Archives West Finding Aid

Charles H. Fiock was born September 24, 1924 and has lived in the Shasta Valley/Yreka, California area and Ashland, Oregon most of his life. His great-grandfather, George Fiock, Sr. was an early settler of Shasta Valley and involved in the Modoc Indian War of 1872-1873. Raised on a farm in Shasta Valley, Charles attended the Shasta River School for two years and then his family moved to Yreka.

Charles had difficulty adjusting to the Yreka School, and was wrongfully placed in a class for students with learning disabilities called the Opportunity Class. However, Principal George Littrell asked him to repaint and update an old globe as a hands-on method of learning. Charles spent the following three years (4th-6th grade) working on the globe. Years later the globe came back into Charles' possession and formed the basis for his writing, The Old Globe.

After graduating from high school, he attended San Mateo Junior College before being drafted into the Army in 1945. Charles trained at Camp Beale, California and Fort Hood, Texas. The war with Japan ended while he was in infantry training; however he served as part of the U.S. Occupation Forces in Japan.

Charles began working for the California Oregon Power Company in 1943, and after World War II he returned to work there for the next four decades. During this time, he married his wife June, raised a family of four children, and worked to make his many childhood dreams reality. In 1964 he moved to Ashland, Oregon.

Two of Charles Fiock's childhood dreams were 1) to learn to fly and 2) to build a large telescope. While in elementary school, Charles and his older brother Carl built a glider that was destroyed during a storm a few days before completion. Years later, at age twenty-four, he learned how to fly a plane. Charles designed the Yreka Observatory, built in 1962 with sponsorship by the Ros Neilon Post of the American Legion and a few anonymous donors. The observatory completed the project to build a large telescope that he had begun at age fourteen.

After retirement in the early 1980s Charles began documenting his life story, family history and regional heritage for family, friends and local organizations.