Charles Gene Chambers
Brief Biography
1956
1957
2007
I was born at Jasper County Hospital May 19, 1939, in Rensselaer, IN. My father was Jesse William (Bill) Chambers & my mother was Bernice Lucille (Bea) Chambers. I have a brother Johnny Joe, another brother William Ronald and a sister Phyllis Lynn. Another sister Mary Belle was run over by a speeding car and killed but that was when I was still just a little boy. Below the small picture on her tombstone in Weston Cemetery is carved the biblical quotation — "She Is Just Away…"
My first memory is of pulling myself up to peer over the top of the second-floor outdoor balcony. A milling throng of men were loudly shouting and crowding around each other, over on the lawn across the road, in the Courthouse Square. Some carried rifles and a few fired them into the air. Years later, my dad told me we lived on the second floor of the old Horton Building then — and the men were farmers who had come to town after hearing the news on the radio and all this had happened December 7, 1941 – Pearl Harbor Day.
When I was 16 I ran away from home, hitch-hiking across Indiana and Ohio and ending up at a hotel in Sharon, Pennsylvania. There I subsisted thanks to the kindness of strangers for just over a month before slinking home.That life-defining month in the mid 1950s was chronicled in a short story I wrote many years later.
Creative Writing. A fine high school Literature teacher, Mr. Pabst, singled out an assigned short story I had handed in and read it aloud to the class. He awarded me a grade of A++ and I was hooked. I've been writing stories, essays, poems and assorted clutter ever since that day, selling and seeing in print a handful of them, enough for me to know that I can do it, but few enough to know I don't have the perseverance to be a successful professional author.
I dropped out of high school and in 1957 enlisted in the Air Force. I have several stories about this time on my life, too. When my military stint ended I returned home and married Ms Bonnie Kay Strain. We had three sons and one daughter, but were divorced in the 1970s.
Bonnie Kay died at age 37 in 1978 from a cerebral hemorrhage… And, yes, I still think of her often, all these many years later.
Throughout my early adult life I have worked at a myriad of menial jobs. I then earned my GED certificate, and in 1980 I enrolled at Valparaiso Technical Institute in Valparaiso, Indiana. And in May of 1982, I graduated with an Engineering Electronics degree. AT&T Teletype Corporation up in Skokie, Illinois hired me with the title of Senior Test Technician in their R&D Proving Labs, to test the new-fangled Personal Computers that were just beginning to appear on the market. Pesky things. No more than a passing fad probably. So I packed up and moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago.
In 1983 I married Donna Wilson. It lasted 20 years. We are still good friends.
In 1986, because of their court-ordered massive break-up, AT&T announced they were closing down the Skokie facility. Donna and I moved to Central Florida. I opened a small retail Candy, Gifts, and Greeting Card shop. Two years later, I sold it, and we moved to South Florida, near West Palm Beach. We later moved to the Gulf Coast, between Ft. Myers and Naples, FL, where I was hired as a Resident Manager of a new High-Rise Condominium Complex — Waterside At Bay Beach We lived in a new three-bedroom condo.
In June of 2001 at the age of 62, I officially retired. Donna moved in with her daughter in Ft. Myers. After living alone for a little more than a year in Lake Placid (near Sebring, FL) I moved to Jacksonville to be near my daughter and my two grand-kids Michael and Elizabeth.
Toward the end of March 2010 I moved to Tucson, Arizona where I now reside.
Currently I play with my computer, compose fiction and poems, and I am trying to write a publishable novel. (But who isn't?)
To follow my daily musings you can bookmark
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for daily updates of what I am doing and thinking about.