All Eyes On: Charles Frost

Charles Frost has lived throughout the world, ranging from Maine to Australia to Southeast Asia. He now has finally found a home in Kirksville.

He's worked as CIA liaisons in foreign countries and for the National Clandestine Service. He moved back to the U.S. in 1972 to work as a Budget Analyst for the Special Action Office, where he witnessed constant protests and rallies while living and working across from the White House.

When he decided to pursue a career as a teacher in the mid-1980s, the name Northeast Missouri State University didn't mean much to him. He applied anyway, and before long he was staying at the Kirksville Travelers Hotel while picking out a house.

"At that time, there was a freight train that would go through and there were grain bins on the other side," Frost said. "I looked out over the railroad track at those grain bins and I said, ‘Charlie Frost, what have you done?'

"But I never looked back." Frost is currently finishing his last semester as a part-time professor in the justice systems department. Because of budgetary issues, the administration has chosen to cut part-time professors within justice systems. Frost plans to continue teaching at the Moberly Area Community College and working as president of the Adair County Historical Society.

"He has a very, very active mind," said Janice Grow, education professor and Frost's wife. "He needs people around him and he needs to be intellectually stimulated, so that's why he keeps working. Fishing wouldn't cut it."

After growing up predominately in Malden, Mass., Frost attended college at nearby Tufts University, located in Medford, Mass., before heading off for a stint in the Navy during the Korean War.

Frost said the original plan was to go into air traffic control, but he wasn't fit for it.

"I studied diligently and had my wife doing table top simulations with me the night before we were going to get real airplanes, and I just couldn't keep two air crafts together to save me," Frost said. "It was very heartbreaking at the time, but I can be philosophical about it now. I think it was probably in the best interest of national air traffic safety that I didn't go into that business."

Frost enrolled at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and soon was pursuing a career with the CIA.

"I realized that my mental traits were more analytical, more stop and [ask] ‘Why is this happening, what's going on?'" he said. "And that's not the way air controllers' minds work."

Frost cannot say much about his years with the CIA because much of his work remains classified.

For 17 years — while working for the CIA — living away from his home country was all Frost knew.

"Overseas work and living kind of got in my blood," he said.

Eventually, Frost decided to move back to the U.S., where he worked for the White House Drug Abuse Prevention Office and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Throughout his military and bureaucracy careers, Frost maintained an interest in academia and upon being hired by Truman, taught full time from 1985 to 1998.

"He said the 12 years he spent here as a full professor were the best years of his professional life — the most interesting and the most rewarding," Grow said.

After retiring to Maine for a short while, Frost came back to Kirksville in 2004 to begin teaching part time.

Marty Jane, justice systems department chair, said Frost's background is rare and allows him to teach courses others don't have the experience to.

"We're going to miss him if we can't come up with a few more bucks to bring him back," Jayne said. "It's been pretty useful to us simply from the point of view of having some more things in the major, give the students some more options."

Frost said regardless of his future with Truman, he's content with his life accomplishments and enjoying his "retirement" in Kirksville.

"I can't say I could have planned it out way back at the beginning, but I do realize that the pieces were interrelated," he said. "One thing led to another."