Frank Towner: Sharing joy

Our Hometown Hero for this month is a warm personality with an alter ego that has given joy to countless Tompkins County residents. Frank Towner, former CEO of the Ithaca Tompkins YMCA, has spent his career cultivating relationships and bringing smiles and laughter everywhere he goes.

These days, you will find Towner at Cayuga Medical Center, where he is a gift officer.

“Philanthropy is about creating relationships,” Towner said, adding that one generous donor recently wrote a $20,000 check for the organization.

Towner has three children. Clement, 31, who lives in Rochester and is married to Kait with two children, Henry, 3, and Oliver, 5. Thomas, 28, is an adaptive physical education teacher in Troy, and Cassidy, 27, is a hospitality representative for the company Axis.

Towner moved to the Lansing area in 1994 to live on his wife, Melanie’s, family farm. That was shortly before their first child was born, and they have been married for 32 years now.

He was director of the Ithaca Area Church and Community Daycare Center and a regular volunteer and teacher of swim classes at the Ithaca YMCA when in 1995, Paul Grennell, the YMCA CEO, asked him to join the staff professionally.

Since then, Towner worked his way up the ranks at the YMCA until he became CEO in 2011.

“It was a great career,” Towner said. One of his biggest accomplishments was creating the outdoor education center on Mecklenburg Road. The land was donated to the Y in 1984, and Towner brought the outdoor campus to life.

During his time at the YMCA, Towner created a new strategic plan, developed a larger board of directors, and oversaw renovations of the building.

In 2019, he secured two large grants for the YMCA: a $300,000 grant awarded by Barbara Lifton’s office and a $1.83 million Regional Economic Development Councils grant for a $6 million project. 

Then COVID-19 hit.

“The day the city shut down we were having our feasibility study,” Towner said. Suddenly he was turning his attention away from developing a multimillion-dollar renovation project and toward survival for the Ithaca Y. He had to lay off 135 people in the process.

“It was awful,” Towner said. The staff was pared down to just five people.

“So, we ran the ship the best we could all the way through,” he said. “It was August before we opened anything.” By January of 2021, the YMCA was mostly open, and Towner retired in January of 2022.

Towner immediately started substitute teaching at Lansing Central School District. The majority of the time, he worked as a teacher’s aide in the elementary school.

Towner then joined Cayuga Medical’s team on the campaign for transforming care. It was a natural partnership, he said, given that he had worked with the company at the YMCA.  

“I’m a grateful patient of Cayuga Health,” Towner said. “I worked closely with them for a year. In November of 2020, Marty Stallone and I started meeting to see how Cayuga Health and the YMCA could partner.”

“It was always my belief that the YMCA is a health organization,” he said. “The hospital is here for the ill and injured to hopefully find a cure, but the Y tries to keep you out of the hospital.”

He joined the fundraising team in February of 2022. “I’ve been lucky most of my life to be in the right place at the right time with the right people to do the right things for the right reasons,” he said, adding that he loves connecting people within the community. It was at a community event many years ago that he first met Jamie McVannan, owner of the Ithaca Papa Johns, and the two have formed a longtime friendship.

Every other year, they go on a moose hunting trip to Nova Scotia, and McVannan said he can think of no one else he would rather be with for the 15-hour car ride.

“He is a super dynamic personality guy,” McVannan said. “Between what he does at work and his side gig as Crossroad [the clown], the guy makes you laugh all the time.”

Ron Provus, Tompkins Weekly’s March 2024 Hometown Hero and the person who nominated Towner, said he met Towner through a fundraising event more than a decade ago, and the two have collaborated on events at the YMCA and the RaNic Golf Club (formerly known as the Country Club of Ithaca).

At 65, Towner says he is still in very good health. He is an active Rotarian, a member of the BOCES advisory council board and the Lansing Fire Department Board of directors, and he still drives fire trucks and helps put out fires, though he no longer fights the fires directly the way he did when he was younger.

Towner also still volunteers for Camp Good Days and Special Times, an organization that strives to improve the quality of life for families affected by cancer or sickle cell anemia through residential camping programs and year-round recreational and support activities in the Rochester, Buffalo and Syracuse areas.

Towner has been working with the camp almost from the very beginning, when it was founded in 1979.

“He was there since year one,” said Wendy Bleier-Mervis, Camp Good Days executive director. “We had an ad in the paper asking for volunteers to help, and Frank responded … he drove up to the camp and became a volunteer and was a lifeguard and was hooked, and that’s the end of the story.”

When he retires, Towner would like to pursue his passion for art. He attended the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) for painting, design, printmaking and sculpture. After he graduated, he went into the fields of youth and recreation, and he continued down that path, “But I have always maintained my artistry,” he said.

That includes Towner’s most well-known form or artistic expression: Crossroad the Clown.

As a student, Towner took the name Crossroad from the title of his high school yearbook, “Crossroads,” and promoted the yearbook with the persona. Clowning classes he had taken with two friends finally paid off, and a lifelong alter ego and source of joy for many was born.

Bleier-Mervis said Crossroad is beloved at Camp Good Days and Special Times. “He’ll show up at camp and events as Crossroad, and the kids just love him,” she said. “He is part of the institution of Camp Good Days.”

“I get as much out of it as I give,” Towner said. “My purpose in life is to spread joy and laughter. That’s my thing.”

Correction: The original version of this story stated an incorrect amount for the grant the YMCA received from Barbara Lifton’s office. This article has been amended to reflect the correct amount of $1.83 million. Tompkins Weekly regrets the error. 

Tompkins Weekly’s Hometown Heroes Award is sponsored by Security Mutual Insurance and Canopy by Hilton Ithaca.