Orphaned orange-picker joined the Army and served many communities

Fred Shinn, co-founder of the Sedona Police Department Volunteer Program and the Sedona Police Field Support Unit, died peacefully at home on Easter Sunday, April 5.

Born June 20, 1937, in Lake Wales, Florida, by 13 he had lost his father to a heart attack, watched his mother walk out, seen his two younger brothers absorbed into the adoption system — and found himself alone in a trailer, signing his own report cards and picking oranges to cover rent.

“He came from a background of really no family after the age of 13 and became a self-made man, just based on his own strength and tenacity, in just wanting to become successful and overcome what hands he was given as a young boy,” his daughter Deborah Shinn said.

His drive earned him a swimming scholarship to Michigan State, where he picked up a job waiting tables at the Alpha Omicron Pi sorority. He would go on to earn a master’s degree in finance from Dartmouth College. Fred and his wife Joy both graduated from Dartmouth in 1953.

“I’m pretty sure my mom’s water glass never went empty — Fred was right there refilling it after every sip, like he was saying, ‘I don’t have a pickup line… but I am very attentive,'” his son Kurt Shinn said of Fred and his mother.

“He just set his eyes on her, and just like he did with everything in his life: this is something that I want, this is something that I’m going to find a way to get, and he did,” Deborah Shinn said. “They were married for 53 years until mom passed away,” on Jan. 31, 2011.

After completing ROTC at Michigan State and Officers Training School at Fort Riley, Kansas, he was commissioned as U.S. Army captain and deployed to Laos from 1960 to 1964.

“He was in Laos on a secret mission. Kurt and I never knew about his mission in Laos,” Deborah Shinn said. “We didn’t find out till both of us were in our late 50s. Even to the day he died, he pretty much kept a lot of it close to the bone.”

Shinn was honored posthumously at the Sedona Area Veterans Community & Outreach Memorial Day ceremony on May 25 at the Posse Ground Pavilion, where an American flag was presented to his family.

After Dartmouth, Shinn joined the Aluminum Company of America, and rose to lead its international finance division. The family moved from Michigan to Ohio to Connecticut to Florida — and wherever they landed, he planted roots. In Connecticut, he and Joy recreated Revolutionary War battles with the Fifth Regiment. In Marco Island, Florida, he founded the yacht club, helped start its film festival and the Marco Island Players.

“Each town that they lived in, each state that they lived in, they embraced the culture of what that was,” Deborah Shinn said.

When the Shinns moved to Sedona in 2005, he saw a newspaper ad for the Sedona Police Department volunteer program and signed up. He went on to found the department’s Field Support Unit, which transports arrestees to area detention facilities, sometimes driving up to 150 miles.

“This requires special training and a very strong commitment to the program due to its unpredictability,” Shinn said in a 2020 interview. “The personal enjoyment and satisfaction that I receive in assisting our law enforcement, in a modest way, is deep-seated and a way of giving back.”

The city of Sedona in turn gave back to Shinn, bestowing him with its first “I Caught You Caring” award in 2013 for staff and volunteers who go above and beyond. Shinn was nominated by Sgt. Kevin Ahern for his assistance in locating a missing elderly male with Alzheimer’s who had wandered from his hotel room in Uptown. Shinn, without being called upon, took it upon himself to assist in the search and found the missing man in the early morning, safely returning him to his family.

Shinn’s service to Sedona extended beyond law enforcement. After his beloved partner Terrie Frankel began pushing about 10 years ago for a dedicated burial space for veterans in Sedona, Shinn suggested broadening it to include first-responders. In early 2025 the Sedona Community Cemetery board approved a $55,000 columbarium dedicated to both first-responders and veterans — where part of his ashes now rest.

“It takes a lot of courage to die. He didn’t want to leave,” Frankel said at the columbarium.

Though Shinn has the distinction of being late to his own funeral on May 29 at St. John Vianney Catholic Church — his ashes were accidentally left at home and retrieved just before the Mass began.

“When he died, in the obituary, at the bottom it said, in lieu of flowers, donate to the philanthropy at Northern Arizona Healthcare,” Frankel said. “So many people donated” that Chief Philanthropy Officer Larry Kushner is starting a Fred Shinn nursing scholarship with the Northern Arizona philanthropy, starting next year. The fund is currently at about $5,000, with a goal of $40,000 to permanently endow it.

“Here’s a guy who jumped out of an airplane on his 77th birthday, he lived the American dream,” Kushner said. “He was cut straight out from a Horatio Alger novel, and God do I miss him.”

“Whenever you got off the phone with him, he’d always say, ‘Bye-bye for now.’ Like he never wanted it to feel like a final goodbye,” Kurt Shinn said. “So, dad, speaking for everyone here, … bye-bye for now.”