From Melon Fields to Moon Rocks. Dianna Borsi O'Brien
Clow Pipe Company to help support the family. Family tales say Charles wanted to follow suit, but Hank wouldn’t hear of it, telling him, “You are smart, and you’re going to get out of here.”
Chapter 4
Coshocton High School
In 1931, Charles began to walk the same three miles to Coshocton that his mother walked to work, but he did it to attend Coshocton High School. With Hank dropping out of school and Charles going on to high school, Charles was beginning to move out of his brother’s shadow.
As Charles put it, “He always called the shots.” However, Charles saw his brother Hank as a major guiding force, always ready with encouragement.
The move to Coshocton High School provided Charles with new champions for his welfare, one of whom would help guide him away from Coshocton and well beyond central Ohio. At Coshocton High School, Chemistry teacher Richard McKissick always made it a point to urge qualified students to go to college. Naturally, Charles caught his eye.
At the same time, Charles signed up for Future Farmers of America (FFA). The FFA teacher Delmar Hoover also took an interest in Charles. He got students involved in an afterschool competitive project he called “pest eradication.” The project involved putting the students into teams of five or six students each and then taking them from barn to barn, farm to farm, to see who could capture and kill the most rats and sparrows.
Charles remembered shining a flashlight into the hay mows so the birds would fly toward the light and the students could catch them and pull off their heads—proof of their successful efforts. Charles and his friends in Canal Lewisville expanded on the supervised pest eradication trips by going out on their own from time to time, bringing rat tails and sparrow heads to school.
Hoover also taught public speaking, which helped transform Charles from a shy, reticent farm boy into someone comfortable talking to anyone. He won the regional public-speaking contest and even competed at the state level, coming in fourth at the competition in Columbus, Ohio.
Charles’s teachers weren’t content with simply guiding Charles’s high-school efforts. They wanted to guide his future as well, pushing him toward attending Ohio State University after he graduated. But s mother wasn’t for the plan. She wanted her son to stay home, get a job, and help support the family.
To try to persuade her to send Charles to college, the two men visited Charles’s mother at home to talk to her, but she wasn’t swayed. She asked them where she was going to get the money to send her second son to college.
At the time, Hank was working at Clow Pipe Company, which helped, but in 1935, as Charles’s graduation approached, she still had Ed (six), Evie (eight), and Lil (ten) to consider. She needed Charles’s financial help.
Even Charles had mixed feelings. He wanted to help his family, but he also knew making a living farming, especially farming the land they had, wouldn’t be easy. “We didn’t have a farm worth anything,” Charles said. “Thirteen acres of nothing. Thirteen acres was a lot at the time, but there were only four or five acres that were fertile.”
Hank helped, though. A 1995 Coshocton Tribune newspaper article reported that Hank insisted Charles go to college. “I knew what work was, and I wanted them to have things a little better,” the article quotes Hank as saying.
Later, at Hank’s memorial in 1999, Charles acknowledged his brother’s help—and the divergence of their lives. “In 1935, with encouragement from my high school teachers and Hank’s help, I enrolled at OSU. Thus our ways began to take separate paths, but always we kept in contact.”
That kind of loyalty would become a hallmark of Charles’s life.
Chapter 5
Ohio State University and the Stadium Scholarship Dormitory
As a result of his teachers’ persuasion and his brother’s help, in fall 1935, Charles stood at the train tracks in Coshocton, waiting for the train to take him to Columbus, Ohio, to attend Ohio State University. “I had eighty dollars in my pocket at the time,” recalled Charles.
He also remembered how much tuition and fees were at the time for Ohio State University: seventy-five dollars a year, twenty-five dollars per quarter.
Charles had the money he’d earned from the three or four years of good melon-growing seasons before the Depression hit their produce business. They’d made pretty good money for the times, three to five hundred dollars each summer, and Charles had managed to keep some of the money for himself, after turning over most of it to his mother. Charles had also continued to work as a farmhand after school and on weekends during the school year.
Until he left for Ohio State University, the only trips Charles had taken beyond those areas were with his public-speaking coach Delmar Hoover to Cambridge and Columbus, Ohio.
When he left Coshocton, the only thing he carried with him was a small brown suitcase—and the knowledge that if he needed help, Hank was there for him.
A New World
When Charles arrived in Columbus, Ohio, he didn’t even know where to put the nickel in the streetcar and had to ask the conductor for help. But he knew something more important: how to take care of himself.
In Columbus, it didn’t take Charles long to find a place to live. He and Donald Troendly, a boy he knew from Newcomerstown, near Coshocton, rented the front room in a boarding house, a short distance from the university and only two blocks from the movie theater.
Troendly’s family owned a large farm in Newcomerstown, and Charles had met him through a girl he had been dating from that area. Troendly would later lose his life in France in 1944 during World War II, but in 1935, the two men had other worries.
The rent for the room was fifteen dollars a month, but that didn’t include meals. No stranger to hard work, Charles took a job at a pancake house just a few blocks away, where he could earn a meal or twenty-five cents an hour for washing dishes. He didn’t mind working for his meals, but at six-foot-two-inches, Charles had a good appetite, which the restaurant wasn’t always willing to satisfy. One evening, Charles recalled, he wanted a piece of pie, but they told him it was too expensive. “I wanted my pie,” Charles said, recalling the rebuff.
Back home in Canal Lewisville, things were tough.
Although Hank was working at Clow Pipe Company and making good wages, the family still faced financial problems. While Charles was attending college, his mother had to move the family to a smaller house and give up the truck farm. The family moved four blocks across Canal Lewisville to Liberty Street to yet another home without running water, electricity, or central heat. Despite the diminished size of the home and yard, the family could still grow produce and keep livestock, including pigs for meat and a cow for milk. Their mother continued to preserve and can anything the children didn’t eat on their way into the house from the garden.
By this time, Louise Mäder was in her early forties, and cleaning houses for a living had become difficult for her, so one of the families she had cleaned for helped her get a job with the Edgemont Glove Factory in Coshocton. Still, between working and caring for her family, she had little time or energy for her son in Columbus.
Like many college students, Charles had been sending his laundry home for his mother to do. For a while, Louise Mäder did her son’s laundry, but at one point, she sent him a clear message that she’d had enough: She sent his shirts back to him dirty.
“That was bad,” said Charles. “That wasn’t conducive for relationships.” Charles didn’t take it personally. He knew how much work doing the laundry was because when he’d lived at home, he’d helped with the wash, out in the yard with a scrub board and washtub. His feelings were hurt, but he never mentioned it to anyone. In fact, seventy-three years later, when he found out his sister Lil knew about the incident, he was surprised.
In many ways, making the adjustment to living in