By Thomas F. Mulvoy, Jr., Associate Editor
Charles “Chuck” Isberg, who was born and brought up in Dorchester in the first half of the last century, is a member in good standing of the fast-vanishing breed of Americans who enlisted to fight for the United States against Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito in World War II. Some 16.4 million men and women served in the conflict under the US flag, history tells us, and today the number of survivors is put at roughly 45,000.
Chuck’s century-long life story, which he recounted to The Reporter from his home in Nicholasville, KY, with a diligence of detail that you’d expect from a former public relations executive, is relentlessly normal in the most upbeat sense of the word, likely reflecting the experiences of tens of millions of his fortunate contemporaries who did their duty and came home to pick up their lives where they left them off.
They had endured the vast impacts of the Great Depression up to the point when war intervened and big and little decisions had to be made in society and at home – where Chuck lived as an only child with his father, Isadore, who worked in a piano factory and participated in Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects, and his mother, Gerta, a supervisor at a laundry operation.
“I was born on Aug. 19, 1927 when my family lived on Victory Road, but we moved to Templeton Street [now Msgr. Lydon Way] four years later. I went to grammar school at the Ellen H. Richards School, to junior high at the Woodrow Wilson, and I graduated from Hyde Park High in June 1945.
“Earlier, when I was 16, and a junior, I enlisted in and trained with the Massachusetts State Guard, which was the backup to the National Guard, under Col. Vincent Breen at the armory in South Boston. You could do that then.
“Two months after graduation, on Aug. 1, I enlisted in the US Army, and managed to get assigned to the Army Air Corps, which is want I wanted. I shipped to basic training in October, and it was off to Germany in December as a radio operator.”
A short-lived peace; an ally turned foe
In his transition during 1945 from high school student to enlistee to airman in six months, Chuck Isberg also moved from the “hot war” of combat that ended in August, his enlistment month, shortly after the second atomic bomb devastated Nagasaki to, just months later, the close-to-five-decade “Cold War,” in which the United States found itself at sword’s point with Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, its former ally, which was with alacrity gaining ultimate governance over eastern Europe and building what Winston Churchill called an “Iron Curtain” between post-war Russia and the West.”
Frankfort on Main, Germany during the Cold War with Russia in combat uniform.
In 1948, the now-Sgt. Charles Isberg, radio specialist, found himself and his colleagues in the middle of a standoff between the US and its Western allies and the Soviets in Hitler’s capital, Berlin, which had been divided into sectors to be governed by the victorious militaries.
“In June of that year, the Russians shut down the highway to all vehicles headed to Berlin,” Chuck noted. “No supplies, nothing could get in. At the time, there were about 90,000 Americans in their sector, and close to a million Russians in theirs.”
There was a sense of the triumphant in his voice as he tells how the US devised the “famous Berlin airlift” and how he, from his workplace at RheinMain Airfield as the effort built up, could see “those C-47s lining up and flying back and forth without stop,” dropping off foodstuff and supplies to the Americans behind the Russian lines. This went on until May 1949, when the Soviets reopened the highway. “Everyone was ready when President Truman said ‘Go,” Chuck said.
Post-war life: work and family
“I was honorably discharged in October 1948 when my three years were up, and I came home to Dorchester,” said Chuck, “and to a new life (his daughter Karen calls it ‘the American dream’). It was a changed place. Before the war, kids in our neighborhood would hang out at the variety story at the corner of Lonsdale and Adams streets. They called themselves the AdaLons. In the war years and afterwards, that corner became a much quieter place.
“I earned a degree in communication from Boston University on the GI Bill and I landed a position with Lederle Laboratories, a pharmaceutical research and development company that worked on vaccines against tetanus, the flu, typhoid, and the first polio vaccine.
Charles and Norma Isberg on their 50th wedding anniversary.
“I was fortunate,” he said. “I was doing what I liked to do and I moved up the ladder, becoming head of Public Relations and Communications at the company, from which I retired after 40 years in 1994.”
Lederle also provided him with a providential opportunity: Time to spend with co-worker Norma Cary on their way to marriage in 1956 and later, one by one, the additions of Steven, now a college professor; Karen, a Cornell grad with a degree in animal science who founded and recently sold Kentucky Performance Products, an international equine supplement company, and Bill, a businessman in finance and sales who, with his wife Kristen and daughter Kaitlyn, host Charles in their home
And after that? Nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren
“Dad served his community as a life-long Rotarian,” said daughter Karen when asked about his post-war life. “He helped organize and run the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Pearl River NY for years. Through his work at Lederle, he supported everything from the local fire department to assorted arts organizations. During the Vietnam War, he served on the local committee that supported returning veterans.
“He actively coached local Little League boys’ baseball and girls’ softball teams for over 20 years. In his 50’s – the early 1980’s – he took up running and competed with the company team in NY City raising money for additional polio research.
“As kids, we could never go to town or an event without multiple people stopping to chat with my Dad. He was very well known and liked by all. We couldn’t get in any trouble either because everyone knew who we were, Chuck’s kids.
“Norma passed away at 91 last October after 69 years of marriage and a long battle with dementia. She lived at home and Dad took care of her until the end.”
A postscript
The impetus for this story was given by Judi Gaine, the Lower School Office Manager at Boston Collegiate Charter School, who told The Reporter:
“My parents purchased a duplex on Msg. Lydon Road in the late 1980s. The Isbergs were long-time tenants there whose family moved them out after the sale. When my parents sold the property, my Mom uncovered photos and letters that Charles had sent home to Dorchester in the late 1940s in a box in the basement and held onto it. About six years ago I looked into the box while helping my Mom clean, and decided I’d search for the owners.
“I went to the OFD [Originally from Dorchester] Facebook page, where I posted pics and letters from the box hoping someone would know the family. This past Dec 26th, a man named Davis Isberg (no relation to Charles’s family) told me that he knew how to contact them! I then reached out and corresponded mostly with Karen, Charles’s daughter.
“We mailed the items to Kentucky. My heart was overjoyed to return the items to him. And then Charles called me to thank me and we chatted for almost an hour.
“The pictures and letters are now where they belong!”
A recent family (partial) photo: On the couch, from left: Three granddaughters in a row: Megan, Taylor, and Kaitlyn Isberg; Chuck Isberg, granddaughter Natalie, and Chuck’s son Bill. His daughter Karen is by Chuck’s knee in the pink vest, and Kristen Cresswell-Isberg, his daughter-in-law, is in the back with the black shirt.
