From Melon Fields to Moon Rocks. Dianna Borsi O'Brien
University daunting. He’d graduated from Coshocton High School in a class of 188 students but now found himself among 300 to 500 students in a classroom. He quickly grew used to the situation and took the usual array of classes, including Philosophy of Education and Accounting. Charles also capitalized on what he knew and took German classes, later becoming president of the German Club.
By his second year, his native intelligence and his outgoing nature helped him find a new solution to his money problems. Of course, Hank and his family helped him with money whenever possible, and he repaid them later, one thousand dollars over ten years (and kept copies of those checks all his life). But Charles knew then he needed to ease their financial burden as much as possible.
During his first year at college, Charles learned about the Stadium Scholarship Dorm at Ohio State University. The price was right: one hundred dollars a year for room, which included meals and a seven-dollar-per-year refund at the end of the school year as well. He wasn’t worried about the grade requirement, a B average, but students had to be nominated for the honor of living in the Stadium Scholarship Dorm.
That summer, Charles went to see Bland Stradley, who was then Ohio State University Examiner and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, lived in Dresden, a town near Coshocton. “I told him I didn’t have any money,” said Charles. The next year, Charles had a place among about three hundred men in the Stadium Scholarship Dorm, where he lived through the remainder of his college career, including the year he studied for his Master’s Degree in Biochemistry and Bacteriology.
The three-story dorms were built into the side of the stadium overlooking the Oletangey River. They featured huge, ward-like rooms where the students slept twenty to a room, their only furnishings one metal cabinet and one cot per person. In between each pair of wards was a study area, and each night, it was lights out at 10:30 p.m.
The dorm was a bargain, but Charles still had to wash dishes. The Stadium Scholarship required students to put in two weeks of kitchen duty every quarter, washing dishes, peeling potatoes, setting the tables, and other such duties.
But Charles didn’t mind. After all, he did without running water and central heat until he came to college, and his farming background held him in good stead; he was used to working hard. At Ohio State University, he held a number of jobs, including working for the National Youth Administration, a federal program that paid students a small sum each month for working at various jobs.
Hard Work Continues
One of Charles’s jobs involved alphabetizing materials for the library, while others were more challenging—even dangerous.
For example, one job as a lab technician involved cleaning the test tubes used in the Bacteriology classes. Students in the classes worked with a wide range of pathogens, such as salmonella, typhoid, diphtheria, and other deadly bacteria. “You name it, it was being taught and used in Pathogenic Bacteriology courses,” Charles said.
Charles’s job involved collecting the trays of used test tubes and carrying them to the autoclave, where they would be sterilized for twenty-four hours at 120 degrees Celsius. The next day he removed the test tubes from the autoclave, took out the cotton plugs, and then rinsed and washed the test tubes in preparation for them to be used again. The danger lay in the possibility of a pathogen ending up on the outside of the test tube and infecting Charles.
Years later, Charles chuckled at his lack of concern, “No one ever me told how dangerous it was.”
Besides, he noted, he earned one hundred dollars a month.
Another job involved using a formaldehyde solution to wash rounds of cheese, roughly twelve-to-eighteen inches high, which were produced by OSU’s dairy technology department. He’d come to learn later that formaldehyde is absorbed through the skin, but at the time, Charles worked without gloves and with no concern at all about the dangers it presented.
One summer, Charles worked in Columbus at Fairmount Creamery, making cherry nut ice cream from leftover ice cream returned by the area drug stores. He would scrape the remaining ice cream from returned ice-cream-counter buckets into a big vat, combing the different flavors and then adding maraschino cherries and nuts, mixing it together to create a concoction known as cherry nut ice cream, a product that, given its origins, he found less than appetizing.
Back home, he found work with Willow Beach Park, an area on the river where people swam. The owners sold sodas and snacks there, and Charles made eighty dollars a summer keeping the place clean.
More Changes
In 1936, Charles also decided it was time to make his name official. When he was born in 1917 in New York City, his birth certificate listed his name as “Male Gerke,” which didn’t even get his last name correct. On his baptismal records, his father paid tribute to the German Kaisers by naming him Karl Frederick Wilhelm Gehrke. But his mother had thought this sounded too German, and with the anti-German sentiment common following World War I, she called her son Charles, the English translation of Karl.
The same year, Charles learned that his father had died in New York City. No one knows where he is buried, although his name is on the tombstone with his wife’s at the cemetery in Canal Lewisville, a burial ground that provides the only reminder of the Methodist church that once stood behind Charles’s early childhood home. Charles said it felt like someone he had hardly known had died. In many ways, this was true. His father had not been in contact with his family since Charles was eleven or twelve, except for one brief visit.
Charles said the main effect his father had on him was a lifelong caution about drinking. “I saw what that kind of thing did,” he said. None of his brothers or sisters display any bitterness about their father’s drinking; his sister Lil joked that her father’s main influence was in creating an entire generation of nonalcoholics.
At OSU, Charles found time for activities beyond his studies. He loved to say that he didn’t letter in swimming but “numeraled” in it and became certified in lifesaving. He also participated in track and attended dances and other campus events, eventually double-dating with his best friend, roommate and study partner Elmer Thomas and finally meeting the woman who would become his lifelong partner.
Chapter 6
An Attractive Lady
Charles met Virginia D. Horcher at a gathering at the Union, a student hangout at Ohio State University. The two got to know each other by taking long walks, many at a campus park near Mirror Lake.
When Charles first met Virginia, he said, he thought she was “a very attractive lady” and added he also liked her gentle, kind disposition. Later Charles would say he was struck by her intelligence; she was, after all, a member of the National Honor Society.
“Virginia was a peach,” said Connie Bowman Caulkins. She’d roomed with Virginia during all of their four years at Ohio State University. “She never, ever complained about anything.” Virginia wasn’t flighty, nervous, or emotional, and she had high principles, Connie said. “We never shared so much as a sweater or a scarf, let alone each other’s boyfriends.”
“Gracious” is the word most commonly used to describe Virginia. Her childhood friend Ruth Jarvis also noted Virginia also had a nice figure and knew how to dress.
Charles may have been drawn to Virginia for reasons beyond her good looks and gentle nature; the two shared several common features from their backgrounds.
A native of Zanesville, a small town in central Ohio, Virginia was raised by a single parent. Her father died when she was eleven or twelve years old, but unlike Charles’s father, he had left the family well provided for, which allowed Virginia to attend college at a time when few women continued their studies beyond high school.
Like Charles, Virginia had to work during college. In fact, she, Connie, Charles, and Connie’s future husband Dane all worked in the same office through the National Youth Administration, a federal work-assistance program.
Unlike