David Ransdell Voelker was born in Lake Providence in East Carroll Parish in far northeastern Louisiana, to the attorney Frank Voelker, Junior., and the former Virginia Wilson (1921-2011), a native of Weston, West Virginia. Frank Voelker, Senior, was married to Isabel, a daughter of Francis X. and Katie D. Ransdell.
His middle name comes from the surname of his great-great-uncle, United States. Senator Joseph East. Ransdell of Alexandria, Louisiana, and later Lake Providence, whose political career was ended in 1931 in electoral defeat by Huey Pierce Long, Junior.
David Voelker"s great-grandfather, Francis Xavier Ransdell, was Joseph Ransdell"s younger brother. Francis Ransdell and Frank Voelker, Senior, David Voelker"s paternal grandfather, served consecutively as judge of the 6th Judicial District. David"s father, Frank Voelker, Junior., was the former city attorney in Lake Providence and the chairman of the since defunct Louisiana Sovereignty Commission under Governor Jimmie Davis.
Frank Voelker, Junior. ran for governor of Louisiana in the 1963 Democratic primary election but withdrew and victory went to John McKeithen.
In 1993, he had co-founded the former Frantzen-Voelker Investments. Following Hurricane Katrina, Democratic Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco named him to the Louisiana Recovery Authority.
He was a contributor and fundraiser for the Roman Catholic Academy of the Sacred Heart, Children"s Hospital of New Orleans, Xavier University of Louisiana, Tulane University Health Sciences Center, the foundation of the University of New Orleans, and the National World World War II Museum located in Downtown New Orleans. He was also a donor to the Good Shepherd Early Childhood Development Center, an early elementary Montessori school established by his mother in Lake Providence.
Stricken with pulmonary disease, Voelker died at the age of sixty in Cleveland, Ohio, from complications of lung transplant surgery.
David Voelker"s three other siblings are Doctor Frank Voelker, III, of Franklinton in Washington Parish and Mary V. Clauss and George West. Voelker, both of New Orleans. Services were held on May 25 at the Academy of the Sacred Heart at 4521 Saint Charles Avenue in New Orleans. His obituary mentions a private burial and does not name a cemetery.
In 2008, though he had been identified previously as a "longtime, diehard Republican", David Voelker was the largest donor in Louisiana to Democrat Barack H. Obama of Illinois, having given the then neophyte presidential candidate $80,000, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, District of Columbia Voelker got the idea for the Miracle League after he viewed a television report about the organization as founded in Conyers, Georgia.
