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Archive: May, 2002

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Acoustic Spotlight
Charlie Vervalin
by Charlie Hall

He didn’t want to do this. Charlie Vervalin, editor of The Black Rose for the past five years, says, in resigning, “they’ve heard enough from me.” We didn’t agree, and hereby take this opportunity to better acquaint you with someone who not only helped make The Black Rose what it is today, but has been a great friend to BRAS for years.

He was a “depression baby,” born in Casper, Wyoming on November 6, 1932. Soon after he was born, the family migrated in search of work through Colorado, Oklahoma, and Longview, Texas, eventually landing in Houston, where his father worked as an auditor for an oil company. Then in the 1940s, over the span of a few years, Charlie lost his entire family. His sister Shirley died of complications from Downs Syndrome at age 3; his older brother Richard died with so many of his fellow Marines in the fighting on Guam. In 1947, Charlie’s father suffered a fatal heart attack and six months later, his mother died of a ruptured appendix.

Jeri & Charlie Vervalin

Suddenly alone, he was about to be placed in Boys Harbor orphanage when a great-aunt from Denver snatched him up and took him back to her home. He lived there and attended school for six months until, at the beginning of summer, he stuck out his thumb and hitched back to Texas. While he had gotten on well with his aunt, he was still disoriented and uprooted from losing family and home; he needed to return to familiar territory.

The trip was also his introduction to Colorado Springs: heading south from Denver to Texas in 1948, the main road through Colorado Springs was Nevada Avenue. Standing there with his thumb out, he was approached by two policemen in a squad car who asked what he was doing. He told them he was hitchhiking, and they told him, “Hitchhiking is illegal within the city limits. How old are you, anyway?” “Fifteen,” he replied. They looked at each other, looked at Charlie and said, “Get in back,” and he knew he was headed for the calaboose. Instead, they drove him to the south end of town, dropped him off just outside the city limits, and gave him $3—about $35 today—to help him on his way. He notes that “Police officers are not noted for big pay. I have had a soft spot in my heart for cops ever since.”

The Barfly Boys

That summer, Charlie “bummed around” with a number of friends’ families until one friend’s mother, a widow, pointed to her son and asked, “How would you like to be his brother?” Gladly, he moved in with them and finished high school in Houston. During that time, he learned to play guitar from a high school chum, Ed Sealy. He eventually saved $50 to buy a left-handed Gibson L-48 archtop guitar, and he and Sealy formed a band, The Barfly Boys. “None of us drank, but that name sure got us a lot of attention,” he says. They played country music of the day—Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, etc.—at charity functions, sock hops, and even a few shows on Houston’s KXYZ radio.

Just out of high school, Charlie joined the Marine Corps, where he quickly discovered his true calling, at least in the military. His first day on the rifle range, he got into firing position with the sling of his M-1 rifle rigged to his right arm, preparing to shoot left-handed. The range gunnery sergeant asked him what he was doing, and he replied that since he was left-handed, he assumed he should hold his rifle in reverse. “The Marine Corps doesn’t have a reverse,” the gunny barked. So, shooting right-handed, Charlie discovered that he was right-eyed, and soon started scoring high expert scores on the range. In infantry training at Camp Pendleton—“the next stop was Korea”—he shot well enough that he was asked to be a marksmanship instructor. “I may have been dumb, but I wasn’t crazy,” he says. He spent almost three years at Pendleton as an instructor until his discharge in 1954, after earning eighteen college credits in night school at Oceanside-Carlsbad Junior College, just off the base.

On leaving the service, Charlie returned to Houston, where a mutual friend set him up on a blind date with a young woman named Jeri Ashley. Eighteen months later, with Charlie a student at the University of Houston on the GI Bill, they married. A few months before graduating with a major in journalism, he applied for an associate editor’s job at Gulf Publishing. He got the job even before he got his degree—“I had to leave work to take my finals,” he says—and spent the next thirty-seven years with Gulf, eventually becoming editor-in-chief of one of the firm’s magazines.

During those years, the Gibson L-48 went into mothballs while he and Jeri raised their three kids, Paul, Casey and Craig. In 1960, they bought a patch of land outside Trinity, Texas, and built a vacation house from the ground up. Then in 1964, after visiting Colorado, they bought some mountain land south of Florissant where they hand-built a second vacation home that they still use today.

For years, Charlie and Jeri planned their retirement move to the Pikes Peak region. Then in 1993, while Charlie finished up at Gulf Publishing, Jeri designed their new home and came to Woodland Park to supervise its construction. “A woman with a level in her hand is a dangerous thing,” he says; she made it tough on the contractor but they got a quality product. For her part, Jeri is a Renaissance Woman; Charlie describes her as an “artist, musician, woodworker and mechanic. She’ll do anything but work on the car because she doesn’t like grease. She’s the one you ought to write about.”

The move in 1994, while eagerly anticipated, was nonetheless another uprooting experience for Charlie, and he says that BRAS provided community, music and a place to serve that he desperately needed. He got his (left-handed) guitar out of the closet and started jamming with a group of BRAS guys at Bob Testerman’s house. I first met him at an Open Stage in 1996, where he made the mistake of saying two things: that he liked the newsletter and that he’d worked in publishing. He sealed his fate when he and Jeri made a large financial contribution to BRAS—our first. Shortly thereafter, Charlie found himself hornswoggled into the newly created position of Editor for The Black Rose—which actually meant writing a lot, editing everything, publishing, distributing and every other cook-and-bottle-washer task. He worked hard to assemble a body of contributors, pushed for inclusion of varied and educational content, and worked around dozens of late submissions. He also served as vice president of BRAS for a year, and was on the Board for two terms.

After five years of running the show, Charlie’s happy to continue contributing, but has unloaded the management and deadline responsibilities so that he and Jeri, among other things, can travel more. Son Paul, his wife and two sons live just down the street from them in Woodland Park, but their other two children and five more grandchildren live in Texas and California. They also plan to visit California, Alaska, Washington, and Montana, where Charlie has family.

He speaks of the long hours and short pay in journalism, and when asked what advice he’d give to aspiring journalists, he says, “Pick another profession.” But, he adds, “for those who are going to ignore that sage advice, the foremost principle for a quality journalist is integrity, and that writing, talent, public speaking and all other factors are secondary.” Charlie has been a mentor to us all, and not just in journalistic terms. With integrity, skill, patience and a positive outlook, he’s taught us a lot about leadership.