Frederick William Franz
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Frederick William Franz - (September 12, 1893 – December 22, 1992) served as President of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the legal organization used to direct the work of Jehovah's Witnesses. He also served as Vice President of the the same corporation from 1945 until 1977 and a member of the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses before becoming president in 1978.
Franz was born in Covington, Kentucky, and graduated high school in 1911. He attended the University of Cincinnati where he studied Biblical Greek and Latin, having already decided that he wanted to be a Presbyterian preacher. He was baptized as a Bible Student on 30 November 1913, and left the University in May of 1914. Franz immediately began evangelizing full time as a "pioneer". (See: Practices of Jehovah's Witnesses, Evangelism)
In 1926, He joined the editorial staff as a Bible researcher and writer for the Society’s publications. Franz is considered by some, though not having been officially acknowledged, to have been a leading figure in the preparation of the Witnesses' New World Translation of the Bible, which was prepared anonymously, like most Watchtower publications. He was the oldest member to lead the organization, and one of the oldest ever to be a leading figure in any religion. In his last years, he was quite feeble.
He died in Brooklyn, New York in 1992 at the age of 99 and was succeeded by Milton G. Henschel. The New York Times, Thurdsay, December 24, 1992 described him as "a religious Leader....[of] a Christian denomination" and "a biblical scholar". The article claimed he was "versed in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek".
