From Melon Fields to Moon Rocks. Dianna Borsi O'Brien
Charles’s work had its surprising and sometimes unpleasant moments. As Canton’s health inspector, Charles had a circuit of inspections to complete. But sometimes the Canton Health Department received a complaint, and he’d have to make a special inspection. He’d been called to inspect a place involved in slaughtering and selling chickens, something typical in the 1940s. The building had a dirt floor, and as he went in that night, he shined his flashlight around the room and saw hundreds of rats running everywhere. The sight jolted him with memories of killing rats during his high school days of pest eradication with Mr. Hoover.
While he liked being, as Charles put it, “The Inspector,” with its accompanying police badge, and liked learning more about bacteriology from a fellow OSU grad who ran the lab at the Health Department, Charles longed for a more professional job, something more in line with his education, including his Master’s Degree in Biochemistry.
Charles told himself, “I’m going to try to get out of this.”
So Charles began applying for positions at small colleges.
Down the Aisle
Charles’s trips to Zanesville were paying off, and on Christmas Day 1941, Charles made Virginia his bride. It was a small affair. The ceremony was held at her mother’s home with Virginia’s childhood friend Ruth Jarvis and a few others in attendance. Ruth recalled Virginia walking down the staircase instead of a church aisle. The wedding announcement noted that she wore a white, floor-length dress with a full skirt and only a single strand of pearls for jewelry.
Charles can’t remember why they picked Christmas Day as a wedding date, only that it was a convenient date everyone had open on their calendars. He does recall they spent the wedding night in a motel near Buckeye Lake in Columbus.
After sixty-five years, the only regret Charles could remember about their Christmas nuptials was Virginia wishing they had photographs of their wedding. It would be sixty-five years later that Virginia would pass away, on Christmas Day 2006, their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary.
Chapter 8
Missouri Valley College, Marshall, Missouri
Weeks before the wedding, Japanese planes had bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States had entered World War II, declaring war on Japan.
The war changed the job market, and a new opportunity opened for Charles. Earl Pettijohn, the Chemistry teacher at Missouri Valley College, decided to leave his post there to take a job in the defense industry, which created an opening for Charles.
Missouri Valley College was a small Presbyterian college roughly seventy miles east of Kansas City. The president of the college, Thomas W. Bibb, suggested he and Charles meet in Indianapolis for the interview to save both of them a long drive.
The two met at a hotel, and Charles said Dr. Bibb told him, “We have three rules here: We don’t smoke, we wear coats and neckties, and we don’t go to picture shows on Sundays.”
While Charles might have wanted to escape his job as an inspector, he wasn’t willing to give up his freedom to see movies on Sundays. He did want the job; it was a big increase in pay: $3,000 a year for nine months of work. Charles told Dr. Bibb, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t mind wearing a necktie, but he was going to go to picture shows on Sundays if he wanted to.
Dr. Bibb acquiesced, and in October 1942, Charles and Virginia headed to Missouri in the 1939 Pontiac the young couple had bought from her mother.
Charles and Virginia left Canton, Ohio, on Route 40, a winding, two-lane road to Missouri, a trip of more than seven hundred miles. The interstate system hadn’t been built yet, and as Charles drove through Missouri’s dark rural landscape in a drenching rain, approaching Marshall, Missouri, from the north, Charles remembers thinking, “Where in the hell am I going?” Coincidentally, he drove past the spot where, twenty-six years later, he would found a new business, Analytical Biochemistry Laboratories (ABC Labs), which would employ three hundred scientists by 2009.
For Charles, Marshall, Missouri, would be his salad days: a time of learning, incredible hard work, and, as he said himself, a lot of fun.
In fall 1942, Charles started teaching Chemistry to three hundred U.S. Navy midshipmen, sailors, and medical officers. With the war under way, the military needed trained and educated officers. Many of them were training to become deck officers for ships in the South Pacific, Guadalcanal, and other parts of the Asian theater of the war. Besides the Navy students, the campus included only one hundred or so other students.
Charles joined a faculty of mostly professors in their fifties. However, Missouri Valley College had also hired four or five new younger faculty members, like Charles, and they immediately formed a close-knit group of young faculty and wives: Byron Banta in Business, Walter Steureman in Religion, Melva Rae Gingerich, Dean of Women, and Lawrence Thomas in Biology.
Charles had a massive teaching load, twenty-three to twenty-eight contact hours per week. This included twelve to fourteen lecture hours, plus the labs that went with the classes.
But he didn’t mind. As the college’s only Chemistry teacher, Charles taught everything: Beginning Chemistry, Analytical Chemistry, Physical Chemistry, and Organic Chemistry. “I learned more chemistry there than I did at Ohio State,” Charles said, laughing. He stayed up nights reading the latest textbooks, attempting to stay ahead of his students. “Of course, you’re always doing that,” said Charles, reflecting on those days after nearly four decades of teaching.
To manage the massive workload, Charles enlisted bright students as lab assistants, including C. Wayne Freeark who had been teaching at Missouri Valley College and would later return there and Harold Affsprung, who, would go on to become a professor at Missouri Valley College.
“It was a lot of fun. It was new. I learned a lot at Missouri Valley College,” said Charles with a fond laugh.
He and Virginia lived just a few blocks from the college, and Virginia took a job teaching business at a high school in Miami, Missouri, driving the fifteen miles there and back, using gas rationing cards she was entitled to because she was a teacher.
Determined to use Missouri Valley College as a training ground, Charles sat in on mathematics classes and French classes, knowing he would need proficiency in two languages for his doctorate. (He had retained the German he’d learned as a child.)
Charles also took a second job, working as an inspector for the city of Marshall, inspecting dairy plants. Every two weeks, he’d get samples of milk from the dairies, take the samples back to the college and test them for bacterial counts, coliform organisms, fecal contamination, and other impurities. If something was found, it was Charles’s job to call the processing plant and tell them “it was a no-go.” For this, he made fifty to one hundred dollars a month.
Things seemed to be going well for Charles, and even when he was called for the draft, it seemed his dreams weren’t going to be deferred. By the luck of the draw, of all five children in his family, only Charles inherited his father’s bad eye. Charles’s left eye tested 20/200, not correctable, and he said the draft board told him, “Go home. We don’t want you.” For once, Charles was glad to be turned away. He wanted to serve his country, but Charles knew he wouldn’t have liked the military. “I didn’t press it,” he said.
His brother Hank wasn’t so lucky. On December 2, 1942, Hank was inducted into the U.S. Army. He served until December 30, 1945, in Europe and Africa as an engineer and military police officer in General Patton’s Army. His service earned him an EAME (European-African-Middle Eastern) Campaign Medal with four bronze stars indicating the number of campaigns in which he served.
While serving, however, Hank remained close to his family, sending touching letters home to his mother, sisters, and brothers, often noting the natural beauty and wildlife of the area. One letter from Hank written on Christmas 1944 marked the tenderness and closeness he felt toward his family. After describing the beauty of the area and an unsuccessful deer-hunting venture, Hank asked about Lil’s studies and Charles’s exams.
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