Biography
Francis Earl Townsend was born the second of six children on January 13, 1867 in Fairbury, Illinois. After Townsend contracted swamp malaria as an infant, the Townsend family moved to Nebraska where Townsend had two years of high school education. In 1898 at age 20, Townsend borrowed $1,000 from his father and moved to Southern California to develop a hay farming business. The business was not successful and Townsend enrolled in Omaha Medical College when he was 31. After graduating, Townsend worked in the medical field in Belle Fourche, South Dakota and met a nurse and his future wife, Wilhelmina "Minnie" Bogue. At age 50, Townsend enlisted as a doctor in the army one year before the end of World War I.
After the war end in 1918, Townsend moved to Long Beach, California to run a dry ice factory. After that business quickly failed, Townsend worked for real estate agent Robert Earl Clements in Midway City, California. Clements would later mastermind the Townsend Plan. In 1930 at the start of the Great Depression, Townsend became a Long Beach city public health officer at age 63, but lost his job three years later. In September 1933, Townsend wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper and launched his career as an old-age activist.
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