ANKARA: Charles F. Oberlin, who started a poultry-processing business and was a pioneer in the creation of turkey and chicken patties, died Friday at Community Health Professionals Inpatient Hospice, Defiance. He was 92.
He’d had complications after contracting pneumonia, his son, Neil Oberlin, said.
Mr. Oberlin had been in the poultry business all his life. When he was born on Oct. 26, 1922, to Hiram and Isola Oberlin on the family farm near Pulaski, the doctor’s fee to deliver him was two chickens.
When he started the Oberlin Turkey Farm after graduating from Bryan High School and marrying Donna Vee Shough, Mr. Oberlin decided that he would raise free-range, grass-fed turkeys, his son said.
He was really interested in the nutrition of people and animals,” his son said, remembering how adamant his father was that he and his brothers clean the turkeys’ water and feeders thoroughly every day.
Mr. Oberlin’s concern for the health of his animals allowed him to breed a strain of turkeys in 1954 that was strong enough to grow to about 70 pounds, son Neil said.
Mr. Oberlin received national recognition for this new line.
Turkey makes you perky!” was Mr. Oberlin’s favorite motto, and his creativity helped his business thrive even as the poultry market overproduced and prices fell in the early 1960s.
It was then that he came up with the idea of breaded turkey and chicken patties, now commonplace in restaurants and school cafeterias.
In 1988, when a fire destroyed his facilities, he started from scratch at a new processing location in Tiffin, where he continued to operate until he sold the business in 2008.
His legacy, though, is much more than chicken patties. Alongside his wife, Mr. Oberlin raised a family of nine children. Together, they taught their children the importance of hard work and responsibility, son Chris Oberlin said.
He had the imagination, and she had the business mind,” son Neil said, describing his parent’s compatibility as business and life partners. “We all feel like we got a little bit of creativity and a little bit of entrepreneurship from each of them,” he added.
Many of the Oberlin sons run businesses of their own, from building energy-efficient buildings, to establishing medical clinics in Nicaragua, to laser therapy, to specialty-engine rebuilding, to demolition and recycling.
We are a family that is not afraid to try and think outside of the box,” son Neil added.
Surviving are his sons, Donald, Deloy, Stanley, Gary, Neil, Chris, and Scott Oberlin; daughter, Jane Oberlin; brother, Walter Oberlin; sister, Vivian Chesser; 15 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
Visitation is 2 to 8 p.m. Thursday at Oberlin Turnbull Funeral Home, Bryan, and for one hour before the 11 a.m. Friday services at Wesley United Methodist Church, Bryan, where he was a lifelong member.
