Gehrke’s trajectory, from picking melons to analyzing moon rocks

Charles Gehrke retired from MU and left the ABC Labs board several yeas ago, but he is still an active author and researcher, working from home at a makeshift desk.

At the intersection where science and business meet, Charles W. Gehrke is well known for his work in analytical chemistry, his founding of ABC Laboratories and his analysis of moon rocks for signs of life.

In the university community, Gehrke is known for his 37 years at the University of Missouri as a professor of biochemistry, state chemist and head of the Experimental Station Chemical Laboratories.

But there is another side to the 90-year-old scientist, whose humble upbringing makes those accomplishments seem even more remarkable.

I began working with Charles about a year ago on a book about his life. We meet at his home office, where the desk is two card tables pushed together. At first, he wanted to focus solely on his work and talked about carbon-based compounds, explained how chromatography worked and summarized the recent grant proposal he’d submitted to NASA.

But I was curious about his family. After all, it was his son and daughter who first approached me about writing the biography, citing his professional accomplishments, along with his devotion to his family and his 65-year marriage. They’d also mentioned that his first job as a young boy was picking melons.
When I asked him about his grandchildren, he rattled off the names, ages and birthdates of all nine. Almost every flat surface in his home is filled with photos of his children and grandchildren through the years. Charles also can look at any one of the photos and tell you who is in the picture and when it was taken.

He’s just that kind of a guy.

Many people will tell you Charles isn’t shy; he’s more than willing to tell you about his work and the fact that he’s published 270 papers and nine books. But Charles rarely mentions his upbringing in rural Ohio.

He and his family grew up poorer than dirt poor, as his brother-in-law put it. But that was only the half of it. Today, the family would be called dysfunctional and his mother a single parent. But Charles doesn’t describe it that way.

Charles Gehrke worked in melon fields during an impoverished upbringing in rural Ohio.

Pressed, he might tell you that when he was 10 or so, local police put his father on a train and told him not to come back, ever. His father had gotten drunk and beaten Charles’s mother one too many times.

His mother was a German immigrant who didn’t speak English well. Left on her own, she went to work cleaning houses, walking three miles to the nearest town. Her five children had to fend for themselves in many ways. The small town of Canal Lewisville during the 1920s didn’t offer any social services. Charles, 12, and his brother Hank, 13, simply did what they had to do and worked as farm hands, taking their infant brother, Ed, with them, putting him under the nearby trees to nap while they worked in the melon fields.

Gehrke (far right) with Kenneth Kuu and Robert Zumwalt.

Charles didn’t mind weeding, hoeing, planting or picking. The only job he didn’t like was selling their produce house to house because that felt like asking for a handout, and that’s something he’s never liked.

As he was about to graduate from high school, two of his teachers came to the house and urged his mother to send Charles to college instead having him take a job to help the family. His mother said there was no money, but with help from his older brother, Hank, Charles enrolled at Ohio State University.

In 1935, with $80 in his pocket, Charles got on the train for Columbus, Ohio. When he arrived, he had to ask where to put the nickel in the streetcar to get to the university.

Other adjustments weren’t so difficult. As a student, Charles continued his lifelong habits of working hard, learning everything he could, making connections with people and places – and helping others along the way.

In 2006, he gave OSU a substantial donation, his thank-you for the school’s help through the Stadium Scholarship dorm, which provided housing for $100 a year with a $7 rebate at the end of the year if the student kept a B average. He still had to work to pay his tuition of $75, washing test tubes and doing other jobs, some of them unpleasant.

It’s also where he met his wife, Virginia Gehrke, or “VG” as he liked to call her. But he’s still not willing to talk about their courtship.

He’s that kind of a guy.

Even now that she’s passed away – on their 65th anniversary, Christmas Day 2006 — he’s not willing to say much beyond how much he misses her, how she was more frugal than he was, and how she was always very willing to tell him how to dance and play bridge, two of the many activities the couple enjoyed.

In 1941, when he took a job at Missouri Valley College, he never complained about teaching 24 to 27 credit hours. He was just relieved when he arrived at the University of Missouri and only had to work two jobs – as Missouri State Chemist and head of the Experiment Station Chemical Laboratory. Then he started recruiting students from Missouri Valley and other small Missouri colleges to MU, where in 1951 he could offer them more in terms of equipment and opportunities.

Of course, he isn’t always exactly humble. He refers to his position at Missouri Valley College as “the head of the chemistry department” – even though he was the only person in the chemistry department. But that was a common practice then, he said.

He’s not even beyond a bit of bluster. In 1959, he told a colleague he could solve his chemical analysis problems using gas liquid chromatography – except he didn’t know much about chromatography at the time. A complex process for separating and measuring molecules, chromatography was in its early stages then. Charles didn’t even have a chromatograph at the time, but that didn’t stop him. Instead, he simply went about rallying his students and learning everything he could about it, which propelled him and his students into an area of scientific discovery that would lead him to analyze the 5-billion-year-old moon rocks and found ABC Labs in 1968.

Gehrke is photographed in 1969 examining a moon rock from the Apollo 11 mission, with MU Chancellor Herbert Schooling
and Dean of Agriculture Felmer Kiehl.

Yet, Charles always cites the efforts of his student colleagues along with his own. Like his grandchildren’s names, he can readily recite the names of students and colleagues, often along with where they are today and their telephone number, usually from memory.

He also offers accolades to those legions of graduate students and colleagues, including David Stalling and Jim Ussary, who co-founded ABC Labs with him. He quickly dismisses any discussion of the 1992 ABC stockholders’ conflict when Stalling seemed to support taking over the company and ousting Charles from the board of directors. That’s in the past, Charles will tell you, and today the two are friends again.

Linus Pauling, 1954 Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry, with Charles W. Gehrke, centennial president of the International Association of Official Analytical Chemists at the 1984 meeting of the International AOAC.

He seems to be guided by his own rules about what to remember and what to forget. When I asked him about any problems he faced raising his own children he drew a blank. Instead, he said what he liked best about raising his children was not having to help them with their homework. He didn’t have to. Jon, 52, is an orthopedic surgeon in DesMoines; Susan, 49, is an attorney and certified public account who specializes in investments in Minneapolis; and Charles Jr. was a physician and training to become a U.S. Navy aerospace surgeon when he died in a plane crash in 1982.

His grief for his first-born son still rises easily, often with tears. Few know his namesake son was especially cherished, since his birth followed a miscarriage and the death of a child at birth. Charles’s response to the death was to set up a scholarship in his name.

But Charles doesn’t dwell in the past; he’s too busy with the future. It took several months to set up a meeting with him before we started our project, and when we finally met he said he’d been busy working on a grant proposal for NASA and was waiting for a response. When I asked whether his role was as a co-principal investigator, thinking at 89 he might want to take a supporting role, he quickly corrected me. “Principal investigator,” he boomed.

Along the way, I’ve also learned about his softer side and his quirky sense of humor. Whenever I mention boarding my dogs when I’m out of town, he says he never has to worry about his dog. Then he laughs because Charles doesn’t have a dog. When we couldn’t find his college diplomas, he chuckled and said maybe we’d find out he’d stolen them. When we were looking up the name of a colleague by the name of Rice, he said maybe we should double check the listing for wheat, too.

And that’s Charles in a nutshell. Ever optimistic, ever ready to work, ever willing to give someone a pat on the back, including telling me the book is coming along just fine. And it is. We’re weeding through what to remember to put in the book and what to forget.