For a special “Friends & Family Edition” of Waterville Unwrapped, hosts Charlie and Ken turned the microphone on their own parents — Charles and Jean Pike — in honor of Charles’s 80th birthday. What followed was nearly an hour of family stories, Navy deployments, cranberry co-ops, and the kind of warm, unhurried conversation that can only happen between parents and the children who grew up watching them work.
A Whirlwind Romance at a Munitions Factory
Charles and Jean met in the fall of 1968 at Atlantic Research in Hanover — a factory that made fireworks and munitions. Charles was marking time there between enlisting in the Navy and going active in February. Jean was already working in the same building.
The courtship moved quickly, by necessity. About a month and a half into Charles’s time there, an explosion destroyed one of the buildings and killed a worker. His grandfather came down and told him flatly he wasn’t going back. Charles moved on. Jean stayed another month. They went on dates when they could, then kept in touch through letters and occasional pay-phone calls once Charles shipped off to boot camp in Chicago.
They were married in October 1969 — almost exactly a year after they met — and Charles immediately left on a six-month Navy cruise.
Six-Month Cruises and a Salvation Army Phone Call
Their early married life was shaped by Charles’s schedule, not their own. After his first cruise, Jean joined him in Norfolk, Virginia, where they rented an apartment off base. When he shipped out again, Jean was pregnant with their daughter Lisa. Charles was at sea when Lisa was born. His mother-in-law called the Salvation Army, who tracked him down in the middle of the night to deliver the news. He managed a few days’ leave to meet his daughter, then had to return — and didn’t spend any real time with Lisa until she was about seven months old.
He was discharged in February 1972. By that July, he had started at Ocean Spray. By that October, he and Jean had bought a house in Whitman for $22,000 — a house now worth over $400,000, as Charles noted with evident satisfaction.
Thirty Years at Ocean Spray
Charles’s path at Ocean Spray traced directly from his Navy specialty. He’d earned an associate degree in mechanical power engineering from Wentworth Institute in Boston, and his Navy rating was Boilerman — “hot and dirty,” he acknowledged, but a job nobody else was raising their hand for. At Ocean Spray, that meant running the steam boilers at night, including holidays. He eventually left the boiler room for the bottling line, then the juice presses, and finally made his biggest leap when the company introduced aseptic paper bottle technology — the kind common in Europe, requiring no refrigeration because the juice is sterilized before sealing.
Charles learned to operate the new filling machines in R&D and eventually became the manager overseeing aseptic paper bottle production across all of Ocean Spray’s plants nationwide. Along the way, when the union’s rigid pay classifications couldn’t accommodate the extra responsibilities he’d taken on, management simply created a new job classification — something like “Utility Foreman” — so they could pay him more. The position outlasted him; other people filled it after he moved on.
He retired at 52. Ocean Spray, a farmer co-op, had been squeezed by an oversupply of cranberries that sent prices tumbling, and the company offered early retirement packages to about 50 employees. Charles took it. The pension was partial — he was only 52 — but the package included one thing he still marvels at: lifetime hospital insurance for both him and Jean. “I tell everybody when I knock on wood, I said I might as well win the lottery,” he said. Nearly thirty years later, they’ve never paid a premium.
Jean had her own Ocean Spray chapter. After leaving a job at McDonald’s, she came home and mentioned it to Charles. The next morning, he went into the office and told them his wife needed a job. “I didn’t even let her sit there one day,” he said. Charlie called him a “little slave driver.” Jean worked there twelve years.
Family Road Trips and a Hawaii Guilt Trip
The Pikes’ family adventures were a highlight of the episode. Charles once loaded the whole family — himself, Jean, Charlie, and Lisa — into a Subaru Brat, a vehicle that was essentially a two-seat small truck. The kids rode in the covered bed, surrounded by luggage, with a small rear window so the parents could check on them. They drove all the way to Disney World, and on the return trip stopped at the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, then wound through the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The Hawaii trip came later, when Lisa was 17 or 18 and Charlie was about 14 or 15. Charlie had been dating a girl who lived up the street — she would eventually become his wife — for about a week or two when his parents announced the family vacation. Lisa stayed home. Charlie went, reluctantly. Worse, Charles had accumulated enough airline miles through his Ocean Spray travel to fly first class — but only two tickets’ worth. Charlie sat in the back of the plane, reading his summer school book. “I just remember it was like eight bucks,” Charlie recalled. “I had to get like eight dollars in quarters to make a collect call.” He did go parasailing on his own and scuba dived with his father, so the trip wasn’t a total loss.
The Comic Book Shelf and a One-Season Coaching Career
Charles and Jean had their share of parenting observations about Charlie, though Jean — who was home with the kids while Charles worked — held most of the stories. The one Charles told best involved the punishment that backfired: whenever Charlie and Lisa fought and got sent to their separate bedrooms, they’d start playing back and forth through the doorway within minutes. “Dad’s mean, we’re gonna fight,” Charles said, laughing, “after just fighting over something a minute ago.”
Charlie, now a father himself, described his own approach: when his son Zach was an infant, he’d strap a changing-table cushion to a wire shelf at his comic book store, seat-belt the baby in, and ring up customers while Zach slept. “People would come in and they’d be like, is that a baby?” Jean said, delighted.
Charles also coached Charlie’s baseball team for exactly one season, motivated purely by the sense that a father should help out. His co-coach was far more competitive about the six- and seven-year-olds. Charles thought the point was for the kids to have fun. “There wasn’t supposed to be any winners or losers,” he said. It was one season. Charlie recognized the same dynamic years later when he coached his daughter Lexi’s flag football team.
A Belated Discovery of Waterville Valley
For all their travels — Florida winters, Europe trips in earlier years, road trips across the country — Charles and Jean had never set foot in Waterville Valley until Charlie started buying Airbnbs there. They’ve since fallen in love with the area: the quiet, the hiking, the golf courses. “If you want to plug for Waterville Valley,” Charles said, “I like it.”
The episode ends with a promise of a part two — Jean’s 80th birthday, which she has already informed everyone she’ll be spending in Florida. “We’ll do it from Florida,” Charlie offered. Charles thought a traveling podcast sounded just fine.
The full conversation — and there’s much more of it — is well worth your time.