Charles McMaster Eesley

Charles McMaster Eesley was born February 17, 1947 in Columbus, Ohio, to Will Eesley the architect and Peggy McMaster Eesley. He served in the U.S. Army from 1969 to 1971 — a Vietnam veteran — and his time in Saigon never left him. He took his economics degree at Marietta College, worked in sales and human resources at Sears, then turned to finance: stockbroker first for The Ohio Company and later for Hazlett, Burt & Watson.

For most of Chuck’s childhood the family lived on Highland Ridge Road, in a house Will had designed, with the orchard Will had planted, the small red bridge Will had originally built, a pond out back that froze hard enough to walk on if you were lucky and not if you weren’t, and the Arnolds — John and Peggy — a hundred yards away as the nearest neighbors and a thousand times closer than that in practice. The tractor he flipped over on himself once. John Arnold helped him up.

He was a longtime, active member of First Congregational United Church of Christ in Marietta, where he served on boards and helped manage the endowment. He read the Civil War. He read Vietnam. He read the financial pages. He believed strongly in the responsibility of voting. He remarried, to Diana Hoffer, in 1999. He died November 26, 2015 at sixty-eight, in Marietta.

The eulogy

The fullest portrait of him by far is the eulogy Chuck delivered at the memorial service. It is the most personal document in this archive in Chuck’s own voice and stands in the documents collection as itself a piece of the family record:

Read “Eulogy for Charles McMaster Eesley” (by Chuck Eesley, 2015)

A few of the things that page carries that the obituary’s prose does not: the pond, the dance Charlie suggested down the empty aisle of the Parkersburg–Cleveland leg, the firework that went into the pine tree, the stereo as the first thing Charlie bought when he came home from Vietnam, the CDs Chuck “stole” for college and then gave away to his cousin Nooreen Rubin, the late comment about losing weight in the form of his foot, the Hemingway line Chuck closed on: “Everyone is broken by life, but afterward many are strong in the broken places.”

The places Chuck named at the end of the eulogy — the track at Marietta Middle School, the house on Highland Ridge, Grandma Peggy’s house on 7th Street, any TV that can pull up CNBC — are the places that should hold his name longest.

Biographical summary above draws on his published obituary at Cawley & Peoples Funeral Home; the rest of the page comes from Chuck’s eulogy.