From Melon Fields to Moon Rocks: The adventurous life of biochemist and entrepreneur Charles W. Gehrke

told.

Chapter 1

The Melon Fields

By the time Charles Gehrke’s mother died in 1977, she had acquired three houses and enough wealth to leave $17,000 each to three of her five children and property to the other two.

Not bad for a woman who’d arrived in the United States from Germany in 1913 with no money and limited English-language skills and who, by 1929, had five children to care for, without support from her husband.

Louise Mäder Gehrke was not easily deterred. Each day, she walked three miles to a nearby town to clean houses for a living, leaving her three youngest children, Lillian (four), Evelyn (two), and infant Ed in the care of her two older sons, Henry (Hank, thirteen), and Charles (twelve).

The family lived in Canal Lewisville, a small town of roughly five square blocks, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in eastern Ohio, near the slightly larger town of Coshocton, Ohio. Named for a portion of the Erie Canal that once flowed through the town, Canal Lewisville was flanked by a river on one side and fertile fields on the other.

While their mother was at work, the two older boys, Charles and Hank, would go to the melon fields to work, putting their baby brother, Ed, under the shade of an old oak tree, which still grows in the field just outside of Coshocton.

When Charles last visited in 2007, corn grew in that field, but Charles could still point out the spot where they put baby Ed to nap in the afternoon while they worked.

For Charles and Hank, childhood was hard work. They labored in the melon fields, soaked up to their waists with pesticides, copper sulfate, lead arsenate, and nicotine sulfate. They weeded acres of corn for ten cents an hour. They sold vegetables door to door in Coshocton from the back of a Model T.

Charles’s least-favorite job was being sent into town to get sugar and flour from an office set up for what passed as welfare during the late 1920s. In later years, he was willing to ask for help, but he never liked asking for a handout.

Many people in rural Ohio and elsewhere were poor. The year Louise became a single mother, the country’s economy was hitting the skids. The stock market crash took place on October 29, 1929.

The Gehrke family faced another obstacle, in addition to poverty. While Charles was growing up, the memories of World War I were still fresh, and anti-German sentiment lingered throughout the communities along the rivers that flowed through the rolling hills of southeastern Ohio.

Charles’s sister Lillian (Lil) said the teacher in the two-story school the Gehrke children attended—who was also the welfare officer’s wife—didn’t even try to teach her to read. Instead, Lil was given crayons and coloring paper. Despite this rocky start in her schooling, Lil went on to earn a Bachelor’s Degree in Education and then spent nine years teaching high school business classes. She is a published author.

Lil said the prejudice against Germans at the time was very real. In the family history she compiled, Lil included a newspaper clipping from February 16, 1921, about an event that family members point to as an example of that anti-German sentiment. The news report recounts the death of a family member as someone who perished several weeks after drinking lye in a suicide attempt.

Gehrke family members recall this death quite differently, saying they were told their uncle died after being dragged out of his shop by some area ruffians and being forced to kiss the United States flag and then drink lye. Whether the printed story or the family recollection is true is unclear. But no one denies the family members kept to themselves in tiny Canal Lewisville, and few other families reached out to them.

Louise Mäder Gehrke equipped her children to overcome anti-German attitudes and other obstacles, instilling in them drive, persistence, a belief in hard work, and a dedication to teamwork and helping others, bolstered by an independent streak. All five of Louise Mäder Gehrke’s children operated on the belief that no matter what you did—whether it was farming, drilling wells, teaching, serving in the military, or raising children—you could do it well and even improve the practice.

Some might call this pride, but there is little evidence of arrogance among the Gehrkes. Most of the time, the Gehrkes demonstrated the midwestern propensity for simply getting on with whatever task was at hand. None of them were prone to tooting their own horns, but Charles came the closest. Charles Gehrke would boast that his lab was the first in the world to automate nearly a dozen procedures for chemical analysis, enabling his staff to do forty or sixty analyses in an hour, versus twenty-four to forty-eight a week. He’d also tell you why he did that work: to automate difficult, time-consuming chemistry so he and other scientists in laboratories throughout the United States would have the time and opportunity to conduct their research better, faster, and more accurately. As Charles put it, It’s a wonderful thing to open a door for other scientists.

