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Chapter 11

State Chemist and Professor at the University of Missouri

In December 1947, Charles earned a Doctorate in Agricultural Biochemistry from Ohio State University and immediately set his sights beyond Marshall.

By 1949, he had three offers on the table—and a story he loved to tell. He even joked about it at his retirement dinner in November 1987.

The University of Connecticut in Storrs had offered him a job as an Assistant Professor in Dairy Science for $4,800 a year. The University of California in Davis had offered him a job as a Dairy Chemist for $4,800. The University of Missouri, after negotiations, offered him $5,400 for a position as an Associate Professor in the College of Agriculture.

At his retirement dinner from MU, Charles said the $600 difference in salaries explained why he ended up in Columbia, Missouri.

As usual with Charles, the entire story was a little more complicated.

While Virginia and Charles lived in Marshall, Missouri, they had remained close to their family and friends, making periodic treks back to Ohio. On nearly every trip, Charles also visited his former Chemistry teacher, Richard McKissick.

These trips of nearly seven hundred miles were indeed treks. The National Interstate and Defense Highway Act wouldn’t go into effect until 1956, and Missouri didn’t start building its portion of the interstate network of roads traveled today until the late 1950s.

“Those were the days when you took trains, not airplanes, across the country, and I thought, ‘Well, if I went east or west, how would I get back to the Midwest?’ The thought of the train wasn’t too appealing,” explained Charles in a 1993 article in the Columbia Daily Tribune.

So when Charles considered the job offers before him, the California and Connecticut offers represented long train rides home. As he explained, “Storrs was East Coast, Davis was West Coast. I was Central Coast.”

Missouri, then, was the logical choice.

In Charge

The job offered something else Charles liked: the opportunity to be in charge. At Missouri Valley College, his appointment was as a Full Professor in Chemistry. For the next step in his career, he had no interest in taking a subordinate or lower ranking position or in blending in with any crowd.

At the University of Missouri, the position included a job as the Missouri State Chemist as well as an Associate Professor of Biochemistry in the College of Agriculture. As the state chemist, Charles would be in charge of the Experiment Station Chemical Laboratories (ESCL), which administered and conducted the tests for the state’s fertilizer and limestone program. The chemical testing is designed to assure farmers that what fertilizer and limestone producers say is in the bag is, indeed, what’s in the container.

His job would also be to help the faculty and staff of the College of Agriculture with their research projects. When the legislature created the Experiment Station, it stated any funds generated beyond those needed to pay for the expenses of administering and conducting the tests necessary for the fertilizer and limestone programs had to be used to fund research dedicated to helping farmers and improving agriculture.

This legal mandate suited Charles. As the Missouri State Chemist and head of the Experiment Station Chemical Laboratories, he could help his colleagues solve their research challenges. It also gave Charles an opportunity to help farmers, a group of people whose problems he understood intimately.

The job was an ideal fit.

Before Charles accepted the position, he did a little negotiating and managed to improve the offer. The original offer made by the department chair was for the position of Assistant Professor at $4,800. He certainly did not want to drop from a Full Professor in Chemistry to an Assistant Professor. So, he bypassed the department chair and visited the dean of the college, who promised him $600 more dollars and the title of Associate Professor. With the upgraded position of Associate Professor and more money, as Charles wryly put it, “I became more interested.”

“With the responsibilities of the new position at MU and five years of teaching at Missouri Valley College at up to twenty-eight clock hours a week, I was ready for the next step at the University of Missouri,” said Charles. “I also knew I wanted to be something more than a Dairy Chemist.”

A New Life

Like the drive to Marshall, the trip to Columbia took place during a storm, but in January 1949, it was an ice storm. The move would take Charles only seventy miles east, but it would offer all new vistas.

In Columbia, Charles and Virginia, with two-year-old Charles Junior in tow, quickly settled down, renting an apartment in university housing near campus for fifty dollars a month. The next year, they would build a home in a new subdivision less than two miles from campus. Though modest, the home included four bedrooms—space they hoped would soon be filled by a growing family.

Their new home also featured a basement apartment, which they rented out to cover their mortgage payments. Charles and Virginia were frugal by nature, and given their experiences with the Great Depression, they had reason to keep an eye on the bottom line. They also had a family tradition of sorts. Both of their mothers rented out rooms in their homes, Virginia’s mother in Zanesville, Ohio, and Charles’s mother in Coshocton, Ohio.

Even after Charles had founded ABC Labs, worked on the lunar samples and become an international expert on chemical analysis, he and Virginia would continue to rent out the basement apartment throughout the early 1970s, with their tenants including visiting professors and graduate students.

In 1950, Charles was more than halfway to his goal of making $10,000 a year, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

At the University of Missouri, while Charles had joined the faculty as an Associate Professor, his top priority was not teaching. He did, however, teach an undergraduate Analytical Chemistry class and a graduate course in Enzymes. Later, he would even develop a series of graduate-level courses in Chromatography, Mass Spectrometry, and Automated Chemical Analysis for students across the sciences, but in 1949, his primary focus was on his job as Missouri State Chemist.