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V
irginia
C
apitol
C
onnections
, S
ummer
2015
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You don’t find too many people around
today who remember the day when they, at
age 11 months, learned to walk. You don’t
find too many people who spent their fourth
grade year in a body cast and then become
experts in tennis. You don’t find too many
people who paid their last two years of
college with savings from a newspaper route.
You don’t find too many people who taught their fathers to drive. You
don’t find too many people whose parents lived to age 103 and age
99. You don’t find too many people who just got back from their 65th
college reunion. You don’t find too many people who get to sleep by
eating chocolate ice cream with a regular Pepsi. You don’t find too
many people who came back from retirement three times. You just
don’t find too many people like Charlie Todd.
Todd was born in Tarboro, North Carolina, in 1929. No matter how
many times you ask him the date, he’ll remind you that it was the last
day of Calvin Coolidge’s presidency. Why is this significant? Well,
for a couple of reasons. First, it puts him firmly as having lived under
21 U.S. presidents so far. That in itself is no small accomplishment.
Second, it seems to have sparked his interest in presidential trivia. Todd
has used his outstanding analytical skills to track all the facts, large and
small, that have gone in to the making of our presidents.
Todd’s steel-trap mind is a thing to behold. He remembers tiny
things from his first five years of life (being in a box with straw: playing
the Baby Jesus in a pageant). His memories go back to when he was
“practically a baby.” His father was a “telephone man”—one of the
first. In the 1920s, he laid the first phone lines across the vast western
states and territories. (Arizona and New Mexico were still territories.)
He went from town to town, usually by foot. He thinks he walked to
every town in Colorado. He was in San Francisco before and after the
big earthquake. He talked of the day that Arizona became a state—the
men jubilantly rode horses and fired pistols into the air.
Everything changed for the Todd family when the Great Depression
struck. Mr. Todd, the adventurous telephone man, “lost everything,”
including his job. He had a wife and two small children, Martha and
Charlie. He was unemployed for 12 years. The family, who soon
moved to a house in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, rented out extra
rooms to make enough money to get by.
Young Charlie Todd was bright, hardworking and thrifty. He
graduated high school, and his father managed to pay his first two
years of tuition at the University of North Carolina. The cost was $25
per quarter. After those two years, the money ran out. Todd dug into
his savings from his newspaper route. He had saved $1,500. That was
enough to get him through his graduation with a degree in geology.
Most of his classmates wereWWII veterans. They attended college
on the G.I. Bill. Todd remembered one prophetic day after classes. He
and these older students were sitting around on the school steps when
they learned the details about the new war in Korea.
They had already served in the military and they looked at Todd.
“Charlie, this is your war,” they told him.
They could not have beenmore right. Immediately after graduation,
Todd was drafted. With a geology degree, the army especially valued
his mapmaking skills. After basic training, they put him on a troop
ship to The Philippines. Suffice it to say, the trip was unpleasant. Once
in the Philippines, his unit set up camp on one small island. They
had a generator, and the ability to show the one film they possessed:
“Tomorrow is Another Day,” starring Ruth Roman. They showed it
every night.What else was there to do? Imagine what was in the minds
of the local fishermen, who stopped by to watch. These people lived
primitively, and spoke several languages, none of them English. One
wonders what they were to make of the United States based on film
noir. If only we could know.
Finally, Todd’s military service came to an end. As a skilled
geologist and mapmaker, he was offered a very good job from an up
and coming company that would later be known as Texas Instruments.
But it required immediate world travel, and Todd had had enough of
that, at least for a while. He turned the job down. Instead he went home
to Rocky Mount and enrolled in Appalachian State Teachers College.
He became qualified to teach.
That first teaching job was “a disaster,” said Todd. He taught
eighth grade in Raleigh. Subjects were not differentiated, so he taught
“everything.” But that disaster led to some very good jobs in many
other places. It also led to his pursuit of more education and his meeting
of Alice, the French student who was to become his wife. They met at
the University of North Carolina. Alice was studious, too, studying for
higher degrees, and teaching along the way.
Todd would probably say that his big break came in 1956. He had
done well in teaching, and somebody sent him a letter urging him to
use his experience in the “booming” county of Fairfax, Virginia. This
county was golden. It was filled with families who worked in good
federal government jobs, and filling even faster with the unprecedented
number of baby boomers hitting elementary schools. Everything, and
maybe especially the school system, was growing madly.
Todd moved up to Fairfax. He had two fellows as roommates, and
Alice came from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville to see
him on the weekends. Todd’s face cracks into big smiles as he describes
that “delightful time.” He and his friends toured all the landmarks of
Washington, D.C., with a special affinity for celebrating on the famous
Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. (Paving the way for that wild wave
of baby boomers who poured across Key Bridge ten years later.)
In the summer, Todd and Alice were married. They attended the
Old Presbyterian Meeting House in Alexandria. (George Washington
was buried there, Todd quickly adds, with plenty of supplemental
presidential facts.)
Both Todds were teaching school, but when Alice became an
expectant mother, her employer required her to stop. That was part
of life in the 1950s. She had two boys, Chuck and John. Meanwhile,
Todd moved up to school administrative work, and the family moved
to Richmond. Todd was an assistant principal in Highland Springs,
and then a principal at Short Pump. We now know Short Pump as a
shopping mecca, but at that time, it was pure country.
“There were days when the telephone did not ring,” said Todd.
“Everybody knew each other. Everybody took care of the children and
knew the families. If a child got on the wrong bus, the bus driver took
the child to his home.”
After more teaching, and more education, and more moving, Todd
took a job with the Virginia Department of Education as a Director
of Planning. He was happy to get a call asking him to come back to
the local level, and switched to a job as superintendent for Hopewell
Schools. By the time he moved on to the University of Virginia’s
Continuing Education Center in Richmond, Todd had put in a full 30
years and he retired.
Or so he thought. He got a real estate license, practiced that, and he
also traveled the world. Upon one of his returns, Hopewell was calling
him back. They wanted him to take his old job again, and he did. After
another retirement, he was asked to do lobbying work for the Virginia
By Bonnie Atwood
ALL
Seasons
for
Man
A