His drive and work ethic, underscored by hardheaded independence, propelled Charles from a life of hoeing corn and raising melons to a life as a full professor at the University of Missouri, where his scientific research would lead him to be chosen to be among the scientists who analyzed the moon rocks from Apollo 11 through Apollo 17 in the search for signs of life on the Moon.

Charles Gehrke’s work included the development of techniques that sped up analysis by wet chemistry and gas-liquid chromatography, enabling him to analyze the Moon rocks in parts per billion, with amazing selectivity, sensitivity, and accuracy. His conclusion: There’s no life on the Moon. All his life, Charles got calls from reporters about his analysis of the Moon rocks. Always a teacher, he offered a full explanation every time.

As an accomplished scientist in the area of chromatography, the science of separating chemicals to analyze everything from fertilizers to DNA, Charles pushed his profession in an unrequited effort to find a way to diagnose and monitor cancer using bodily fluids such as blood and urine, sparing patients invasive and unnecessary treatments.

In 1968, Charles founded a company that, forty years later, would become the anchor tenant in a new research park established by the University of Missouri. Before Charles died in 2009, this company, ABC Labs, had a net income of $2.2 million and employed about three hundred workers, many of whom were University of Missouri graduates.

A federal law in place in 1987 required university professors and U.S. postmasters to leave their jobs at age seventy. After his mandatory retirement, Charles stepped down as Missouri State Chemist, head of MU’s Experiment Station Chemical Laboratories and a Professor of Biochemistry. However, he continued to work, and he traveled the world giving lectures about using chromatography to find cancer markers. He wrote ten books and 270 peer-reviewed scientific papers.

Charles was a hard worker but not a workaholic. A scientist, educator, and an entrepreneur, he was also a devoted family man. He married Virginia Horcher on Christmas Day, 1941, a marriage that lasted until her death on Christmas Day, 2006, their sixty-fifth anniversary.

Their marriage endured a number of tragedies, including the deaths of three children. The couple lost one child just before birth and another just after. Their son, Charles W. Gehrke Jr., died in 1982 at age thirty-five, in a fiery airplane explosion during a U.S. Navy training flight in Pensacola, Florida.

A devoted husband, Charles nursed his wife through years of illnesses, never complaining, rarely seeking help.

A few months after the death of V.G., as Charles liked to call his wife, his son Jon Gehrke and his daughter Susan Gehrke Isaacson embarked on a mission to find a journalist to help their father write a book about his life.

Discussing the potential project, Jon said his father wasn’t just a successful scientist and an important businessman. Jon said, most importantly, his father succeeded as a husband, father, and grandfather. At ninety, Charles could rattle off without a pause the names, birthdates, and ages of all nine of his grandchildren.

It wasn’t just Charles’s success in his field that makes him interesting. Plenty of people come from humble beginnings and make their mark in their professions. Charles was the kind of father who inspired his children to recruit a writer to bring their father’s life to light.

Charles’s commitment to both work and family is what this book is about.

Chapter 2

The Early Days at Home

Charles Gehrke’s grandfather, Heinrich Gehrke, came to the United States in 1887, deserting the German army to pursue a girl his mother disliked because she hailed from a different village and cleaned houses for a living.

Ignoring both his mother and the German army, Heinrich Gehrke followed the girl to New York City, and they married. He took a job as a blacksmith with a brewery, where workers were entitled to enjoy all the beer they could drink. Unfortunately, as Charles’s sister Lil Gehrke Peairs noted in the family history, this policy led Heinrich to overindulge.

In 1899, Heinrich Gehrke left the United States, taking his daughter (eleven) and his son Heinrich Gehrke Jr. (nine) with him back to Germany. Once there, Heinrich served some jail time as a result of his army desertion. After his release, he operated a blacksmith shop with his brother. A short while later, he and his family visited New York for a few months and then returned to Germany once again, settling in Wremen, in northern Germany, where Heinrich took up shrimp fishing along the mud flats of the North Sea.

