From Melon Fields to Moon Rocks. Dianna Borsi O'Brien
that lunch and always, he was a gentleman, pulling out my chair for me. He was indeed a boaster, but then his accomplishments had given him something to boast about. He described how he’d founded ABC Labs. Later I’d learn he founded it with the help of several partners, including one that few people knew even existed. I know because later Charles talked about how he started the company with two of his colleagues, and I learned about an early fourth partner because I read through documents and letters from the early days of ABC Labs.
During that first meeting, he revealed a character flaw I’d later find out about in spades—the desire to drive the car even when he wasn’t in the driver’s seat. He told me he’d been out to look at the new construction going on at ABC Labs and how he wanted to make sure they didn’t make any mistakes in building the laboratory. No matter that at this time he wasn’t even on the board anymore, he just still wanted to offer a few pointers to those in charge.
At our first meeting, I asked Charles my most important question, the one that determined whether I’d take on the project or not: “Do you want me to write this the way it really happened or do you want me to write it the way you want it to look?” His answer? “Write it the way it happened.”
Factual matters
So I did. Our mutual commitment to the truth didn’t mean he always liked it, but no matter what I wrote, what I learned and reported back to him, he never once corrected a factual matter, edited out a negative finding, or balked at the truth I learned during the more than three dozen interviews I conducted and the countless documents I reviewed.
After our first lunch, the next time we met was at his home, at his desk (two card tables pushed together). He was ready with a check, an outline, and a list of names of people for me to call. Over the next two years, we’d meet every week, and he’d tell me more about his journey from the melon fields in the foothills of the Appalachians, to founding ABC Labs and his last years as a practicing biochemist searching for the answer to cancer activity in blood, serum, and urine. He also tried to teach me about electrons, molecules, the make-up of sugar and gas-liquid chromatography.
In our meetings, he’d rattle off names and telephone numbers from memory of people I should contact. During those years, I interviewed dozens of people from his past, and I uncovered things that surprised both of us. When I uncovered audio recordings of a radio show that revealed him predicting they’d find life on the Moon, we were both surprised. He and history had forgotten how unusual and precarious the first Moon missions were for both those involved and for those back on earth. At the time of the Moon missions, many had feared that they’d bring back some kind of terrible, sinister pathogen that would wipe out life on Earth, but time and history had erased those fears—until the recording of Charles on that radio show brought it all back.
Along the way, we also had a lot of laughs. When I fact-checked his rendition of his time at Missouri Valley College, where he said he was head of the Chemistry Department, I reported back that he was the only person in the Chemistry Department and he retorted with a snort of righteousness, “Well, I was still head of the department.”
Another time after I’d interviewed one of his former colleagues, he told me without a hint of hostility, “I know you check up on me.” And I said, “Well, that’s my job. That’s what I do. Nothing personal.” We both knew we wanted the book to be as objective as it could be, given the constraints of time and history.
Of course, he was Charles and stubborn in his own ways. For example, he would never elaborate on his sentiments about his wife, reveal how or where they were engaged, or how he decided she was the one. He kept that private information private, although he did tell me he put his last anniversary card into her casket before they buried her. On some things, he just wouldn’t budge.
There were other things he didn’t want to tell me, and I can’t blame him. For example, he never quite got around to giving me those boxes of documents that outlined in detail the ABC Labs proxy fight that almost cost him the company he’d founded. Those documents and personal notes showed him in a less than glowing light. In fact, I didn’t get those boxes until after his death, with the documents that showed what really happened when ABC Labs nearly went bankrupt, and it wasn’t pretty. Charles could certainly go beyond stubborn at times.
He was a hero, but not a hero without clay feet. No matter what, he was a determined person. The last days of his life, he was still dictating to me what he wanted in the book and what he wanted the book to look like. He also asked me to promise to finish the book, which, unfortunately wasn’t done before he died. I did promise and it took me nearly two more years to finish it. Working on the book after his death I learned some unpleasant facts about Charles, but even the worst of it showed me his courage. He knew those documents would be made a part of the book because we’d agreed it was all going in there. That’s who Charles was. Unflinching. Determined. Persistent. And a bit of a braggart. Yet as the dedication he wrote for this book showed, he was a man who, in the end, cared just as much about the people in his life as the things he’d accomplished. And that’s why his children Jon and Susan asked me to write the book about a man who did indeed come from poverty and a tough background, but who went on to become a successful scientist, entrepreneur, and a beloved family man and friend.
And so I leave you with the introduction Charles wrote a short time before his death:
INTRODUCTION
“I touched the Moon, 4.5 billion years old in space.”
—Charles W. Gehrke, 1917–2009
From the poorest of the poor in the depth of the Depression, Charles W. Gehrke rose to the highest ranks in his scientific profession, going from the melon fields to the moon. During his more than five decades of research, he helped to shape and guide a generation of scientists in solving problems, advancing the academic and corporate worlds. This is a story that needs to be told.
He was right. But it wasn’t the whole story, the whole story is so much more and so much better.
That’s my dedication to Charles W. Gehrke, a man I learned to think of as my friend, as well as my colleague. And that’s a story that needs to be told.
Chapter 1
The Melon Fields
By the time Charles Gehrke’s mother died in 1977, she had acquired three houses and enough wealth to leave $17,000 each to three of her five children and property to the other two.
Not bad for a woman who’d arrived in the United States from Germany in 1913 with no money and limited English-language skills and who, by 1929, had five children to care for, without support from her husband.
Louise Mäder Gehrke was not easily deterred. Each day, she walked three miles to a nearby town to clean houses for a living, leaving her three youngest children, Lillian (four), Evelyn (two), and infant Ed in the care of her two older sons, Henry (Hank, thirteen), and Charles (twelve).
The family lived in Canal Lewisville, a small town of roughly five square blocks, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in eastern Ohio, near the slightly larger town of Coshocton, Ohio. Named for a portion of the Erie Canal that once flowed through the town, Canal Lewisville was flanked by a river on one side and fertile fields on the other.
While their mother was at work, the two older boys, Charles and Hank, would go to the melon fields to work, putting their baby brother, Ed, under the shade of an old oak tree, which still grows in the field just outside of Coshocton.
When Charles last visited in 2007, corn grew in that field, but Charles could still point out the spot where they put baby Ed to nap in the afternoon while they worked.
For Charles and Hank, childhood was hard work. They labored in the melon fields, soaked up to their waists with pesticides, copper sulfate, lead arsenate, and nicotine sulfate. They weeded acres of corn for ten cents an hour. They sold vegetables door to door in Coshocton from the back of a Model T.
Charles’s least-favorite job was being sent into town to get sugar and flour from an office set up for what passed as welfare during the late 1920s. In later years,