H. Robert Charles was born in Pitcher, Oklahoma, Charles grew up on a wheat farm and cattle ranch near Hutchinson, Kansas, and enlisted in the Marine Corps in June 1940. He was a machine gunner aboard the USS Houston at the time it was sunk by the Japanese in Sunda Strait, March 1, 1942. He swam nine hours, was picked up off the coast of Java by the Japanese, and held forty-three months in slave labor camps in Burma, Thailand, and Saigon.Repatriated at the end of the war by British paratroopers and Office of Strategic Services personnel, Charles spent time at a hospital in Calcutta before returning home.After graduating from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Charles later joined Parents Magazine in New York, serving as family home editor.