The move back to Germany proved to be Heinrich’s undoing. Heinrich began drinking hard liquor and became a harsh husband and father, according to family history. His son Heinrich Gehrke Jr. (Charles’s father) found the elder Heinrich’s treatment unbearable. He joined the German army and, some say, became an accomplished marksman in the artillery despite having one bad eye—a condition Charles would later inherit. On his return home from his military service, Heinrich Sr still expected his son to continue in the family’s shrimp fishing operation without pay.

Heinrich Gehrke Jr. couldn’t take his father’s harsh treatment any longer. He took the money he’d earned from working for other farmers and fled to the United States. In New York City, in 1913, he met Louise Mäder, who, with her sister Lena, had just arrived from the southern German city of Breisach. The two met at a dance and were married.

News of Heinrich Junior’s marriage shocked his mother, according to the family documents.¹ When Heinrich Junior’s sister in Germany read the letter announcing his marriage to their mother, she said her daughter was crazy. In the family history, the sentiments expressed in Henrich’s letter are described as: He was lonely, he saw this girl, he was in love with her, and so he married her.

The family history continues, He later wrote about such a lovely baby they had. A photo from the time shows an idyllic setting with father, mother, and baby Heinrich, later called Henry or Hank, Charles’s older brother. With Hank born in 1916 and Charles following a year later on July 18, 1917, it looked as if the family was on its way to the American dream.

Already, though, there were hints of Heinrich Gehrke Jr.’s difficult nature. Charles’s official birth certificate reads only Baby Gehrke, but in the family Bible, his father listed his name as Karl Wilhelm Frederick Gehrke, giving every German Kaiser a nod. As Charles noted, this wasn’t such a good idea, given the anti-German sentiment in the United States during the years of World War I.

The young family of four traveled to Coshocton, Ohio, to visit Louise Mäder’s relatives. They soon decided to move to the area and take up farming, first buying a farm near Roscoe, Ohio, and then buying a better but smaller thirteen-acre farm on the edge of Canal Lewisville. The new home had a cemetery on one side and a Methodist church behind it, with a small barn, a chicken coop, and an apple tree, as well as space for a vegetable garden. At the end of Charles’s life, his mother’s patch of rhubarb still grew there.

Following in His Father’s Footsteps

At their first home on the edge of town, the family first eked out a living as farmers of a sort, growing strawberries, radishes, potatoes, cabbage, and other vegetables on their few acres of land. Out of the thirteen acres, only three or four turned out to be good, fertile soil, said Charles.

Along with farming the land, the family kept a cow for milk, a horse to help with plowing, and a pig for meat, recalled Charles. He also remembered thinking the barn was haunted because it was next to the cemetery.

In addition to tough economic times, the family faced another problem: Their father was beginning to have his own problems with drinking, following unfortunately in his father’s footsteps. Heinrich Gehrke Jr. began to drink more and more as the family faced the economic problems of the country’s slide into the Great Depression, marked by the stock market crash on October 29, 1929.

Charles said his father wasn’t around much, although he did note with a chuckle he must have been there at times because Lillian (Lil) was born in 1925, followed by Evelyn in 1927, and, finally, Edward in 1929, when Charles was twelve.

Unwilling to dwell on the details, Charles simply said he didn’t like his father much because he was always getting in trouble with the law. For what? Being obnoxious, I guess, said Charles. The other children recalled, without bitterness, other memories. For example, Lil remembered, as a four-year-old, seeing her father pin her mother against the wall and hit her as Lil screamed from her high chair, Leave my mother alone! Another time, Lil remembered her siblings and herself holding onto their mother’s skirts as they ran to a neighbor’s house for safety. Once, Charles and Hank waited near the grade school in Canal Lewisville with a gun, planning to scare their father off, but Heinrich never came their way that night.

Finally, after one more attack on their mother, the police told their father to leave town and never come back. And for a long time, he didn’t.

