From Melon Fields to Moon Rocks. Dianna Borsi O'Brien
mother, according to the family documents.1 When Heinrich Junior’s sister in Germany read the letter announcing his marriage to their mother, she said her daughter was crazy. In the family history, the sentiments expressed in Henrich’s letter are described as: “He was lonely, he saw this girl, he was in love with her, and so he married her.”
The family history continues, “He later wrote about such a lovely baby they had.” A photo from the time shows an idyllic setting with father, mother, and baby Heinrich, later called Henry or Hank, Charles’s older brother. With Hank born in 1916 and Charles following a year later on July 18, 1917, it looked as if the family was on its way to the American dream.
Already, though, there were hints of Heinrich Gehrke Jr.’s difficult nature. Charles’s official birth certificate reads only “Baby Gehrke,” but in the family Bible, his father listed his name as Karl Wilhelm Frederick Gehrke, giving every German Kaiser a nod. As Charles noted, this wasn’t such a good idea, given the anti-German sentiment in the United States during the years of World War I.
The young family of four traveled to Coshocton, Ohio, to visit Louise Mäder’s relatives. They soon decided to move to the area and take up farming, first buying a farm near Roscoe, Ohio, and then buying a better but smaller thirteen-acre farm on the edge of Canal Lewisville. The new home had a cemetery on one side and a Methodist church behind it, with a small barn, a chicken coop, and an apple tree, as well as space for a vegetable garden. At the end of Charles’s life, his mother’s patch of rhubarb still grew there.
Following in His Father’s Footsteps
At their first home on the edge of town, the family first eked out a living as farmers of a sort, growing strawberries, radishes, potatoes, cabbage, and other vegetables on their few acres of land. Out of the thirteen acres, only three or four turned out to be good, fertile soil, said Charles.
Along with farming the land, the family kept a cow for milk, a horse to help with plowing, and a pig for meat, recalled Charles. He also remembered thinking the barn was haunted because it was next to the cemetery.
In addition to tough economic times, the family faced another problem: Their father was beginning to have his own problems with drinking, following unfortunately in his father’s footsteps. Heinrich Gehrke Jr. began to drink more and more as the family faced the economic problems of the country’s slide into the Great Depression, marked by the stock market crash on October 29, 1929.
Charles said his father wasn’t around much, although he did note with a chuckle he must have been there at times because Lillian (Lil) was born in 1925, followed by Evelyn in 1927, and, finally, Edward in 1929, when Charles was twelve.
Unwilling to dwell on the details, Charles simply said he didn’t like his father much because he was always getting in trouble with the law. For what? “Being obnoxious, I guess,” said Charles. The other children recalled, without bitterness, other memories. For example, Lil remembered, as a four-year-old, seeing her father pin her mother against the wall and hit her as Lil screamed from her high chair, “Leave my mother alone!” Another time, Lil remembered her siblings and herself holding onto their mother’s skirts as they ran to a neighbor’s house for safety. Once, Charles and Hank waited near the grade school in Canal Lewisville with a gun, planning to scare their father off, but Heinrich never came their way that night.
Finally, after one more attack on their mother, the police told their father to leave town and never come back. And for a long time, he didn’t.
A few years later, their father did return, but only briefly. As Lil recalled it, he was so sick and heavy she didn’t recognize him at first. He came to the back door, and she thought it was a neighbor stopping by. Their mother let him in, but he didn’t stay.
The family learned about Heinrich’s 1936 death in New York City a few months after it occurred, when they received his personal effects. The cause of death was noted as cirrhosis of the liver due to alcoholism.
The youngest child, Ed, was seven at the time, and he said he recalled his father’s death only because he remembers his father’s personal belongings arriving in the mail; he wanted his father’s leather wallet. But instead, said Ed, Hank, his oldest brother, snatched it up. It made sense. Without a father on hand, in many ways, Hank took on that role.
Charles said he admired Hank, but he also admitted he always felt dominated by him. Lil recalled Hank urging family members to work hard, sometimes even admonishing them: “What good are you if you don’t work?”
In remarks at Hank’s memorial service in 1999, Charles recalled feelings of tenderness and a sense of teamwork with Hank. “When, on occasion, trouble would arise at school or elsewhere, the two of us met these problems together, thus making our way successfully through many difficult situations.” As for family and work, Charles wrote, “Henry was the leader, as we made our life on the small farm in Canal Lewisville...striving to keep the cellar full....Henry and I were always together, whether hoeing corn ten hours a day, working threshing machines or hay balers, taking wagons full of hay to barn mows....Working with Henry was an experience one never forgets. His work ethic was to do, without fail, a great job.”
A Mother’s Influence
Louise Mäder was born in southern Germany in 1894 to Edward Mäder and Barbara Schmidlin. Edward Mäder, according to the family history, “was an important stable influence on his family and a respected member of the community,” a sharp contrast to Charles’s father.
Louise Mäder worked as a housemaid in nearby Switzerland after graduating from school in Germany but left for the United States at age nineteen, seeking a new life. She and her sister Lena left Germany with one hundred marks in gold from her father, a debt Charles said he later helped his mother to repay.
Upon arriving in the United States, Louise and Lena went to Ohio to visit their uncle, John Schmidlin, who was killed later in an anti-German attack. While Lena decided to stay in Coshocton, Ohio, Louise demonstrated her independent nature by returning to New York City by herself and seeking work there as a housemaid. As previously mentioned, in New York City, she met Heinrich Gehrke Jr. at a dance.
Charles noted that his parents had a troubled marriage. Lil described the family history this way: “Heinrich had been a fisherman in Germany. He was not successful as a farmer in America. During the Depression years, other jobs were difficult to find. He turned to alcohol and was dominated by his need for it.”
When Heinrich was told to leave town, Louise was left with five children to raise on her own. To make ends meet, she began walking to Coshocton, three miles away, to work as a housemaid.
Lil wrote in the family history, “Louise never accepted her current circumstances but always tried to rise above them, no matter how hard or slow. She was a forceful, dynamic, and extraordinary mother who taught her children to always look to the future, that through hard work they could achieve their goals and, as she described, ‘a better way of life.’ ‘Where there is a will there is a way,’ was her belief. Raised with our mother’s firm, austere German ideas and tradition of hard work, frugality and saving, we, her children, are proud of our heritage.”
Ed remarked that complaining about work just didn’t make sense to them. Nearing eighty years old, Ed, the youngest of Charles’s siblings, continued to work on his investment portfolio, manage his many real estate holdings, and write a book about the stock market, when he and his wife weren’t traveling or keeping up their one-hundred-twenty-acre homestead.
“You see,” Ed explained, “we think work is good.” Prior to “retiring,” he’d held the rank of full colonel in the U.S. Air Force, serving as a commander of a Strategic Air Command unit from 1975-1978, the culmination of a military career that included serving as a commander during the Vietnam War.
Like Ed, Charles looked back on his hardworking childhood with pleasure, happily pointing out fields where he once grew rows of strawberry plants and the hills where he picked raspberries for his mother to turn into jellies and jams.
The family garden helped to keep everyone fed, and what the children didn’t eat walking inside from the garden,