Charles Leonard Eesley

Charles Leonard Eesley was born September 26, 1879, the ninth of ten children of Albert Robert Eesley and Jeanie Goldie. He married Lillie Dale Chenoweth (b. August 9, 1877). Their family home was in Bexley, Ohio — the leafy independent municipality embedded in eastern Columbus — and the house often took in boarders.

Together they raised ten children, with two losses along the way:

• Leonard David (1904, Geneva OH – 1976, Silver Spring MD)
• Thomas Leonard (1906)
• James Michael “Mike” (October 26, 1908)
• Donald Stuart “Don” (September 24, 1908 – May 15, 1975, Tulsa OK)
• Wilbur “Will” Chenoweth (October 6, 1910 – 1986)
• Jean Goldie (October 28, 1912 – 1924) — died at age 12 in Columbus
• Mary Elizabeth (August 25, 1913, Shelby MI), who married William Thomas Bean and wrote the 1985 family history
• Lyle (August 13, 1914, Grove City OH – July 25, 1942, Cabanatuan Prison Camp, Luzon, Philippines) — died as a Japanese POW
• Dale Dudley George (August 5, 1916, Lebanon OH – July 12, 1939) — died at age 22; engaged to Thelma Haughn
• Helen Louise (January 16, 1924, Columbus OH), who married Edwin William Burnes — Roberta Burnes’s mother

The two acts that define him

1942 — losing Lyle, sheltering Stella. In July 1942 his son Lyle died in a Japanese prison camp on Luzon. In the months that followed Charles Leonard brought Stella Sunn — a Chinese-American teenager from Honolulu at risk of West Coast Japanese-American internment — across the country and into the Bexley house. The two events are almost certainly connected: cousin Roberta’s 2019 note that Stella “may have joined the scene after Lyle died” puts them within months of each other. Charles Leonard’s grief did not turn into a grievance against any East-Asian face that crossed his door. The opposite. He took her in.

Aunt Maggie’s recollection from a 2019 family email confirms the disposition: “They were Chinese, not Japanese. Grandpa felt very protective of them.” Aunt Jeanne’s: “Grandpa Eesley brought her over to live with them during the war and she became part of the family at that time.”

1950s — the depression after Stella left. Stella lived in the Bexley house “until sometime in the 50s,” by Roberta’s account, by which point all his own children had grown and left. When Stella left too — by then in her own marriage and her own household — Roberta writes that “Grandpa fell into a deep depression.” The house had been full for forty years; suddenly it wasn’t.

He died around October 1972, two years after Lillie Dale. The Chongs, by then on the East Coast, sent flowers from Hawaii for the funeral — the last and quietest of the threads connecting the wartime shelter to the rest of his life.

He appears in the family group portrait — taken at his own home in Bexley — behind his wife Lillie Dale, the matriarch at the center of the frame.

Sources: Mary Eesley Bean, Eesley Family History, March 1985, p. 8; July 2019 family email exchange among Chuck, Aunt Maggie, Aunt Jeanne, and cousin Roberta; the 1940s letter collection Roberta still holds.