Читать книгу From Melon Fields to Moon Rocks - Dianna Borsi O'Brien - Страница 9

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 Charles, Virginia was an only child. She and her mother lived in a nice part 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.