frustrated and angry at producing plastic parts on the factory line, he quit.
“ I told myself that I don’ t ever want to run another machine,” he said, so in 1963 he took a job selling carpets. That job lasted for three years, and he became a top salesman. But he says the company owner was overbearing, and Goehl had had enough.“ After one great sale I made, I’ m thinking,‘ Is this as good as it gets? Is this enough?’” So at age 27, he enrolled in Ohio State University and did surprisingly well.“ I’ m not real intelligent or smart, but I am clever,”
Goehl said.
Anthropology appealed to him, so he got his bachelor’ s degree in that. A part-time job at a facility for mentally disabled children also spurred his interest, and he received a master’ s degree in special education from Ohio State. That led to a job
in Mansfield, Ohio, at a facility for mentally disabled, where he was administrator. One of the things that job taught him was a great respect for the way different people figure things out.
“ Everybody asks themselves, how do we make sense of this world we’ re living in?”
But after about three years, he had lunch with a 30-year veteran of a child welfare program and realized that his work in social service was not something he wanted to do for the next 30 years.
Since college, Goehl had discovered he liked to work with his hands. After he got a torch outfit for a birthday gift one year in the 1970s, he quit the social service job and began metal working in a basement workshop. One thing led to another, and soon he had sales representatives and his brazed metal business began to take off.
He sold the business to Cosco, now a division of Dorel, in Columbus, Indiana, with eight of his designs as a part of the deal. He moved to Indiana to work for the company as a designer, and settled in Brownstown, where a plant was to be built. Tired of the commute to Columbus after the company decided not to build the Brownstown plant, he quit that job and moved to Brown County to operate his own small shop in Nashville. He did that until he went to work for Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation where he taught special education for about three years.
He had a mail order business going for a while, specializing in bicycle-related objects and doing shows all
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March / April 2019 • Our Brown County 31