Patrick Frawley

Biography Frawley was born in León, Nicaragua, to an Irish-born father and a French-Spanish mother. He grew up in San Francisco, though he dropped out of high school and returned to Nicaragua as a teenager to learn the ways of business from his father. renaming it the Frawley Pen Company. In 1949, the Frawley Pen Company developed an ink that dried instantly; the pen that delivered this ink was called "The Paper Mate." The company claims to have made the "first pen with a retractable ballpoint tip" in 1950.

In 1955, the Frawley Pen Company was obtained by The Gillette Company, Inc. for $15.5 million, and formed the basis for the Paper Mate Division of Gillette. Frawley used the profits to buy controlling shares in Shick and Technicolor, Inc. He provided funds to the anti-communist Information Council of the Americas (INCA), founded in 1961. His Schick Company sponsored television showings of the INCA film "Hitler in Havana" (1966), which suggested that Castro had culpability in the assassination of President Kennedy.

Frawley had alcohol addiction problems, and in 1964 checked into the Shadel Sanatorium in Seattle for aversion therapy. He thought the experience was so valuable that he "bought the hospital for Schick, and renamed it Schick Shadel." founding the Catholic weekly newspaper Twin Circle. although Frawley held on to the rights at least through the mid-1980s.

By 1970, Twin Circle Publishing broadcast daily radio hits and a weekly half-hour television show espousing Frawley's conservative Catholic views. At that point, he took over publishing the National Catholic Register newspaper, changing its editorial focus from progressive to conservative. Also in 1970, Canadian theatre and film producer Harry Saltzman won control of Technicolor from chairman Frawley in a proxy fight.

In 1971, Frawley (on behalf of Schick), along with Charles E. Sellier Jr., and Rayland Jensen founded Schick Sunn Classic Pictures, based in Park City, Utah. The company produced independent feature films, documentaries, and made-for-television movies; in the period 1977–1982 the company produced a number of television films with the Classics Illustrated brand, including The Time Machine, Donner Pass: The Road to Survival, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

In 1995, Frawley sold the National Catholic Register and (the renamed) Catholic Twin Circle to the Legion of Christ.

Frawley died on November 3, 1998, in Santa Monica, California, leaving behind a sister, two sons, five daughters, and 20 grandchildren.