From Melon Fields to Moon Rocks. Dianna Borsi O'Brien
of Zanesville in a large duplex they owned—living in one half and renting out the other half—and her mother worked as a sought-after hair dresser at a high-end beauty shop.
Like Charles, Virginia was shy in high school.
Virginia remained friends with Ruth after she went to college, often inviting her school chum to Columbus for the weekend. “To me,” said Ruth, “Columbus was a big, glamorous place.” On one trip, Ruth met Charles, and he and Virginia rustled up a double date for her.
Ruth noted that Charles was well liked and prominent on campus, but she also saw in him an unusual student, bright and intelligent as well as intense, focused, and often quite serious.
Charles had reason to be serious. His debt to Hank was mounting. He’d earned his first degree, a Bachelor’s Degree in Biochemistry, in 1939, but the country’s lackluster economy provided few job opportunities.
He went to graduate school to pursue a Master’s Degree in Bacteriology. His friend Elmer Thomas was studying Dairy Chemistry, and Charles became interested in research focused on measuring the nutritional components of milk.
At the same time, Charles had started dating Elsie Flora of Huntington, West Virginia, who worked in the same building as Charles, where he was washing test tubes.
In 1940, for six months Charles dated Elsie and Virginia, taking one or the other to the movies or for a walk. Before long, though, Virginia was his sole romantic interest, and he never let on he’d ever dated another woman, keeping the secret all of Virginia’s life.
Romance
Ruth observed that Virginia was a great dancer, and Charles wasn’t. He shook his head and laughed when he recalled that throughout their life together—all sixty-five years of marriage—Virginia was always telling him what to do on the dance floor. They danced to Harry James and His Orchestra and Guy Lombardo and others. They went to football games. The two got along well; Connie described them as companionable.
Virginia helped Charles with his research papers, typing long into the night, as her roommate recalled. Back in those days of onion-skin paper, carbons, and corrections, Virginia, who was studying business and education, would proofread Charles’s papers as she typed, calling out to Connie, an English major, from time to time, “Connie, how do you spell …?” After all, his focus, even then, was on chemistry and the laboratory, not grammar or spelling.
Charles was devoted to Virginia. Virginia was set to graduate in June 1941, but Charles had finished his Master’s Degree in Bacteriology in March. He decided to stay on at OSU for one more quarter so he could be near Virginia. He spent those additional months taking eighteen to twenty-four hours of classes to fulfill the requirements for an Education degree. Those classes, he recalled with a smile, included an advertising class he took with Virginia as a classmate.
A Tough Crowd
Charles’s degree in Education required student teaching, which he did at the Ohio Reform School in Lancaster, Ohio, roughly thirty miles south of Columbus. The school was basically a reformatory for boys ages eight to eighteen. Established in 1857, it was designed to give juvenile offenders an education while instilling good values in them, according to the Ohio History Society. Such schools were fairly successful, according to an article found in an Ohio History Society publication, “Ohio Reform School,” from Ohio History Central: An Online Encyclopedia2. By 1901, twenty-eight states had adopted the same approach to juvenile prisons, the publication notes. In 1964, the school was renamed the Fairfield School for Boys, and in 1980 it became the Southeastern Correctional Facility for adult offenders.
For six weeks in 1941, Charles taught Chemistry to the sometimes-unruly and recalcitrant students. Once, a student challenged him to a fistfight, and Charles considered taking him on. He later learned the boy was a former Golden Gloves champion from Cleveland. “He probably would have taken me out,” said Charles, chuckling at his close call.
Charles enjoyed teaching but found the discipline there repulsive. He said students would be taken to the gymnasium, stripped to the waist and beaten with belts while faculty and staff looked on from the bleachers.
Charles, who said he was never spanked as a child, found the process disturbing and after witnessing it once never again took his place in the gymnasium and never recommended a student for discipline.
Finally, on June 29, 1941, Charles received his Bachelor’s Degree in Education, and it was time to leave Columbus, his home away from home since 1935.
Chapter 7
The Inspector
Charles didn’t know it at the time, but the summer of 1941 would be the last time he’d work as a farmhand.
Although he had two Bachelor’s Degrees and a Master’s Degree, jobs were scarce. While Charles was looking for a job, he continued to work as a field hand. Ruth Jarvis remembered Charles stopping off in Zanesville to visit Virginia with a load of melons.
Finally, a job offer in Canton, Ohio, came along, and Charles left manual labor behind for good. Dr. Scott, DVM, offered Charles a job as a food inspector of the Canton Health Department with a yearly salary of $1,800. He asked Charles, “Is that enough?” To Charles, that looked like a lot of money, so he took it. “I soon learned $1,800 didn’t go very far,” Charles said with a laugh.
A gritty city in the 1940s, Canton boasted plenty of steel mills and factories, many of which have closed since then. Near Akron, Ohio, Canton was a bustling, growing city. On many days, Charles said, the city was enveloped in a deep, impenetrable smog, limiting visibility to a few yards.
His job came complete with a police badge and involved inspecting restaurants, beer gardens, groceries, bakeries, pie shops, and food-processing plants. Charles liked Dr. Scott, who let him do things on his own, which suited Charles’s independent nature. He didn’t like riding street cars or buses to get to all the places he had to visit. As for the job itself, Charles said, “It was interesting, but I didn’t like it very much.”
As usual, Charles found a mentor. Richard Dishnica, a Greek man with a bad leg who was head of the Eastern Ohio Restaurant Association, took Charles under his wing and made sure he was included in the local weekly poker game. Restaurant owners paid attention to Charles when it came to complying with city health codes.
Once again, for lodgings, Charles found a bargain, taking care of a house owned by a woman who lived out of town. The house was located on Cleveland Avenue, the main highway to Cleveland, and the road roared with the traffic of the output of Canton’s factories: hundreds of half-tracks, military vehicles with tank-like treads at the rear, all on their way to Cleveland for overseas duty.
Charles’s brother Hank also moved to Canton at the time, having taken a well-paying job as a crane operator. Charles often borrowed Hank’s “Terraplane” truck, a vehicle he fondly recalled, to visit Virginia in Zanesville. When he couldn’t use Hank’s truck, Charles took the Greyhound or the Ohio Transit bus to see her.
Back home, things were moving along for his family, too.
Louise finally had moved her family, with three children still at home, to a house on Third Street in Coshocton. At last the family had electricity and running water—and a source of income that didn’t involve hard labor. The family’s new home was large, which allowed Louise to rent out rooms in the house. The move to Coshocton also shortened Louise’s walk to her job at the glove factory in Coshocton and Charles’s siblings’ walk to school. Instead of facing a three-mile walk to school, Lil (sixteen), Evie (fourteen), and Ed (twelve) had to walk only a few blocks to Coshocton High School.
The move was a good one for the family. In addition to being closer to work, Louise liked being able to walk to all the stores. Lil recalled this time fondly, even how she and her sister Evelyn had to help their mother learn to pronounce the name of their street correctly. With their mother’s thick German accent, the name of the street often came out sounding