Frederick T. Bonham graduated from Knoxville High School in 1899 and worked for the Southern Railway. Before he was 21 years old, he was city passenger and ticket agent. (He was later associated with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad in the traffic department.) In April 1908 he left the railroad and became assistant business manager of the Knoxville Journal and Tribune. He then became the business manager and later became associate publisher. As business manager of the Journal and Tribune, he established the Journal and Tribune Cross-Country Run in 1920.
He was a member of the UT Law Class of 1909 and of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. During his years in Knoxville, he was active in civic affairs and was an organizer of the Knox County Chapter of the American Red Cross. In 1928 he accepted an offer from his friend Adolph Ochs to work for the New York Times as personnel director. In 1931 he was elected president of the Tennessee Society of New York.
In 1933 he married Valerie Knapp Langeloth, a wealthy widow. After her death in 1952, he sold their mansion on Long Island Sound and moved into the Plaza Hotel in New York, where he lived until his death in 1958. He endowed the Bonham Journalism Scholarship and the Amanda Minnis Bonham Scholarship in Journalism in memory of his mother, and he also established the F. T. Bonham Foundation. At his death in 1958, income from the foundation was distributed to his heirs for a 20-year period and then (1978) was transferred to UT to establish the Frederick T. Bonham Scholarship Endowment.