Just Call Me Orville by Robert W Topping

Author:Robert W Topping
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781557535955
Publisher: Purdue University Press

• Orville, the persistent, positive-thinking idealist who pushed ahead relentlessly, ignoring any possible defeat;

• Charlie, the pragmatic, articulate, hard-headed realist, a dozen years Orville’s junior.

On the contrary, despite such doomsaying, Charlie and Orville were an unbeatable combination; their friendship remained solid after nearly fifty years, and the multi-million-dollar business they formed in 1952 thrived.

Charlie and Orville did not always agree on all business matters, but they took the time and made the effort to respect each other’s opinions, resolve differences, then back each other totally on whatever decision that had to be made.

In 1953, Charlie joined Orville in the full-time operation of the new business. They decided to move the entire operation to Valparaiso and bought twenty acres east of the city on U.S. 30 to build the company’s offices and additional grain and fertilizer processing facilities.

They also added a third partner, G. L. “Jack” Findling, who left his job in 1954 as sales manager for Crib Filler Hybrids at Windfall, a central Indiana village of less than eight-hundred. Findling became vice president for seed corn and small grains. He retired to Arizona in 1985, though he still is, as Orville called him, a “silent partner” and still serves on the firm’s board of directors. He returned to live in Valparaiso in 1993.

The trio of Findling, Bowman, and Redenbacher, an experienced, imposing team of seedsmen, expanded the company to become the major producer and seller of Kankakee Valley Hybrid seed corn and certified small grain and soybeans in northwest Indiana. They changed the name of the company to Chester Hybrids, Inc., and prepared for some high-powered diversification. Chester Hybrids soon introduced several agricultural services and products, giving substance to the coinage of a new word, agribusiness, to describe the combination of the producing operations of a farm; the manufacture and distribution of farm equipment and supplies; and the processing, storage, and distribution of farm commodities. It is as if Merriam-Webster’s lexicographers visited the Chester firm in Valparaiso before they wrote the definition.

The company diversified into liquid fertilizer, application and spray equipment, as well as an engineering service to develop and install grain-drying and grain-handling equipment and systems. Orville and Charlie decided in their first year as partners to include the development and production of hybrid popcorn seed. They devoted land for a plant nursery at Valparaiso and acquired a small plot near Homestead, Florida, as a winter nursery so they could raise two, occasionally three, hybrid generations instead of only one each year.

Carl Hartman came on the scene at Chester in 1959. A thirty-four-year-old Iowan from the Davenport-Rock Island area, Hartman is a 1949 graduate of Iowa State University in animal husbandry. He worked for the Chicago Stockyards until he and his wife, Phyllis, who was born and reared in Porter County, decided they had had enough of big-city living in Chicago and began to look around Valparaiso for employment. He answered a Chester “help wanted” advertisement in the daily Valparaiso Vidette-Messenger and soon began working for Charlie and Orville in garden seed sales, at which he was less than enthused.

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