A few years later, their father did return, but only briefly. As Lil recalled it, he was so sick and heavy she didn’t recognize him at first. He came to the back door, and she thought it was a neighbor stopping by. Their mother let him in, but he didn’t stay.

The family learned about Heinrich’s 1936 death in New York City a few months after it occurred, when they received his personal effects. The cause of death was noted as cirrhosis of the liver due to alcoholism.

The youngest child, Ed, was seven at the time, and he said he recalled his father’s death only because he remembers his father’s personal belongings arriving in the mail; he wanted his father’s leather wallet. But instead, said Ed, Hank, his oldest brother, snatched it up. It made sense. Without a father on hand, in many ways, Hank took on that role.

Charles said he admired Hank, but he also admitted he always felt dominated by him. Lil recalled Hank urging family members to work hard, sometimes even admonishing them: What good are you if you don’t work?

In remarks at Hank’s memorial service in 1999, Charles recalled feelings of tenderness and a sense of teamwork with Hank. When, on occasion, trouble would arise at school or elsewhere, the two of us met these problems together, thus making our way successfully through many difficult situations. As for family and work, Charles wrote, Henry was the leader, as we made our life on the small farm in Canal Lewisville...striving to keep the cellar full....Henry and I were always together, whether hoeing corn ten hours a day, working threshing machines or hay balers, taking wagons full of hay to barn mows....Working with Henry was an experience one never forgets. His work ethic was to do, without fail, a great job.

A Mother’s Influence

Louise Mäder was born in southern Germany in 1894 to Edward Mäder and Barbara Schmidlin. Edward Mäder, according to the family history, was an important stable influence on his family and a respected member of the community, a sharp contrast to Charles’s father.

Louise Mäder worked as a housemaid in nearby Switzerland after graduating from school in Germany but left for the United States at age nineteen, seeking a new life. She and her sister Lena left Germany with one hundred marks in gold from her father, a debt Charles said he later helped his mother to repay.

Upon arriving in the United States, Louise and Lena went to Ohio to visit their uncle, John Schmidlin, who was killed later in an anti-German attack. While Lena decided to stay in Coshocton, Ohio, Louise demonstrated her independent nature by returning to New York City by herself and seeking work there as a housemaid. As previously mentioned, in New York City, she met Heinrich Gehrke Jr. at a dance.

Charles noted that his parents had a troubled marriage. Lil described the family history this way: Heinrich had been a fisherman in Germany. He was not successful as a farmer in America. During the Depression years, other jobs were difficult to find. He turned to alcohol and was dominated by his need for it.

When Heinrich was told to leave town, Louise was left with five children to raise on her own. To make ends meet, she began walking to Coshocton, three miles away, to work as a housemaid.

Lil wrote in the family history, Louise never accepted her current circumstances but always tried to rise above them, no matter how hard or slow. She was a forceful, dynamic, and extraordinary mother who taught her children to always look to the future, that through hard work they could achieve their goals and, as she described, ‘a better way of life.’ ‘Where there is a will there is a way,’ was her belief. Raised with our mother’s firm, austere German ideas and tradition of hard work, frugality and saving, we, her children, are proud of our heritage.

Ed remarked that complaining about work just didn’t make sense to them. Nearing eighty years old, Ed, the youngest of Charles’s siblings, continued to work on his investment portfolio, manage his many real estate holdings, and write a book about the stock market, when he and his wife weren’t traveling or keeping up their one-hundred-twenty-acre homestead.

You see, Ed explained, we think work is good. Prior to retiring, he’d held the rank of full colonel in the U.S. Air Force, serving as a commander of a Strategic Air Command unit from 1975-1978, the culmination of a military career that included serving as a commander during the Vietnam War.

Like Ed, Charles looked back on his hardworking childhood with pleasure, happily pointing out fields where he once grew rows of strawberry plants and the hills where he picked raspberries for his mother to turn into jellies and jams.

The family garden helped to keep everyone fed, and what the children didn’t eat walking inside from the garden, their mother would can when she returned from cleaning houses in Coshocton.

