of life who have read my material and are engaged in their own research and/or are becoming interesting in the Sabbath.
My latest research has not been published on any website. In addition to this new material, I also have countless pages of unpublished research beginning with my college years (i.e., A Synchronized Chronology of the Ancient World and A Dictionary of Biblical and Classical Antiquity) and continuing down to the 1990’s. Since June of 2008 I have been publishing a theological journal (Theological Research Report) for the Sabbatarian Community at large.
Microsoft Cloud Technology, originally dubbed SkyDrive, has made it possible for me to begin publishing some 50 years of research on-line, offering it free of charge to readers around the world. Some of my material has been published on various Internet Websites for over 20 years. However, my SkyDrive site, is not a website (it cannot be accessed by “Googling” it) so please contact us for access information if you are interested:
Carl D. Franklin
58775 Klumbis Rd.
Dowagiac, MI.
49047-9779
Warmest Regards
Carl and Jeanie Franklin
P.S. Microsoft has recently renamed “SkyDrive” -- “OneDrive.”
