Morris Frank

Morris Frank (March 23, 1908 – November 22, 1980) was a founder of the first guide-dog school in the United States. He was the first person to be partnered with a seeing eye dog and the co-founder of The Seeing Eye, a guide-dog school. He traveled the United States and Canada to promote the use of guide dogs for people who are blind or visually impaired, as well as the right of people with guide dogs to access restaurants, hotels, transportation, and other places that are open to the general public.

Frank was born in Nashville, Tennessee, as the third and youngest son of wealthy Jewish parents, John Frank and Jessie Hirsch Frank. Throughout his childhood, Frank had been the guide and helper for his mother, who was blind. At age six, he went blind in his right eye after hitting an overhanging tree branch while horseback riding; at age sixteen, he went blind in the other eye while boxing with a friend. (In a bizarre coincidence, his mother's blindness was also caused by two unrelated accidents: she went blind in one eye when delivering her first son, and in the other fifteen years later when she was thrown from a horse.) Before Frank reached his teens, he went to summer camp at Camp Winnebago in Fayette, Maine, where he later returned for a visit, and brought Buddy with him.

Frank graduated from Montgomery Bell Academy, then attended Vanderbilt University while working as a piano tuner and insurance salesman. He hired young men to serve as guides, but found them to be unreliable.

On November 5, 1927, The Saturday Evening Post published an article by Dorothy Harrison Eustis, an American dog trainer living in Switzerland. The article, titled "The Seeing Eye", was Eustis's first-hand account about a school in Germany where blinded World War I veterans were being trained to work with guide dogs. Frank was one of many people who wrote to her asking where he could get such a dog.

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