ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 19, 1997 TAG: 9704210060
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: NEW YORK
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: NEW YORK TIMES
She ran a flying school, recruited sailors for World War I, and hobnobbed with the king of Greece.
Dorothy Frooks, who stumped for women's suffrage as a child, recruited thousands of men to World War I service as a teen-ager, and then spent most of the century as a lawyer and political gadfly, died Sunday, April 13, at Veterans Hospital in Manhattan. She was about 100 and lived in Manhattan and Peekskill, N.Y.
Among her many achievements were laying the groundwork for aid to dependent children and for small claims courts.
She served as chief yeoman in the Navy in World War I and as a judge advocate in the Army in World War II, taught school in Puerto Rico, ran a flying school, turned out columns for The New York World, wrote half a dozen books, founded The Murray Hills News, represented celebrated murder defendants, ran repeatedly for Congress, corresponded with George Bernard Shaw, feuded with Eleanor Roosevelt, hobnobbed with the King of Greece, turned down marriage proposals from Harry K. Thaw and Fiorello H. La Guardia, and so clouded the issue of her age that even her own family is not sure if she was 99 or 103.
But whether she was ``almost 17,'' in January 1918, as she put it in her her book ``Lady Lawyer,'' or 20, as a contemporaneous newspaper article reported, Frooks, who received a gold medal from President Woodrow Wilson that month, was surely one of the last living Americans to have had a formal audience with Wilson in his White House office (and seen the evangelist Billy Sunday clap him on the back with such gusto that the president's top hat went flying.)
Whatever her age, by then she had a national reputation as ``the infant prodigy,'' who had made speeches for women's suffrage from Union Square to Hyde Park before turning her attention to military recruitment and Liberty Bonds.
The daughter of a prosperous businessman and an international society figure, Frooks was the seventh of nine highly articulate children, five of whom became lawyers.
It was one of her mother's London society friends who spotted her talent for oratory and recruited her for the suffrage movement.
She was even more impressive as an unofficial military recruiter, and after she had talked an estimated 30,000 men into signing up, primarily for the Navy, Wilson not only presented her with a medal but recruited her for the Navy. As the highest-ranking woman in the service, Frooks expanded her recruitment activities and later organized a women's veterans organization.
By the early 1920s, at least, she was well known in New York as the first full-time lawyer for the Salvation Army. After discovering that poor people were often frustrated by their inability to collect small debts, she conceived the idea of a small claims court and lobbied hard until the first was signed into law by her old friend and suitor, La Guardia.
Thaw, the man who had killed the celebrated architect Stanford White 20 years earlier, hired Frooks in 1926 to defend a 16-year-old girl who had killed the man who raped her when she was 12.
Frooks, who eventually won a suspended sentence for her client, became so incensed that the girl's widowed mother had been forced to neglect her children while struggling to eke out a living that she helped prod the legislature into establishing aid to dependent children.
Frooks, who was married in 1986, is survived by her husband, Jay P. Vanderbilt.
LENGTH: Medium: 71 linesby CNB