Handbook N-P - Fulton County Public Library

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Having failed at operating the Richland Center general store and then escaping the
drudgery of a South Bend factory, my late father Charles S. Overmyer decided in 1916 that
Rochester best could supply the means to support his new wife and oncoming children.
The memoirs he left behind, under discussion here today for a third and final week,
reveal that his search for a means satisfactory to his pysche as well as to his pocketbook was not to
be an easy one.
He first concluded that painting girders at the Rochester Bridge Company factory, on the
city's north edge, was unsatisfactory; “not much future in this.'”Nor was keeping books for Florian
Dovichi's wholesale fruit business at 721 Main Street, site of today's Main Street tavern. Working
indoors at Dovichi's affected his heart because "I got all the stale air from the store along with the
odors from the fruit stored below.” Dr. Howard Shafer ordered him into fresh-air work.
Writes my dad Charley, rather ruefully: “I think (in-laws) Minnie and Percy began to
think that Edyth hadn't got such a steady husband but they never let on to me. Edyth used to say
that Minnie would give her the devil about things I would do but she was always nice to me.”
That should have a familiar ring to many husbands: it does to me.
The Overmyers, now a threesome with daughter June's birth in 1916, got into fresh air by
moving to the Richland Township. homestead. He rented the place from his father, who was
having a hard time farming it with his four sons gone. To start out, Charley had only his last
week's pay from Dovichi, "the great sum of $12," he recalls. The first year was a hard scrabble
and he writes that "we would have had pretty slim eating if it hadn't been for Percy and Minnie
who would come out over the weekend and always bring some meat and groceries." Dad
persevered for a few years, built up the wornout soil and finally was farming all 160 acres with
two three-horse teams, two riding plows and a hired man. But then, “Just when I felt like I was
accomplishing something,” an abdominal injury forced him to leave the fields.
The family came back to Rochester, where in 1924 son Jack arrived. Dad first drove a
pickup route for cousin Cliff Overmyer's poultry business. But then he discovered electricity, an
occupation that would possess him for 16 years. He was hired by the Northern Indiana Power
Company (now Cinergy) that had bought out the Rochester electrical utility, was expanding
service to outlying towns and needed workers. He began as a truck driver for construction gangs,
learned to climb poles, do line work and after four years became line foreman.
Dad always was proud oi his accomp lishments as foreman, as well he should have been.
He was line boss for 12 years. sometimes directing 20 workers, and never had one of his men
injured, or “burnt,” as he terms it. He built the lines into Ttosa, Talma, Lucerne, Tippecanoe. and
Bourbon. Many were the nights that I was awakened by a telephone call summoning him to direct
storm damage repair.
My father was an ambitious man like his father and decided that he should have
“something working for me on the side." So about 1933 he started a chicken hatchery in a former
cigar factory next to our house at 212 East Sixth Street. "I worked in the hatchery in the evening
and Edyth took care of it during the day." Soon afterward he put in a feed mill in the barn at the
end of East Sixth Street, on land now occupied by Gaerte Engines.
In 1935 his mother died and his father no longer was able to manage the family
homestead, so Dad bought it, assuming the mortgage as well as making additional monthly
payments to his father. Obviously, Dad had been managing his foreman's wages of $180 per
month quite well; he now owned a chicken hatchery, feed mill and 160-acre farm.
However, Northern Indiana Power officials were not happy with his outside interests.
“They claimed that with my hatchery and feed mill I was competition to their customers." Dad
always believed that the company wanted to sever him before his 20-year pension kicked in. His
memoirs detail various job harassments that continued for so long that "they finally made me mad
enough and I quit, and they were satisfied.”
For practical purposes, that ended my father's employment by others and he became a
much happier man for it. Our family made one more stab at living on the homestead, but there he
developed a debilitating case of undulant fever and we came back to town. The disease is
transmitted by infected farm animals and was little understood at the time. Dr. Dan Urschel of