Finis Earl “Frank” Schneider rode into the sunset Aug. 27, 2026, a month shy of his 95th birthday. He was born in Crosby County, Texas, out on the Panhandle plains on a farm with no electricity. He was the fourth of six siblings in a house with two rooms, his mother a school teacher and father a farmer. Other than picking cotton, one of his earliest memories was going with his mother to see the Carter Family sing at some lonesome music hall.

The family moved to the metropolis of Plainview when he was around 10, and his assignment was to ride their horse from the farm into town. He stopped at a little diner in the middle of nowhere, tied the horse to farm machinery and got a hamburger for 10 cents. It was a different world.

His parents dropped him off at West Texas State when he was 16, leaving him on a street corner with a suitcase, and he’d hitchhike home for visits. He went on to see the world during a career in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. After a dance at Fort Lee, Virginia, his date - Petersburg girl Eunice Williams - called to say she had left her scarf in his Ford Thunderbird convertible. They never found the alleged scarf, but married less than a year later, in 1962.

The Army sent him to graduate school in filmmaking at the University of Southern California in the mid-1960s, where he and Mom hobnobbed with the likes of Barbara Eden and Rock Hudson; Robert Vaughn starred in his student film project. The photos of Daddy in his crewcut and Ray Bans and Mom with her beehive hairdo are magnificent. He spent 1968 in Vietnam - the Tet Offensive, earning a Bronze Star - then never talked about it. For his homecoming he had Mom buy him a Camaro.

He retired from the Army in the mid-1970s at the rank of lieutenant colonel, got his PhD at the University of Texas-Austin and began a second career as a professor of radio, TV and film at Hampton University. He was a wood worker who could fix or build anything - not always elegantly, but quickly - and spent summers remodeling TV and radio studios at HU. Eventually they made him department chair, because he was the kind of man people wanted to put in charge of things. Tall and reserved, he was as dependable as the sound of his lawnmower on Saturday morning, a life deacon and chairman of the deacons at Hampton Baptist Church. Sundays in the fall meant rushing home to change clothes and watch the Washington Redskins while eating chili and cornbread.

Everyone has a dark side, and his involved torturing his kids with very loud country music - Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, Flatt & Scruggs - and toxic amounts of the TV show “Hee Haw.” He loved Mel Brooks movies and was a connoisseur of “dad jokes” before the term was invented. No matter how badly he wanted to sing and play guitar or banjo, no amount of lessons could make that possible. But he could throw a perfect spiral, pitched a no-hitter overseas in the Army and played irritatingly good golf well into his 80s. When he teased his grandsons about being a better athlete than they were, they couldn’t really argue. Until his knees stopped working, Daddy was the old guy who built wheelchair ramps for other old guys. He was, as one grandchild put it, “a tough old cowboy.”

He is survived by his wife, Eunice; their two children, Greg Schneider and Kim Bingol; two children from a previous marriage, Brad Schneider and Laurie Troy; nine grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

A graveside service will be held at 1:00 PM on Saturday, September 5, 2026 at Parklawn Memorial, Hampton, VA with a reception immediately following the graveside at Hampton Baptist Church, 40 Kings Way, Hampton.