For the most part, the children took care of each other and stayed out of trouble. As Charles noted, there wasn’t much else to do, with no electricity, no radio, and certainly no television, which wouldn’t become common in American homes for several more decades. The little town of Canal Lewisville boasted almost nothing of interest to do beyond, as Charles recalled, swimming in the river or hanging around one of the two small stores, Corbett’s and Graham’s.

Lil, Ed, and Charles never complained about not having electricity or central heat. Charles made light of relying on a well for water. At age seven or eight, when he was pumping for water in winter, a coating of ice made the handle slick, causing it to slip out of his hands and hit him under the chin. I can still feel my teeth rattling, said Charles, with a chuckle, in 2008. The family wouldn’t have running water until they moved to Coshocton in 1935, the year Charles went to college. That’s why I don’t want to go camping, Charles said. The first twenty years of my life was camping.

The Gehrke home, according to family members, didn’t hold any books, magazines, or newspapers. Rather than reading, the family learned from life and working—and from the gentle guidance of their mother and the example she put forth.

Chapter 3

Taking Care of Each Other

The Gehrkes loved retelling their family’s solution to childcare: Charles and Hank taking baby Ed with them when they worked in the melon fields or the cornfields. In another makeshift childcare solution, their mother arranged for Charles and Hank to take four-year-old Lil to school with them at the grammar school two blocks from their home while Louise cleaned houses. Lil was too young for school, so the teacher simply let Lil color or draw. Lil, however, recalled this differently and attributed her teacher’s lack of attention as antipathy toward the Gehrkes because they were German.

Some family members said that from time to time they thought financial problems might lead to sending Ed, Lil, or Evie to live with a neighbor or another family member, but Hank and Charles wouldn’t hear of it. Instead, the two boys kept busy working as field hands for area farmers, earning money to keep the family together.

At age ninety, Charles could still rattle off the names of the various weeds he attacked with a hoe and recount how he would watch the farmhouse in anticipation of the white flag that signaled the lunch break. He and Hank worked the fields together, earning ten cents an hour each for hoeing acres of corn. They worked from sunup until five or six in the evening, keeping their hoes sharp with a file, while Ed toddled after them.

The two also worked in a cantaloupe and watermelon operation of several acres that united four different families. The Blairs owned the land, while the Hebling family owned the greenhouse in which they grew the potted plants for the fields. Another family, the Baughmans, also operated greenhouses, where they grew seedlings for several weeks after germination before replanting them in the fields. They also provided the fertilizer, pesticide sprayers, and trucks.

We were the labor, said Charles. The Gehrkes transplanted the melon plants, sowed the seeds, weeded by hand, harvested the melons in July and August and then loaded the produce into trucks parked at one end of the field.

For two or three years, the Gehrke boys made four to five hundred dollars as their share, a tremendous amount of money in the 1930s. To protect their crop from thieves, Charles and Hank would sleep in a tent in the fields during the summer, and for a while things were good in the melon fields.

Melon truckers came from Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Columbus to take two to five hundred bushels of cantaloupes per day for several weeks, at fifty cents a bushel, wrote Charles, describing those days working with Hank.

But then one summer, no trucks came to pick up the melons. The Depression was on. They ended up feeding five hundred bushels of melons to the hogs.

The two made other entrepreneurial efforts. In 1934, Hank and Charles decided to grow potatoes at the Raymond Geib farm, near a farm Hank would later buy. We had a great crop of Ohio russets, related Charles, describing the experience during his talk at Hank’s memorial service. This was the depths of the Depression, and one day the Eastern Ohio Farm Market called to say they would like to buy two-hundred one-hundred-pound sacks at one dollar per sack. The two boys rented a truck for twenty dollars, loaded it with potatoes and headed to Columbus, seventy-seven miles from Coshocton, for what seemed like a great economic deal. But when they pulled up, the manager came out and said, Boys, the price of potatoes today is ninety cents a sack. That, said Charles with a laugh, was his first economic lesson: Get it in writing.

Between their agricultural ventures—and misadventures—the two worked as farmhands during the summer as well